Antisemitism claims have one goal: To stop Jeremy Corbyn winning power

The Jewish community’s alienation from Labour has been years in the making - but it is Johnson's Conservatives who have embraced hostility to minorities

Jonathan Cook

Part 7 - Nationwide echo-chamber

Corbyn’s democratic socialism is the first serious attempt by Labour since the Thatcher years to try to reverse the enormous and relentless economic gains made by Britain’s corporate ruling class. And Corbyn’s much more outspoken position in support of Palestinian rights – no different from his backing for black South Africans under apartheid rule – is unprecedented for a leader of a major British party.

That has made him especially vulnerable to attack both from a billionaire-owned media worried about his economic policies and from Israel lobbyists worried about where he might take British foreign policy on Israel. 

Both have found antisemitism an effective weapon with which to damage Corbyn – both because of the seriousness of the offence and because it has been difficult to rebut such claims given the intentional blurring of antisemitism’s meaning since his election to lead Labour.

The main Israel lobby groups in the Labour party, from the LFI to the Jewish Labour Movement, have pushed hard for the Labour Party to change its rulebook on antisemitism. Last year the party was forced to adopt a highly controversial definition drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), shifting the focus from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel. 

With a media-wide consensus on Corbyn’s antisemitism problem, it was inevitable that a significant proportion of British Jews would come to accept that Labour is indeed antisemitic. They have been living in a nationwide echo-chamber for the best part of four years.

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