Criticism of the Israeli state should not be outlawed

His failure to learn any lessons from the 2014 independence referendum campaign, combined with his muddled timidity in the face of the hard-right Brexiteer wing of the Tory party, has left him looking more like a fading crooner than a rebel rock star. Yes, Labour are still running the Tories neck-and-neck in the UK opinion polls. That’s roughly where Neil Kinnock was throughout 1991 and until the very eve of the 1992 election. But when the real votes were counted, John Major’s Tory Party held on by a decisive eight points and two-and-a-half million votes.

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Given the crisis engulfing Theresa May’s government, Labour should be way out in front at this stage. Perhaps that will change in the months to come, but not if their still-powerful Blairite wing can help it. More than any other Labour leader in modern history, Jeremy Corbyn is discovering the truth of the old saying: in the House of Commons, your opponents sit across from you, but your enemies sit behind you.

Yesterday, Sky News reported that Labour MP Ian Austin– a former minister and aide to Gordon Brown – was heard ranting that “under this leadership, the Labour party has become a sewer”. His outburst was apparently prompted by the party’s failure to adopt in its entirety the wording of the “non-legally binding working definition” of anti-Semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Scottish Labour, too, have become further embroiled in the endless row over anti-Semitism within the party, with almost half of Richard Leonard’s shadow cabinet attacking the leadership over the party’s definition of anti-Semitism. With some commentators predicting this issue could be the catalyst for an electorally catastrophic Labour split, it might be tempting for those in the independence movement to jump on the bandwagon and add to the clamour of voices denouncing Corbyn and his allies as racist and anti-Semitic.

I believe that would be wrong. There clearly has been a problem with anti-Semitism within Labour’s ranks, particularly, it seems, among those who joined as part of the upsurge in membership between 2015 and 2017. Many are passionately pro-Palestinian but have at times crossed the line between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. It is right that people should be reminded continually of the historical context of the persecution of the Jewish people.

It’s not a just modern phenomenon but has persisted for a millennium, in the form of forced conversions, pogroms and massacres. It reached its pinnacle in Nazi Germany with the Holocaust. That history has understandably generated a culture of hyper-vigilance among the Jewish community internationally, along with a determination to prevent any return to the atrocities and humiliations of the past. There needs to be empathy with the Jewish people – and zero tolerance for anti-Semitism and racist conspiracy theories that claim Jews have secret control of the global financial system and the international press.

Zionism – the idea of a separate Jewish homeland – became a mass force after the Holocaust as a defensive reaction to centuries of persecution, and thus the state of Israel was created. But let no-one pretend the formation of that state was nothing short of an outrageous historical injustice, with the forced expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinian people – more than 85 per cent of the indigenous Arab population – and the brutality of their treatment ever since.

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The problem with the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is that the paragraph I have just written could be labelled anti-Semitic. A list of examples of anti-Semitism cited by the IHRA includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming the Israeli state is a racist endeavour.”

Let’s think about that statement. Denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination is racist. But denying the Palestinian people the right to self-determination is at the core of the Israeli state. The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has just enshrined in law the idea that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it.” The parliament also stripped Arabic of its status as an official language.

Renowned Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim described the new laws as “racist” and “a very clear form of apartheid”. Barenboim, it should be said, is a strong supporter of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. But according to the IHRA definition – which Jackie Baillie, Anas Sarwar and a bunch of other Labour politicians want the party to adopt – his statement would be tantamount to anti-Semitism.

Nelson Mandela, a strong critic of Israel, would be deemed a racist under this definition. And Desmond Tutu. And tens of thousands of Jews, including the billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros, who described the accusation of anti-Semitism against those who criticise the Israeli state as the “most insidious argument of all”.

It seems that short of abandoning support for the Palestinian cause, there is nothing Corbyn can do to appease his opponents inside and outside the Labour party on this issue. For the right-wing press and the Tories, it has been a welcome deflection from the chaos that is Brexit. And for many Labour MPs and MSPs it is about undermining the party leader with a view to restoring the old order after Corbyn loses the next General Election.

As Jaqueline Rose, co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices in the UK, put it a few days ago: “We need to go on debating and talking, always alert to the possibility that any one definition [of anti-Semitism], however well-intentioned, however designed to protect the Jews from the suffering and ravages of their own history, might be harnessed on the side of injustice.”