Kelemen, author of The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce, looks at the roots of the recent controversies in the Labour Party
Please read the article in full on Red Pepper, May 2016.
Excerpt: ‘…For creating this perfect storm, elements in and outside the party, wanting for a range of rightwing reasons to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, latched on to a controversy initiated by pro-Israeli activists seeking to pre-empt Labour moving away from its traditional pro-Israeli stance. Several of the newspapers that have eagerly joined the hunt to root out Labour’s antisemites are unlikely champions for this cause. Not so long ago, they had been insinuating that the previous Labour leader’s Jewish origins – highlighted by such apparently telltale signs as his foreign-born Marxist father and alleged ineptness in eating a bacon sandwich – made him unsuitable material to be a British prime minister. But their newfound outrage over antisemitism has a wider agenda than undermining the current Labour leader.
The Bradford MP Naz Shah and the newly elected first Muslim president of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, have been prominent among those accused of antisemitism – and this against the immediate backdrop of a London mayoral election in which the Muslim background of the Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan, was turned into a campaign issue. Notwithstanding Khan distancing himself from Corbyn and declaring fidelity to the interests of the financial sector, he has been tagged, not least by David Cameron, as someone who may be a Trojan horse for Islamic extremists.
It is not without bitter irony that London’s Jewish community, which prior to the First World War was stigmatised as the hotbed of dangerous fanatics infected by such foreign ideologies as anarchism and communism, is now cheered on by the Daily Mail to lead the charge in castigating another ethnic minority as the carriers of antisemitism and other contagions.
‘In seeking to win Anglo-Jewry’s tacit approval for this ignominious task, leading communal organisations such as the Board of Jewish Deputies, the National Union of Jewish Students and the Zionist Federation have played up the threat of antisemitism which, as recent YouGov and Pew surveys show, is at an all-time low in the UK. The fear that really haunts them is that a future Labour government might abandon its traditional close ties with Israel, which under the Blair and Brown governments had seemed beyond challenge….’
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