If they were from any other minority, no one on the left would have the slightest trouble denouncing the deaths of 53-year-old Adrian Daulby and 66-year-old Melvin Cravitz as the result of a lethal racist attack. A terrorist with the resonant name of Jihad Al-Shamie – talk about nominative determinism – went for them because they were Jews.
That’s all there was to it. The assassin, a British citizen of Syrian heritage, showed his appreciation for this country by ramming his car into the grounds of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in my home city of Manchester and stabbing any Jew he could find.
He had never talked to them. He had never discovered their views about Israel and Palestine. It was enough that they were Jews, and any Jew would do. So he killed one and left the other to be hit by a stray police bullet in the fight that followed. These are racist murders. Just as the huge upsurge in abuse of Jews since the Hamas massacres of October 2023 represents a huge upsurge in racial hatred.
Left-wing anti-Semitism is a gift that keeps on giving for some conservatives
Last night pro-Palestinian demonstrators couldn’t give it a rest – not even for 24 hours. They were outside Downing Street and Manchester’s Piccadilly station, chanting all the old slogans and ducking all the hard questions. ‘Globalise the intifada,’ they cried – does that mean killing Jews in Manchester? ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ – does that mean driving out all the Jews living between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan?
It should be the easiest thing in the world for pro-Palestinian demonstrators to reject accusations of Jew hate and dismiss these questions as smears. It’s not anti-Semitic to denounce Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli far right. Nor is it in any way racist to deplore the reduction of Gaza to a charnel house of rubble and bones.
Yet much of the British left cannot defend itself against charges of bigotry because many leftists (not all, but many) refuse to define anti-Jewish racism and declare it unacceptable. They can’t and won’t because any condemnation of anti-Semitism would imply a condemnation of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian theocrats. Rather than take a stand against the very people who have led the Palestinian cause to disaster, they prefer to say nothing at all.
I am not nitpicking or raising arcane issues. Three points ought to be obvious. Firstly, the best people to tackle murderous anti-Jewish racism on the left and in Muslim communities are leftists and Muslims themselves. Conservatives will not get a hearing.
The British left ought to have learnt the hard way that a failure to take a stand leads to disaster. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s finding that the Corbyn-led Labour party was responsible for ‘unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination over anti-Semitism’ allowed Keir Starmer to purge the left.
Left-wing anti-Semitism is a gift that keeps on giving for some conservatives. As Donald Trump is showing in the United States, it allows the radical right to turn the left’s own language of anti-racism and anti-fascism against it. Yet go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and all you find is obfuscation.
As with anything else to do with Jews, there are arguments about the correct definition of anti-Semitism. From a Palestinian point of view, by far the most accommodating is contained in the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, written by liberal academics in 2021. It challenged the alleged protection given to the Israeli government by the more widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, which has been circulating in various forms since the early 2000s.
The authors of the Jerusalem Declaration are clear that ‘supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law’ is not racist. Nor is supporting a two-state solution or a unitary democratic state. All the Jerusalem Declaration does is say that it is anti-Semitic to imagine that Jewish conspiracies control the world, or to deny the holocaust, or to hold Jews collectively responsible for the behaviour of the Israeli government – as all those who attack synagogues do.
A low bar to jump, you might think. But it was too high for the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. It denounced the academics’ attempt to protect the fight against racial prejudice without undermining the Palestinian cause. It urged:
Public bodies considering adopting the [Jerusalem Declaration] to consider it with a critical mind in relation to the dangers of it too being used to reinforce the illegitimate policing of speech about Palestine and advocacy for Palestinian rights.
Very well then, if the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism won’t do and if the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism won’t do either, what will? Apparently, nothing.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has said that it finds anti-Semitism ‘repellent’. Yet it offers no definition that might educate its supporters. It draws no lines and sets no boundaries. It just criticises anyone who tries to protect Jews. Any definition of anti-Semitism, however narrowly drafted, would capture the Iranian regime, which engages in holocaust denial; Hamas, whose founding covenant is saturated with the anti-Semitism of fascist Europe; and the Muslim Brotherhood and all the other Islamist organisations that have at some point endorsed the Hamas creed.
The same failure to take a stand is threatening Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to build a new party to the left of Labour. Zarah Sultana, Corbyn’s rival for the leadership, claimed in an interview with New Left Review that Corbyn ‘capitulated’ when he accepted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.
The obvious follow-up question was never asked: what definition of anti-Semitism will such people accept, then? The answer, in all likelihood, is none. Many leftists dare not define it because any definition, however narrowly drawn, will capture many people that the infantile left regards as allies on the ‘right side of history’ even after they have led the Palestinian cause into Leon Trotsky’s dustbin of history.
To show why these arguments matter, on Wednesday German police arrested three suspected members of Hamas for planning ‘assassination attacks on Israeli or Jewish institutions in Germany’. Can western leftists say that these suspects are potential anti-Semites or do they, like fascists of the 1930s, see the assassination of Jews as a legitimate punishment?
Conservatives may not like me pointing this out but, for all the problems it has had with individual members, the Green party provides a rock of moral clarity in this sea of double standards. Zack Polanski, its (Jewish) leader, spoke honestly and called the Manchester murders ‘anti-Semitic’. The party has cooperated with Lord Mann, the government adviser on anti-Semitism, to combat anti-Jewish racism among its members. There is even a Jewish Green movement which offers a reasoned definition of anti-Semitism and fights attempts by its enemies in the party to overturn it.
Don’t confuse Israeli people and Jews around the world with the Israeli government, it says. Don’t glorify violence, and don’t use ‘Zionist’ as a substitute for ‘Jew’. As anti-Semitic murderers stalk British Jewry, it is both terrifying and disgraceful that there are leftists who cannot echo these sentiments and prefer to whine and equivocate instead.
Comments