Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Labour MPs are conferring legitimacy on anti-Semitism

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice.

First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade unionists are sometimes busy coming for the Jews themselves. There is a more fundamental objection. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ To which I ask: So what if it did?

What if the fractious bigotries stirred by the Labour Party limited themselves to the Jewish people? Would they be any more tolerable? Why does the left recoil instinctively from hatred of blacks and Muslims and Asians but require a three-hour PowerPoint presentation and a course of diversity training when it comes to Jews? Why is empathy unlocked only by fear the tormentors of the Jews may one day turn on others?

The answer is that the left, specifically the brand of left which Corbyn appeals to, divides the world into three categories: Victims, victimisers and the virtuous. Ethnic and religious minorities have been targets of historical imperialism and contemporary intolerance and so they are victims. Western white men have been largely responsible and so they are victimisers. The left champions the former against the latter and so they are the virtuous.

Jews cannot readily be placed in this schema for in the left-wing imagination Jews are white (the concept of Mizrahi Jews is lost on the average Labour member); conspicuously successful; represent a frustrating tension between the universal and the particular; and, the greatest affront of all, are victims who became victimisers in Palestine.

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