Jeremy Corbyn. Credit: Christopher Furlong / Getty
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My mother-in-law is over from Israel to see her grandchild. She comes every few months, and soon after she arrives we always do the same thing: sit in the garden, drink coffee and talk politics. She asks me if it is true that Jeremy Corbyn is a is Holocaust denier. I say he is not. And that he is not a racist. But she doesn’t look at all convinced.
I have been avoiding this subject for too long, not wanting to address it. I am a socialist and something of a Corbyn fan. Personally, I rather like him. But I am also a Zionist. My father is Jewish and my wife is Israeli. And the cognitive dissonance has been screaming in my head.
My wife and I have recently been discussing whether our young son should apply for his Israeli citizenship to which he is entitled. I don’t like the idea of him joining the Israeli army when he is older. And nor does my wife.
Partly, that’s because I was once shot at by the IDF when I was in Gaza. A group of children were showing me the remains of their demolished homes in Rafah on the Gaza/Egypt border. Without warning, a machine gun sprayed the area we were standing with bullets. No one was hurt, but the bullets kicked up dust a few feet from where we were standing. Someone could easily have been killed. And an experience like that stays with you.
Yet this, and similar experiences notwithstanding, I have finally come round to the belief that my son should indeed apply for his Israeli passport. And the Corbyn situation has played some part in that difficult decision.
It is clear to me that the Left does indeed have a blind spot about antisemitism. And the best way I can describe it is that the Left mistakenly thinks that antisemitism is always a form of racism and that it has racism covered. Jeremy Corbyn has indeed been a life-long anti-racist. His credentials on this are strong. But he still doesn’t get it. So what is it he doesn’t get?
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