At Labour’s conference in Liverpool last year, I bumped into two acquaintances – both Jewish Labour supporters who were standing outside the main entrance to the hall. They had been inside but now were lingering on the pavement – drawn in by the political energy of the occasion and yet simultaneously repelled, as though by an invisible force.

Labour has let poison of antisemitism take root, says chief rabbi Read more

I think often of their faces, of the pain and bewilderment, every time Labour’s derisory handling of antisemitism returns to the headlines. Standing on the left and yet feeling separated from it, by a force that too many still insist they cannot see, has become a familiar feeling for Jewish leftists, for whom the agonising issue of Labour’s antisemitism has torn at two key parts of their identity.

But it comes with an accompanying despair, about the treatment of antisemitism in British politics, where a dangerous prejudice that demands our serious attention and analysis has become the subject of an escalating partisan conflict. The tendency to subordinate antiracism to party political disputes is hardly unique to antisemitism. But this familiar cycle – of allegations, defences, evasions, counter-claims and dismissals – has now reached a new level.

Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has declared that while it pains him to make a political intervention, Jeremy Corbyn is not fit for high office because of his handling of antisemitism. Mirvis said that the “poison” of antisemitism taking hold in Labour has been “sanctioned from the top”. With typical diplomacy, the Labour peer Alf Dubs told Radio 4’s Today programme that, respectfully, “the chief rabbi has gone a bit far”. The intervention from Mirvis, who represents 62 of the UK’s orthodox synagogues, ignited the usual protagonists in this excruciating row: those who falsely deny Labour has a real problem on the one hand, and on the other, those who claim Corbyn is the biggest threat to British Jews.

We’ve already seen countless repetitions of this cycle, which has intensified since patient zero, Ken Livingstone, started going on about Hitler and the Zionists in 2016 – followed by the first of many sluggish responses from the Labour leadership, the first of many instances of gaslighting of distressed Jewish people from sections of the left. More recent examples include outlandish claims that Corbyn’s pronunciation of Jeffrey Epstein’s surname is evidence of antisemitic intent, set against grim reports that some Labour canvassers have reacted to concerns over antisemitism with laughter. In the press, we have duelling letters from two groups of celebrities: one side pronouncing Corbyn the world’s greatest anti-racist, the other declaring they can’t vote for him – each a problem for different reasons and both feeding the antisemitism arms race.

Caught in the middle are many British Jews with shades of opinion that don’t fit either category. And similarly trapped in the middle of this binary are those who are well aware of Labour’s insufficiently decisive handling of antisemitism, yet wonder why the media is focusing on it to the extent that other prejudices are diminished. There are particular inflections to the way that different forms of race-hatred appear across different parts of the political spectrum. But minorities instinctively understand that prejudice against one group is never far from prejudice against another. Tackling one form of racism does not entirely succeed unless we tackle prejudices collectively.

The worrying aspect of this latest furore is not that community leaders have raised Labour’s issues with antisemitism in light of the acute and very real fears among Britain’s small Jewish population – it is that doing so explicitly in the midst of an election campaign risks appearing indifferent to the dismal record of Boris Johnson and his increasingly nativist Conservative party, whose allies on the far right in Britain and Europe pose a real peril for all minorities in Britain, including Jews. This is not about deflecting attention from Labour’s failings, which plainly exist – or pretending that antisemitic conspiracies emanating from the crank left can be excused by citing white supremacists on the right – but rather about weighing judgments and providing a context to them.

People calibrate their politics according to their own moral and ideological compass – inflected with life experiences, policy preferences, hopes and expectations. It is appallingly crass to tell British Jews who are agonising over their choice in this election that they are not prioritising correctly. Yet neither is it reasonable to imply that support for Corbyn is evidence of moral failure. Millions of people across the UK will vote Labour in this election, each for their own reasons. They cannot all be dismissed as indifferent to prejudice for doing so.

Meanwhile Jewish leftists who support Labour do so in part because they see some allies within the party in the fight against antisemitism. One Jewish Labour member recently told me that the experience of canvassing for this election alongside other members who refuse to excuse antisemitism in Labour has given him a sense of solidarity and hope for the party’s capacity to resolve an issue that should never have been treated so poorly from the start.

Every British Jew has their own family story – of emigration and immigration, of threats and losses, but also of community and belonging. My own family’s journey to the UK from Iraq via Israel – two places fatefully touched by the influence of empire – may explain my own lack of shock at the callous, divisive and biased treatment of minority communities by the British political class, Labour included. Remembering Britain’s history is not an excuse for today’s politicians, or a minimisation of the real and noxious racism that still permeates our society. But it should be a reminder that for many in Britain, the experience of racism is still the norm and not the exception.

• Rachel Shabi is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands

• This article was amended on 5 December 2019. Ephraim Mirvis does not represent all Britain’s orthodox congregations, but instead the UK’s 62 orthodox synagogues