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The campaign to depict the British Labour Party as a hotbed of antisemitism was, in its profile and its protractedness, unprecedented in modern British politics. One study tallied 5,500 national newspaper articles on the topic between 2015 and 2019. This remarkable proliferation stemmed from the campaign’s novel political character. Although Jewish and pro-Israel groups had frequently leveled the charge of antisemitism against the Palestine solidarity movement in the past, Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader saw such charges weaponized by the full breadth of Britain’s establishment, as it sought to discredit and defeat a popular insurgency. Three distinct if overlapping networks pushed the story: the Conservative Party, the Labour Party’s own right wing, and Britain’s pro-Israel Jewish establishment. Each played an indispensable role. Tory and Labour-right allegations would have lacked plausibility without the validation of Jewish leadership groups, which also mobilized considerable resources behind the campaign. Conversely, the Jewish establishment’s vendetta against the Left would have gained little traction had it not been amplified by wider political and media elites. The story of that campaign, its role in Labour’s 2019 election defeat, and the party’s failure to respond effectively to a torrent of disinformation is an important case study for left-wing movements in other countries — not least the United States, where a similar campaign may well be in the offing.

Comment Is Free If many came to believe the claims about pervasive, endemic antisemitism in the Labour Party, this was primarily because, as the Media Reform Coalition put it, the British press set out to undermine Corbyn “with a barrage of overwhelmingly negative coverage.” The “Labour antisemitism” campaign was the most extreme manifestation of this hostility. Press coverage was replete with factual errors. It was widely reported, for example, that the 2017 Labour Party conference played host to numerous instances of antisemitism — in the British tabloid idiom, “an abundance of wild-eyed, mouth-foaming hatreds” as “the tumour of anti-Semitism that grows in the rancid guts of Labour moved centre stage” — yet none of the concrete allegations withstood proper scrutiny, and nearly all turned out to implicate people who were themselves Jewish. (As the old cliché goes: two Jews, three antisemites.) The British media abandoned any semblance of rational criteria for assessing news value, to the extent that random Facebook posts by ordinary Labour members and factional wranglings over internal party complaints procedures became the stuff of national headlines. And no effort was made to set the allegations against Labour within a wider social or statistical context, with the result that coverage wildly inflated the perceived scale of the problem and inverted the real political distribution of racism in contemporary Britain. The 2019 election campaign brought these shoddy journalistic practices to a crescendo. The Evening Standard, London’s daily newspaper, fabricated a quote from an interview with Jeremy Corbyn, then corrected the online edition, without, however, providing any explanation of how the “error” had come about. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland defamed a Labour election candidate, Majid Mahmood, as an antisemite, because he had the same name as another man — a typical example of the fact-checking standards applied to claims about “Labour antisemitism” by Britain’s most prestigious liberal newspaper, and by Freedland in particular. And in a bizarre conclusion to this protracted affair, Corbyn’s pronunciation of the name “Jeffrey Epstein” became further “proof” of his antisemitism.

Fears and Dismay In the wake of Labour’s election disaster, a number of political and media figures faced condemnation for blaming the result on Israel and/or British Jewish organizations. This was a flawed explanation for the result, as we shall see. However, these figures were simply taking Corbyn’s opponents at their word. Already in 2018, Marie van der Zyl, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BOD), had boasted that “we showed how we could keep this issue of antisemitism on the front pages day after day, week after week, exacting a severe political and reputational cost.” After Labour’s defeat, Joe Glasman of the CAA recorded a triumphant message: “We did it!” Marie van der Zyl rejoiced over the “unprecedented levels of unity” shown in the battle against Labour. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the Jewish Labour Movement, which is affiliated to the Labour Party, announced its refusal to campaign for Labour, and publicized its leaked submission to an Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation of Labour’s handling of antisemitism-related complaints. The CAA released a report claiming that antisemitic views were most widespread on the Left and among supporters of Corbyn — even though its actual figures, in line with previous studies, showed the opposite — and convened a public “rally against antisemitism” implicitly targeting Labour. The former chair of the Reform Movement broke a taboo to advise that congregants “vote for whichever party is most likely to defeat Labour” since “a Corbyn-led government would pose a danger to Jewish life as we know it.” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis all but urged a vote against Labour, in a statement timed to derail the party’s “Race and Faith” manifesto launch. The Jewish Chronicle implored its non-Jewish readers to take a stand: if Corbyn was chosen as Britain’s prime minister, the message would be sent that our “fears and dismay count for nothing.” These heartfelt appeals from representatives of Britain’s most prosperous and well-integrated minority group ignored the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was running against the party that implemented a “hostile environment” for immigrants and oversaw the Windrush scandal, now led by a man with a long record of overtly bigoted remarks, whose future political strategy will most likely depend upon the excitement of a resentful and exclusionary nationalism. When the Archbishop of Canterbury endorsed the Chief Rabbi’s intervention, anti-racist activist and academic Gus John resigned from the Church of England in disgust. After the election, the BOD congratulated Boris Johnson on his “historic achievement , ” while Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) suggested that the result “showed that Britain remains a place which respects minorities.” The new Conservative government has since deported people who had lived in the United Kingdom for almost all of their lives to Jamaica, and defeated a proposal by Lord Alf Dubs — who escaped Czechoslovakia in 1939 on the Kindertransport — to permit stranded child refugees to join relatives in Britain. Apparently, some kinds of “fear and dismay” still “count for nothing.”

“Not a Big Story” However, in spite of these vigorous efforts, antisemitism allegations probably did not have a large direct impact on the result. Even at the peak of media hysteria over “Labour antisemitism” in August 2018, a Populus survey found that the issue had barely penetrated public consciousness: “This is simply not a big story for most people.” Reviewing the “most noticed news stories” of 2019, Populus again found that while Brexit “utterly dominated public attention throughout the year,” antisemitism didn’t merit a mention. Developments that resonated included parliament’s failure to pass Theresa May’s Brexit deal (86 percent of respondents to a weekly survey listed this as their “most noticed” story), the Notre Dame fire (59 percent), the Sri Lanka bombings (47 percent), and Boris Johnson becoming prime minister (81 percent). By contrast, “Labour antisemitism” had never been the most noticed story for more than 5 percent. Media coverage of the antisemitism controversy dramatically increased during the final three weeks of the election campaign. But neither the Chief Rabbi’s high-profile intervention , nor Corbyn’s own difficult BBC television interview — in which he was grilled over antisemitism — registered in the polls. Even though a significant proportion of people did come to believe that Corbyn was antisemitic, the issue wasn’t salient for most of them. The indirect impact of the controversy appears to have been more significant. First, Corbyn’s apologetic response to the antisemitism allegations most likely worsened perceptions of the Labour leader as weak and indecisive, which ranked among the most frequently cited reasons for his unpopularity. While Corbyn’s image problem was primarily the result of Labour’s position on Brexit, widely perceived as “wishy-washy,” his failure to forthrightly and consistently reject the antisemitism smears surely didn’t help. Second, the relentless allegations against Labour members drained activist morale. People who joined the party on a surge of idealism and moral conviction found themselves depicted in the national conversation as a racist gang. The resulting disorientation grew worse as seemingly nonpartisan Jewish communal groups endorsed these allegations, and left-wing public figures almost uniformly chose not to rise to the defense of Labour members. It is difficult to convey the mounting dread felt by many of those members as they contemplated the fresh antisemitism controversy that would inevitably erupt anew each summer, and ahead of every local or national election.