As a Zionist and a liberal Jew, I am struck by the contrast between Ahmad Samih Khalidi’s article (Opposing Zionism is neither racist nor antisemitic, 29 August) and the interview given by Jonathan Sacks to the New Statesman (Corbyn remarks most offensive since ‘rivers of blood’, says Sacks, 29 August). Both refer to the question of Jeremy Corbyn and his past and present comments on Zionism.

On the one hand we have a well-articulated and reasonably well-balanced argument in favour of the Palestinian cause by an Oxford academic, and on the other, and I say this regretfully, what can only be described as a vicious rant by a previously influential religious figure.

Some of Khalidi’s insights into Corbyn’s inability to put the subject of his alleged antisemitic bias to rest strike a chord and throw serious doubts on his leadership abilities. However, Lord Sacks, in his vilification of Jeremy Corbyn, has allowed himself to descend into the bearpit of anti-Corbynism with others who profess to speak on behalf of the Jewish community. There is no limit to expounding the canard that the Jewish community in this country faces an existential threat if Jeremy Corbyn ever came to power. Surely we are entitled to expect, from an emininent teacher and rabbi, a more thoughtful appraisal of the extent of antisemitism in the Labour party. Will we ever return to courteous exchanges of view?

Dr Alan Swarc

London

• It is a pity that in the whole debate about Zionism, the history and facts have been studiously avoided. Zion is the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, and modern Zionism started in Europe in the late 19th century – with Theodor Herzl considered its founder. He envisaged an independent Jewish state in the 20th century with its citizens coming from the ghettos of Europe. Zionism did not have a uniform ideology, but the main two were religious Zionism and labour Zionism. Many of the members of labour Zionism were communists, socialists and anarchists, and they used the name Poale Zion. In Britain, Poale Zion was affiliated to the Labour party and in 2004 it became the Jewish Labour Movement.

The reality today is that religious Zionism has defeated labour Zionism and anyone, including Jews, who opposes the current Israeli state is considered antisemitic. This blatantly wrong interpretation of antisemitism is being used as an excuse for the media and the right to attack Corbyn and the Labour party – not because he is antisemitic but because he is a threat to the appalling form of capitalism we now have in the UK.

Michael Gold

Romford, Essex

• Natalie Nougayréde (Ditch identity politics: fight for one person’s rights at a time, 29 August) hints at one of the corrosive tendencies in contemporary politics, the pull of drawing specific instances of oppression into increasingly strident victim groups. She quotes Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the outgoing UN high commissioner for human rights: “Defending the rights of one community against other communities amounts to creating the conflicts of tomorrow.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the increasingly strident issue of antisemitism in the Labour party, with those for and against Corbyn each claiming to be more victimised than the other.

The #Metoo movement is tending similarly to demonise all men under cover of aggressive victimhood, which absolves individuals on both sides from personal responsibility. The primacy of identity politics also distracts from what should be the two great issues of our discourse: climate change and inequality.

Diana Birkett

London

• To compare Jeremy Corbyn to Enoch Powell is outlandish, particularly for a respected public figure such as the former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. It serves to obfuscate growing racism in this country. Powell’s speech was made in the highly charged context of the arrival of thousands of Kenyan Asian British citizens and the debate over the 1968 Race Relations Act to outlaw discrimination. His language of “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” was seemingly chosen to incite. And it was Powell who started “the numbers game” over immigration in the UK.

Corbyn’s “crime”, committed five years ago at a relatively small gathering but surfaced now by political forces that want to end his leadership, was to describe as Zionist those who, through their behaviour, clearly were, and to make an off-the-cuff remark about English irony. Is a lack of proportion also an English trait?

Jenny Bourne

Editor, Race & Class

• Jonathan Sacks is over the top in his criticism of Jeremy Corbyn. However, for the first time in the Labour antisemitism row, Corbyn has crossed a sinister line. By saying that a group of Zionists had “lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives” but “don’t understand English irony”, he was needlessly implying they were not completely British; that they were “alien” or somehow “other”. Instead of now defending the indefensible, the Labour leader should be brave enough to admit he was wrong and apologise unconditionally.

Joe McCarthy

Dublin

• I welcome Ahmad Samih Khalidi’s take on Jeremy Corbyn. As a Jew I bitterly resent the unmitigating assaults, not least by Jews, on Corbyn for stressing that opposition to Zionism is not anti-semitic. My grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, was among the founding fathers of Israel, a colleague of Theodor Herzl and one of the then few who persuaded his children to adopt aliya and settle in Palestine in the early years of the last century well before it became de rigueur, before himself emigrating in the last years of his life. But my aunts and uncle who made the move in the 1920s were on friendly relations with their Palestinian neighbours and, although the likely outcome of the Zionist programme was clearly discernible, the Nakba and the expulsion, whether forcible or otherwise, of Palestinians from their centuries-old homeland was an abhorrence from which Jews worldwide ought to dissociate themselves.

So, as a Labour party member, I place myself four-square behind Jeremy Corbyn and condemn the studied campaign to belittle him and destroy his credibility.

Benedict Birnberg

London

• Natalie Nougayréde’s article coincided with my reading East West Street, Philippe Sands’s account of the Holocaust and Nuremberg trials. Nougayrede’s comment that, “tribal politics, tribal thinking, are arguably human rights’ worst enemies”, echoes the argument advocated by the lawyer Lauterpacht, who successfully campaigned for the charge of crimes against humanity to be used at Nuremberg and not genocide. Lauterpacht argued that the individual must be taken as the “ultimate unit of all law”. Ironically, identity based on racial, group or tribal grounds only promotes stronger nationalistic lines, divisions and conflicts. The inalienable human rights of each and every individual might be sacrificed, subsumed to the hegemony of the group. A controversy that is still relevant today.

Jenny Stokes

Birmingham

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