Zoe Strimpel
Shame on those who brush off ‘the anti-Semitism thing’
Vote in a leader like Corbyn and policy will soon be the least of our worries
Can I pinpoint the exact moment I began to be uneasy about people who stuck by Jeremy Corbyn despite his record on Jews? I can indeed. It was the moment he became leader of the Labour Party on September 12 2015. That was when I first felt a chill of dread and disgust at the prospect of an opposition leader who had, over decades, milked his obsession with the Palestinian cause at the extreme expense of the Israeli one in the comfortable company of buddies including Ken Livingstone, the ex-London mayor who claimed that Hitler was a Zionist.
It was also the moment I first thought, queasily, “Oh, so that’s how it is,” when formerly decent-seeming people crowded around him, chanting his name at music festivals, sporting caps in his style.
But now we have an election in less than two weeks in which Corbyn has his longed-for shot at the premiership. With 2.5 million young people signed up to vote in the past three months, many of whom will vote for him, he is still very much in the game, despite what the polls may say. A Corbyn premiership is no longer a matter of round-table abstraction or dinner party projections. It has become an urgent moral task to put aside other considerations and say no, on grounds of anti-Semitism.
Many of the Labour voters I encounter at parties and in WhatsApp groups see a vote for Corbyn as a means of stopping Brexit or want to stop Boris, seemingly at any cost. But this is wrong: the pervasive rot of anti-Semitism is not an unfortunate blemish: it’s a fatal flaw. As the lawyer Anthony Julius put it last week in the
New Statesman: anti-Semitism has “acquired institutional authority in today’s Labour Party… [and a] party that cannot be trusted in relation to Jews cannot be trusted at all”. Just so.
And yet I look on in horror as people who claim to be committed to stamping out “isms”, who think of themselves as good people fighting the good fight, say that they’ll be voting Labour: “it’s a shame about the anti-Semitism, but…” they say.
Everyone, from the wokest student up to the high and mighty, seems prone to this malign doublethink. I recoiled to see Sir Richard Evans, the revered historian of Nazi Germany and scholar of German anti-Semitism, tweet last week in support of Corbyn, writing that despite the “cancer of anti-Semitism that has infected the party” he would still vote Labour.
Thankfully, following the vigorous intervention from Julius, he saw sense and changed his mind. But the acceptability and indeed the popularity of brushing away “the anti-Semitism thing”, as I’ve heard friends call it, is widespread. The comedian Deborah Frances-White’s pro-Labour Instagram post, which went viral last week, is a case in point. “Voting isn’t marriage,” she wrote. “It’s public transport. You are not waiting for ‘the one’ who is absolutely perfect. You are getting the bus.”
Sadly, the bus she’s getting is one that throws Jews under it. This has been clear since Corbyn took over, evident everywhere from the rhetoric of lowly but zealous members, right up to the behaviour of the top brass.
Ruth Smeeth, the Jewish Labour candidate for Stoke-on-Trent, told last week how she now has to carry a panic button, is flanked by security at all times and receives daily death threats. She is one of the few hanging on; Jewish ex-Labour MPs including Luciana Berger and Dame Louise Ellman were driven to resign from the party over anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, last week, when pressed by Andrew Neil, Corbyn refused to apologise to the Jewish community for his party’s atrocious record on anti-Semitism.
I get that Brexit, economic policy, foreign policy or class politics may all attract voters to vote Labour. Having a brilliant Labour MP also makes it hard to turn away. Like my friend Will, some good people defend their Labour vote by making predictions: Corbyn will be hamstrung, or he’ll only be in for a year and then… and so on. But political predictions rarely pan out, and once this train is set in motion, there’s no knowing where or when it will stop. And, sorry, Deborah Frances-White, it does actually matter what the destination of the bus is.
Vote in a leader like Corbyn and the fineries of policy will be the least of our worries five years down the line. If there’s one thing we know from history, it’s that societies that select leaders at the explicit cost of Jews, and of core values of liberty, end up going to hell in a handbasket one way or another.
Many decent-seeming Germans in the Thirties said that, while Adolf Hitler’s line on Jews was a bit much, they did like what he was promising economically to a beleaguered Germany. That didn’t exactly work out as planned.
Britain is unlikely to ever become like Germany in the Thirties. But the same principle applies: install a leader with a dismal track record on anti-Semitism and the rest will follow – and it won’t be pretty.