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j watson
j watson
1 year ago

It’s not just elements of the Labour party who are struggling with this intractable issue. In many regards the way party opinion moved and oscillates during the decades outlined in the Article reflects the trend in broader public opinion too.
Was impressed Starmer dug in and hasn’t budged. Showing some mettle here not going to do him any harm. This is not a simple issue and as everyone knows what Labour policy in opposition might be makes not a jot of difference to what will happen in the middle east. The debate and arguments are a form of self indulgence in many regards and I think that what frustrates him as much as anything. ‘Studently’ type debates about this are one thing, but when you became a PM, with all the complexity that will involve, things get serious.

Guy Haynes
Guy Haynes
1 year ago
Reply to  j watson

Agree with all of that, though I fear that he might “reverse ferret” at the slightest opportunity. He’s not so far and credit to him for that though.

However, where I am not seeing any leadership from Keir Starmer at present is towards the Jewish population of this country – many of whom are living in fear from the threat of their own countrymen. In a supposedly civilised country, this is entirely unacceptable.

While undoubtedly difficult for him, Starmer has the opportunity to make a tangible differences by having those difficult conversations and calling out the behaviour of the sizeable minority who are causing British Jews to live in fear. With the Police seemingly unwilling to get involved – shamefully so in my view – it is undoubtedly the right thing to do.

Jeff Herman
Jeff Herman
1 year ago
Reply to  Guy Haynes

It is not just British Jews living in fear but others who have perceived to have caused offense to Muslims. Is the Batley teacher still living in hiding? Salman Rushdie? Others stay silent to avoid being accused of Islamophobia.

j watson
j watson
1 year ago
Reply to  Guy Haynes

V much hope he doesn’t ‘reverse-ferret’, and I don’t think he will. Essentially he removed his predecessor from the Labour party and been unflinching to date on that because of anti-semitism. That’s a pretty unpredecented action against a previous Party Leader by their successor. I actually think on this Starmer has set out his line in the sand and holding to it.

Francisco Javier Bernal
Francisco Javier Bernal
1 year ago
Reply to  Guy Haynes
Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
1 year ago
Reply to  j watson

His wife is Jewish; not one he can probanly sit out. I thought his comments about islamopjobia were misplaced in the context of events in London over the past 3 weeks.

El Uro
El Uro
1 year ago

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,

Last edited 1 year ago by El Uro
Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
1 year ago

Starmer is a career politician with a killing desperation to be PM. Who does Starmer get more votes from British Muslims or British Jews, that’s the crux?

Alex Carnegie
Alex Carnegie
1 year ago

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.

Last edited 1 year ago by Alex Carnegie
R S Foster
R S Foster
1 year ago

…a very large number of habitual Labour voters in specific metropolitan/urban seats are virulent anti-Semites…the majority of younger Labour activists are anti-Semites…and almost a third of the PLP are anti-Semites…and I would expect that number to have risen to a majority by the end of next week…
…by the time we get to Christmas, they will be openly supporting Hamas and calling for “Palestine to be (Jew) free…from the River to the Sea…”
Anybody considering voting for them should search their conscience…

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 year ago

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.

Ardath Blauvelt
Ardath Blauvelt
1 year ago

Simple fact: so-called Palestinians, as Arabs, have always had a home, if their neighbors had really cared; the Jews, no. Never in anything that could be called recent times. As civilized people, to equate Arab Palestinian history or territorial needs, with Jews, is outrageous.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

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.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

Well let’s hope, David, that our support for Israel arises from a cold calculation of our national interest, instead of the usual fannying about with a “foreign policy with an ethical dimension”. Neither Israeli nor British Jews will be engaging in terror and subversion in the UK. You can’t say the same about Hamas and it’s acolytes.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

The Holy Family Church in Gaza City was bombed during Mass on this All Saints Day. That’s a hattrick, since Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants have all now been bombed. Last night, it was the Greek Orthodox Cultural Centre, as it had already been the extremely ancient Church of Saint Porphyrius. Almost all Greek Orthodox of the Jerusalem Patriarchate are Palestinian. And the whole world knows who bombed the Anglican-Baptist Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital, including its chapel, with a handful of people in a handful of countries pretending to believe something else, thereby placing themselves in the same category as those who affected to imagine that Dr David Kelly had committed suicide. Indeed, those are very often the same faux fantasists.

How was hitting any of those unmistakable targets a strike against Hamas? But in addition to including two parties that differed from Hamas in forbidding women to be candidates for public office, the Israeli Government includes people who, like that Government’s ISIS allies in Syria but demonstrably unlike Hamas, actively believe that there is a religious obligation to destroy churches, even the most sparsely Protestant (or indeed Modern Catholic) ones, since the assertion of the Divinity of Christ is itself idolatrous.

In Britain, that Government enjoys such cross-party support that MPs on both sides of the House are purged for deviating from its line, while the rest of us face criminalisation if we expressed the opinion of three quarters of us, including the Editorial Board of the Financial Times, in favour of a ceasefire, or if we endorsed the constitutional position of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud partyforcefully articulated by Tzipi Hotovely, that there should be one state from the River to the Sea. In any case, Andy McDonald never said that second part.

jack sales
jack sales
1 year ago

UnHerd needs to really start pushing its podcasts. This piece of really should be better known more widely.

Ed Paice
Ed Paice
1 year ago

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

Douglas H
Douglas H
1 year ago

Really interesting – thanks for this.

Clare Haven
Clare Haven
1 year ago

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.

A D Kent
A D Kent
1 year ago

Who writes the headlines around here? Where did the ‘Tragic’ come from – this rather nice historical analysis seems to be rather neutral on the goodness or otherwise of Labour’s shift away from Zionism.

That notwithstanding, any assessment of the recent relations between the UK Labour party & Israel that doesn’t include the term “Apartheid” I don’t think can be considered complete.

Otherwise this single phrase I think contains the main reason for any change in the views of most currrent (or more likely recently left/expelled) Labour members with regards to the Zionist project “the hardline governments of Sharon and Netanyahu”

Arthur G
Arthur G
1 year ago
Reply to  A D Kent

I think it’s pretty tragic when any Western political party moves from supported the targets of an intended genocide to supporting the wanna-be perpetrators of that genocide.
When are people going to wake up and accept that a large minority (at least) of Muslims in the world, including immigrants to the West, hate Western values, hate Jews and Christians and secularists, and want to impose an Islamic theocracy on the whole world?

Last edited 1 year ago by Arthur G
Gorka Sillero
Gorka Sillero
1 year ago
Reply to  A D Kent

I love how you just ignore the fact that Arab muslims literally want to wipe the Jews from the Middle East. Genocide, that is.
You probably also think it wasn’t 6 million, just about 100k