Before I left for the Your Party rally in Manchester, I carefully looked at myself in the mirror. My Star of David necklace and rings with Hebrew etchings were off, and I ran through, yet again, the alternative name and identity I had prepared in case anyone asked. After all, it’s not every day that a Jewish-Israeli woman sneaks alone into the meeting of a party that proudly describes itself as the ‘only anti-Zionist party in the entire country.’
The party’s obsession with Israel and Palestine was astonishing
So I tried to blend in. All I had to do was temporarily become a useful idiot: I enthusiastically collected leaflets from old ladies with genocidal slogans on their T-shirts, and nodded and clapped every time a speaker promised to ‘free Palestine’ and abolish Zionism, as if we were sitting in Khan Younis rather than an overheated room in the north of England. The confusion was understandable, since the only national flags on display were two massive Palestinian flags.
Among the trade unionists, independent councillors and activists, the main speaker was MP Zarah Sultana, who left Labour in July to co-found Your Party (a provisional name) with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, effectively becoming his number two.
Beyond reheated Marxist talking points that would have made even Lenin yawn (‘We are fighting for the fundamental transformation of society… That means workers controlling the means of production’, as Sultana put it), the party’s obsession with Israel and Palestine was astonishing. Sudan, which is currently experiencing the world’s worst humanitarian crises, was hardly mentioned.
‘Your Party will be the only anti-Zionist party in the entire country,’ Sultana announced. ‘Israel must be treated like a pariah state, the same way South Africa was… We will sever all diplomatic ties with a genocidal apartheid State of Israel. We will expel the ambassador; we will shut down the embassy.’
The MP also seemed to praise the proscribed group Palestine Action, without mentioning the group’s name explicitly, claiming that the Labour government has ‘attacked our civil liberties and called people of conscience opposing genocide “terrorists”. To be clear, they are heroes.’ According to Sultana: ‘The real terrorists are the Israeli government [and] we will not rest until Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the dock over their hate response and made to account for their crimes.’
For Sultana and her crowd, the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is meaningless: ‘We will stand with Palestinians until every inch of their land is free. Single democratic state from the river to the sea, with equal rights for all.’ Who will remind her that the last time Palestinians practised ‘democracy’, they elected Hamas, which swiftly took over Gaza while throwing its opponents off buildings? Or perhaps she knows exactly what she wants – a Jew-free land, delivered by Hamas, a movement that has repeatedly declared its intention to murder Jews regardless of their passport.
Somewhere between the heated speeches and my performative clapping, something odd happened to me. For the first time I understood how the ‘I’m not an anti-Semite, I’m just anti-Zionist’ echo chamber works. It’s quite simple: you just have to submit yourself to gurus like Corbyn and Sultana, and suddenly you no longer feel even a twinge of discomfort when calling for the destruction of the only Jewish state. Their gaslighting is working.
Surveys show that most Jews worldwide are Zionists; for us, Israel is a miracle, a return to our ancestors’ land. But as the far left has emptied ‘Zionism’ of its original meaning and villainised it through the prism of its own post-colonial guilt, most of us are now marked in its little red book.
For almost two hours, speaker after speaker invoked every possible minority and grievance – from trans, Muslim and even Sikh communities – except Jews, some of whom had been murdered only a month ago in their place of worship here in Manchester.
I felt indignation starting to rumble in me. I stood up and nervously took the mic. In the least Israeli accent I could manage, I asked why no one had bothered to talk about last month’s terror attack at a synagogue in the city. The room’s response – initial awkward silence, inappropriate comments from the crowd (‘A lot of people get murdered in Manchester!’, heckled one local activist) and a swift pivot back to comfortable talking points – was telling.
Of course, now the speakers had to address the elephant in the room, but even after I had pointed it out to them, they seemed to struggle to name what they were seeing. ‘We have to view it as the same hate that also creates the fascist mobs outside the hotels that target Muslims,’ said one speaker, concluding that Muslim and Jewish people should ‘unite under the fight for Palestine’. I was thinking, meanwhile, about all the videos of Hamas terrorists from 7 October, chanting ‘Itbah al-Yahud’ (‘slaughter the Jews’) rather than ‘free Palestine’.
Sultana’s brief, generic denunciation of anti-Semitism quickly turned sour as she insisted that she and those who speak up for Palestine should not be smeared as anti-Semites. She soon found someone else to blame: ‘The fight against anti-Semitism is the same fight against Nigel Farage and Reform,’ she declared. Obviously the Manchester attacker, Jihad Al-Shamie, who pledged allegiance to Isis, was a potential Reform voter.
Corbyn and Sultana’s blindspot about anti-Semitism isn’t an accident – it’s a feature. Anti-Israel agitation is the party’s easiest mobilising tool. Besides the socialist slogans and the similarities to the Greens, toxic anti-Israel rhetoric is really all that’s left for Your Party. They are not hiding it: Michael Lavalette, an independent Preston councillor who previously refused to denounce Hamas and was interviewed by police over a social-media post calling for an Intifada (which he denied was a call for violence against the Jewish community), told the room that ‘the roots’ of the movement come from the ‘Palestine resistance movement in Britain’. In this climate, no wonder so many Jews and Israelis fear the rise of Your Party.
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