Labour’s policy has never changed. They choose someone who can be called “oppressed” and dance around him with a tambourine, even when the “oppressed” one robs and sets fire to their house.
PS. The problem is that in many cases the “oppressed” are oppressed because of their own behavior. The criminal definitely feels oppressed in prison. Should we fight for his freedom? Unfortunately, many (especially women) think: “Yes, of course!” Then we get Portland,

The roots of the Labour / Jewish alignment must be found surely in the pogroms in Russia in the 1890s which led to mass emigration and much of the diaspora in Britain and America. As victims of chauvinistic nationalism – which at the time was associated mainly with right wing parties – Jews in the West naturally identified with left wing and internationalist politics. This alignment continued for a century despite the increasing prosperity of the Jewish communities but unsurprisingly gradually eroded with e.g. the neo-cons defecting to the the Republicans and the Tory party under Thatcher coming to be more influenced by Jewish businessmen than the diplomats of the “Camel Corps”. Simultaneously, Israel changed from being seen as a socialist country dominated by idealistic kibbutzniks to a rampantly capitalistic and intensely nationalist entity led by the abrasive leaders of Likud. As anti-semitism and anti-Zionism were deliberately conflated by the latter – the better to intimidate their critics – Jewish identity shifted increasingly towards a nationalist and right wing focus i.e. the precise opposite of the starting point in the 1890s. The Labour Party’s reorientation is perhaps best seen as just a reflection of this wider evolution of attitudes.

Labour has a selling point as the party sticking up for the oppressed/disadvantaged. They have embraced the Working Man, the Jews, the feminists, women, the Gays, freedom fighters, Muslims and the Genderfluid crowd.
Unfortunately for the different groups Labour drops them (or will drop them) as soon as all the political benefit has been extracted.

The proportion of Jews voting Labour has been statistically tied around the 20 per cent mark since 2010 at the latest, Jeremy Corbyn made no difference whatever to that, nor did having a Jewish Leader in the person of Ed Miliband, only one constituency in the entire House is even 20 per cent Jewish, and that seat has been Tory since 2010, as it had always been before 1997. Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s own seat, a fact that had a dramatic impact on foreign policy.

On Israel and Palestine, there are, in drastically reduced order of size from each to the next, four broad schools of thought in Britain: the indifferent, the profoundly ambivalent, the strongly pro-Palestinian, and the fiercely Zionist. Yet almost all politicians, and the entire media, belong to that tiny fourth faction, which barely featured in British public life until there was a Prime Minister whose constituency happened to have a wildly untypical ethnic profile, but which did not become anything like dominant even under her.

That dominance arose in a window of perhaps half a generation, between the retirements of the British Mandate veterans (although a few of those are still alive, such as my late father’s old Army comrade who went on to by my Senior Tutor when I was an undergraduate), and the emergence of the mass anti-war movement in relation to Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq. To this day, Israel is not a British ally. In what specific way is it? It simply is not. Yet we are expected to make Israel’s, often undeniably unpleasant, enemies our own.

Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War as an act of anti-British revenge on the part of Menachem Begin. Even beyond that, what have the Israelis ever done for us? What would they? Why should they? They have everything that they could possibly need to defend themselves. We are irrelevant to them. Yet our politics revolve around them. Their Ambassador to London accompanies our Foreign Secretary when he visits her country. No one else, absolutely no one, gets that kind of treatment. And if it were to cause bombs to go off in Britain, well, somehow that would prove that it had been right all along. “Not just today, not just tomorrow, but always”? That is not the stuff of grownup relations with any foreign state. None, including that one, would say such a thing about Britain. Nor should it.

Ah yes, Michael Foot. Had rather forgotten about him. Thankfully. The Jeremy Corbyn of his day (but with rather greater intellect).

When one thinks of the Bennite tradition in the Labour movement today, one thinks of (or I do) such disciples as George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn. Especially on the question of Europe.

It’s striking to me therefore that both these left-wingers of the old Labour guard are fervent critics of Israel and vocal supporters of the rights of Palestinians. One doesn’t associate them with the ‘new left’ at all.

I’d be interested to hear of any thoughts on this significant deviation.