Bombarded
by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into
seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating
Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism menace
by
Jonathan Cook
End-of-year
polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and
political trends over the past year and predict where things are
heading in the next. But a recent poll of European Jews – the
largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply
misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a
new, left-wing form of anti-semitism.
Part
8 - Israel's role
Not only
does Corbyn offer an inclusive domestic political agenda, unlike the
Orbans of Europe but, worse, he also refuses to shy away from
confronting the legacy of European racism and colonialism.
The
chief historic victims of that racism in Europe were Jews. But today
that same European racism is channelled both into fervent support for
Israel as a supposedly “safe haven” for Jews and into a general
indifference – aside from handwringing – towards the Palestinians
who for decades have been displaced and oppressed by Israel.
Corbyn
represents a huge break with that tradition and is, therefore, a
threat to Israel. That is why behind the scenes Israel has been
seeking to redefine anti-semitism in a way that tars anti-racists
like Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party.
I have
documented before in Middle East Eye Israel’s role in
stoking the supposed “anti-semitism crisis” in Labour and in
cornering the party into adopting a new, convoluted definition of
anti-semitism that for the first time makes criticism of Israel the
benchmark of anti-Semitic discourse.
Last
month Netanyahu made that conflation explicit in a video message to a
conference in Vienna. While praising Orban, he averred:
“Anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, anti-Israeli polices – the
idea that the Jewish people don't have the right for a state –
that's the ultimate anti-semitism of today."
But it
is not just Netanyahu who is stoking the patently preposterous notion
that anti-racists like Corbyn – those whose principles require that
they reject Israeli privilege over Palestinians – are really secret
Jew-haters. If that were the case, the criticisms of Corbyn might not
have as much traction with British Jews as this month’s EU poll
suggests.
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