British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, May 12, 2017. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
For Jews in Britain, especially, the four-and-a-half years that Corbyn spent at Labour\u2019s helm was a nightmare. In the process, the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain gained an international audience as never before, with Corbyn and those around him coming to symbolize the attitude of the extreme left\u2014contemptuous and suspicious in equal measure\u2014to Jewish causes and concerns. <\/ins><\/ins><\/ins><\/p>\nNow that his leadership is in the past tense, did we learn anything from Corbyn that we didn\u2019t know already about the far-left\u2019s hostility to Jews as a self-conscious collective? To put that question another way, was the anti-Semitism that marked the Corbyn era simply more of the same, but uttered by more influential people with much louder voices, or did we encounter something qualitatively new?<\/p>\n
To my mind, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n
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When Corbyn took the stage at the United Kingdom\u2019s annual Glastonbury Festival in 2017, reveling in the thousands of audience members chanting his name to the tune of \u201cSeven Nation Army\u201d by the White Stripes, many commentators saw this rock-star moment as inaugurating a boldly new and potentially unstoppable Socialist opposition. But there was another way of looking at it\u2014as the last gasp of the not-so-New Left of the 1960s, unexpectedly given a fresh lease on life thanks to a frightful political mess within the Labour Party that enabled Corbyn to win the leadership post at the 11th hour. Overnight, a man derided as a humorless relic of the Cold War\u2014someone who had expressed sympathy for the IRA and the PFLP and sorrow over the Soviet Union\u2019s demise\u2014was poised to become the next prime minister.<\/p>\n
Or so they said.<\/p>\n
In the end, his rise was hardly meteoric, while his fall was quite spectacular. After four years of media headlines exposing the lurid anti-Semitism that had mushroomed among Corbyn\u2019s supporters, the Labour Party performed disastrously in a December 2019 election it really should have won. Recall that at the time, the United Kingdom\u2019s departure from the European Union (Brexit) was in chaos and the bitterly divided Conservative Party had just replaced Prime Minister Theresa May with Boris Johnson. But whatever the doubts about Johnson and the Tories, the most brutal verdict of the electors was reserved for Corbyn, whose eye-wateringly low personal ratings were mirrored in Labour\u2019s own showing. On the morning after the vote, news report after news report emphasized that it had been Labour\u2019s worst defeat since the election of 1935.<\/p>\n
Anti-Semitism was always a persistent problem on the New Left, and as Labour leader, Corbyn duly legitimized that strain which codes its attacks with the words \u201cZionism\u201d and \u201cZionist,\u201d and which portrays the Palestinians as victims of a Nazi-style genocide launched by an apartheid state. But thanks to the internet, this salonf\u00e4hig<\/em> variant of anti-Semitism, whose advocates angrily denied that it was<\/em> anti-Semitism, found itself in the company of Holocaust-deniers and assorted other conspiracy theorists more commonly found on the far-right. During Corbyn\u2019s tenure, the Labour Party accumulated hundreds of internal complaints about anti-Semitism, of which a good number centered not on offensive speech about the Jewish national movement, but on more traditional anti-Semitic tropes, such as the alleged control exercised by the Rothschild banking family over the global economy.<\/p>\nAnyone who has studied the history of left-wing anti-Semitism will be aware that these seemingly counterintuitive associations have been made many times before by left-wing parties in various countries. In Labour\u2019s case, however, there was a new mode of distribution in the form of social media. Each real-world instance of Labour anti-Semitism was echoed online many times over to the point that the entire problem came to define Corbyn\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n
Anti-Semitism was not the only (and definitely not the most important) reason why Corbyn and Labour lost the 2019 election, but it was certainly a factor. Across the United Kingdom, Labour Party workers reported on doorstep encounters in which Corbyn\u2019s political war against Britain\u2019s Jewish community was cited with bemused disapproval. Still, whatever the damage done to Labour\u2019s relationship with British Jews, theoretically at least, that can be repaired; conversely, Corbyn belongs to the party\u2019s past, his place in the gallery of Labour leaders who never made it out of opposition firmly assured.<\/p>\n
What of Keir Starmer<\/a>, Corbyn\u2019s successor? In the days that followed his election, Starmer underlined his determination to wipe away the \u201cstain\u201d of anti-Semitism<\/p>\nfrom within the Labour Party.<\/p>\n
He continued that an apology on its own, without corresponding action, would not be good enough, proposing a two-pronged strategy whereby Labour will deal \u201crobustly and swiftly\u201d with outstanding cases of anti-Semitism in its ranks, at the same time transforming its institutional understanding of what anti-Semitism is and how to fight it. Like Corbyn himself, Starmer seems to be saying that the fate of anti-Semitism in Labour\u2019s ranks is to be consigned to history. We shall see.<\/p>\n
Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.<\/em><\/p>\n
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