Far-left group Labour Against the Witch Hunt claims Israel conspired to fabricate Labour’s antisemitism crisis.

The annual conference of far-left group Labour Against the Witch Hunt (LAW) has claimed that Israel conspired with MPs and Zionist organisations to fabricate Labour’s antisemitism crisis.

A motion agreed unanimously by around fifty activists attending the conference claims “to lay bare the role of the Labour right, the Israeli state and Zionist organisations in fabricating the antisemitism ‘crisis’ in the Labour Party.”

The same motion also alleges a “war of attrition against Corbyn as Labour leader, carried out by an alliance of the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the Party bureaucracy, the Israeli state, the pro-Israel lobby and the mainstream media, began even before he was elected.”

The activists decided to attack the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) too, saying “we do not accept that an organisation which supports a racist project of colonisation is capable of providing anti-racist education.” Asa Winstanley, a writer for Electronic Intifada who addressed the conference, reportedly described JLM as “proxies for the Israeli embassy”

A separate motion, also passed unanimously, claims that the widely accepted IHRA definition of antisemitism adopted by Labour in September “is designed to allow any criticism of the actions of the state of Israel to be dismissed as ‘antisemitism’”.

The conference was chaired by Jackie Walker, suspended from Labour since 2016 for her claim that Jews “were the chief financiers of the slave trade”. Without any hint of irony she is said to have told the conference there would be a “miraculous change” if the right succeeded in removing Jeremy Corbyn: “You can bet that Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ problem would suddenly disappear.”

In true far-left style, the minutiae of the tiny group’s draft constitution managed to throw the conference into bitter division, with expelled Labour member Tony Greenstein warning that they must “guard against LAW being taken over by some sect”.