A senior Israeli cabinet minister, tipped as the country’s next prime minister, has accused the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party of being antisemitic.

On a visit to Brussels, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s public security minister, said his government had become concerned by the views expressed by figures in the highest echelons of the Labour party.

“We recognise and we see that there are antisemitic views in many of the leadership of the current Labour party,” Erdan said. “We hope it will be changed. The views.

“That they will come to the right decisions about people in their party who don’t understand that Hamas is a recognised terror organisation, that you cannot have a regular relationship with a terror organisation.”

Asked specifically whether he was suggesting Corbyn himself was an antisemite, the Israeli minister paused, before adding: “I didn’t say it. I said there are views that are very close to antisemitism in the leadership of the Labour party today in the UK.”

This summer Corbyn told MPs investigating accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party that he regretted once calling members of Hamas and Hezbollah “friends”.

After a speaker at a fringe meeting at the Labour conference claimed free speech should include the right to question the Holocaust, Corbyn undertook a series of interviews to insist that antisemitism was “completely at odds with the beliefs of this party”.

Erdan was in Brussels to lobby key European parliament figures to stop funding for groups campaigning for boycotts of Israeli goods.

The minister, who is the second most senior in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, added that a review last year of antisemitism carried out by Shami Chakrabarti, the former director of the civil rights group Liberty, who was later given a peerage at the suggestion of the Labour leader, had been “empty”.



The inquiry, which followed the suspension of the MP Naz Shah and the former London mayor Ken Livingstone amid antisemitism claims, had found an “occasionally toxic atmosphere”.

Erdan said: “We don’t think this committee was enough. We still follow and listen to their views and we are concerned that it will lead, it will bring, the UK to a very, very negative place. Still we are optimistic.”

Last month, the historians Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, wrote a letter published in the Times expressing their concern over the “tone and direction of debate about Israel and Zionism” in the Labour party.

Erdan also offered his support for the former international development secretary Priti Patel, who was forced to resign after undertaking a series of unauthorised meetings with senior Israeli government figures while on holiday and back in London.

Erdan, who met Patel in one of those meetings in Westminster, and posed with her for photographs on the Commons terrace, said the British government would be diminished by Patel’s dismissal from the cabinet.

“The Brits have something to lose here as well,” he said. “In Israel I must tell you it takes much, much more to leave the government.” Erdan, a former adviser to Netanyahu, is understood to have ambitions to replace the Israeli prime minister, who is currently under police investigation over allegations of corruption.

A spokesman for the Labour party said: “Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party campaign against and condemn all forms of antisemitism and the Labour party conference recently adopted new tough rules on antisemitism.”