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For more than a decade, seasoned far-left internet-surfers have enjoyed the scabrous, hilarious, tasteless wit of Jewdas, a social-media-savvy radical — and tiny — Jewish group. Had it been suggested a week ago that this minute, loose grouping of righteously furious Bundist pranksters would be national, even international news, it would have seemed impossible, if a delightful thought. But a week, these days, is a particularly long time in politics. Thus it is that Jeremy Corbyn attending a Jewdas-organized Seder in North London is being depicted as an insult to Jews. For approximately two years, the Labour leadership has been assailed by charges of tolerating, or showing a blind spot for, antisemitism. For the first time in that whole period, the scandals have drawn blood. Corbyn’s attendance at the Jewish festival — his hosts report being delighted that he brought his own homegrown horse-radish — is, by deranged political judo, being cited as evidence for antisemitism. Leading up to this, Corbyn has been forced to apologize for a Facebook comment from several years ago, defending an antisemitic mural by the artist Mear One, and to issue a sweeping statement addressing the problem of “pockets of antisemitism” in Labour. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell, and Momentum, have also put out statements saying that antisemitism in Labour is a real problem, not to be dismissed. Unfortunately, many people refused to see anything antisemitic about the mural, featuring a classic conspiracy theory trope about rich Jews. Some Corbyn supporters signing a petition defending him against a “very powerful interest group,” toxic language to use in this context. Subsequently, Christine Shawcroft, a close ally of Momentum founder Jon Lansman and a long-standing Bennite activist, has been forced to resign from Labour’s National Executive Committee. She will be replaced by Eddie Izzard, from the party’s right-wing. Shawcroft made the lamentable mistake of opposing the expulsion from Labour of Alan Bull, a would-be local council candidate. Bull posted Holocaust-denial and antisemitic comments about David Miliband (“a jew” “paid by Rothschild who also owns Israel and also controls mossadd who kill people for Israel and Zionism”) on his Facebook page. Shawcroft said she would not have solicited on his behalf had she seen these posts. Given her long-standing commitment to defending members against a hostile bureaucracy, it is plausible that Shawcroft acted on autopilot. But such carelessness, which could have resulted in this antisemitic conspiracy theorist representing Labour in local government, was a gift to the Right. There is, clearly, a problem somewhere. Unfortunately, the way in which allegations of antisemitism have been used for party-political purposes, has tended to obscure the need to address it. Antisemitism is being depicted, by the Right, with the mainstream media obediently reproducing the lie, as a problem of the Left when a study published by the Community Security Trust, which is strongly pro-Israel, finds that the Left is in no way more antisemitic than the political “center-ground.” Antisemitism, in fact, is predominantly a right-wing problem. The narrow, distorted framing of this issue, therefore, clearly benefits one side in a turf war over control of Labour. That narrative has spiraled “out of control”, as Joseph Finlay suggests, when Tory minister Sajid Javid can use the surreal atmosphere (and parliamentary privilege) to accuse Momentum of being a neofascist organization. However, this can’t be used to avoid a real problem. It is a cautionary tale, or what Americans call a “teachable moment.” To get to grips with why it has happened, we must review the scandals — amid remarkable achievements — of Corbyn’s still-young leadership of the Labour Party.

Labour and the “Jewish Vote” Despite two years of attacks, Labour dramatically increased its vote in the 2017 snap election, with the biggest surge since 1945. Yet, in the glare of the antisemitism scandals, a mischievous question went up in the national media: can Corbyn “win back” the “Jewish vote”? The idea of a univocal “Jewish vote” is a figment of the antisemitic imagination. Like other voters, Jewish voters generally divide on social class. Like other faith groups, they divide on social issues. For example, Jewish voters were overwhelmingly anti-Brexit, but those with a religious affiliation to Judaism were slightly pro-Brexit. Generationally, younger Jewish voters are more pro-Labour than older Jewish voters; self-employed Jewish voters are more Tory than employed Jewish voters. More complicatedly, the right-wing academic Geoffrey Alderman has argued that a “Jewish vote” emerges contextually to tilt the balance of votes in swing constituencies, where an issue like support for Israel might be at stake. An analysis by Tablet claims, along these lines, that a small number of Jewish voters may have cost Corbyn victory in 2017. Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle claims that Jewish voters in the “bagel belt” helped obstruct the red tide, simply by not defecting to Labour. This is quite an extraordinary claim to make for the cohesion and power of 0.5 percent of the electorate. True, polls suggest Corbyn’s support among Jews is lamentably low. In the 2017 general election, he had the support of about 14 percent of Jewish voters. Corbyn does have passionate Jewish supporters, many of them prominent in the movement, but their views are not necessarily reflective of the majority of Jewish opinion. Strange to relate, however, Corbyn’s support among Jews is practically identical to that for his predecessor, Ed Miliband, who had the support of 13 percent of British Jews. This last figure is striking: far more Jewish voters chose the Home Counties Tory David Cameron over Ed Miliband, who was literally “Jew-baited” by Tory candidates and in the national press, and would have been Britain’s first Jewish Prime Minister. This was a huge shift from 2010, when Jewish voters were split evenly between Labour and Conservatives. Robert Philpot, director of the Blairite think-tank Progress, attributed this to Miliband’s criticisms of Israeli policy, and others to his not being “loyal enough” to Jews. By implication, Labour can only “win back” Jewish voters by adopting a less critical position on Israel. But while Israel matters to most Jewish voters, there is no unilateral consensus among them about what Israel should be, or do. Miliband’s criticisms of Israeli actions and support for Palestinian statehood, for example, were well within the mainstream of Jewish opinion, even if not acceptable to the Board of Deputies. The evidence suggests that, overall, there has been a much long-termer shift from Labour to the Conservatives, which was interrupted by the New Labour era. So what caused the shift? In a way, the question is itself a problem, if it takes the migration of Jewish opinion to the right as some sort of aberration. As Philip Mendes points out in his history of Jews and the Left, Jewish radicalism has historically been a product of systems of ethnic and class oppression. Today, these structural factors don’t exist in the same way. The destruction of the Third Reich dealt a lethal blow to dictatorships based on antisemitic persecution, while the terrifying realities of the Holocaust have delegitimized any attempt to give popular antisemitism the teeth of state power (one of many reasons why Holocaust denial is so toxic). The postwar era saw significant class mobility among British Jews, from the working class and petty bourgeoisie, to the professional middle class. The ensuing right-turn was a function of class mobility rather than ethnic solidarity around Israel, as even Alderman agrees. When parts of the British middle class shifted to Thatcherite hard-right as the postwar consensus disintegrated, therefore, a lot of Jewish voters were among them. If the shift wasn’t caused by Israel, one might ask, how much was it enabled by British foreign policy toward Israel? In the retrospection of the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies, Thatcher is celebrated to the skies for her pro-Israel position. Philpot esteems Thatcher an “honorary Jew” for supporting Israel. It is true that Thatcher made a conspicuous effort to cultivate Jewish support, and shed the Tory aura of antisemitism. Supporting Israel was important to this strategy. It is also true that, in 1982, the British trade union movement and the Labour Party began to break with Israel in response to the Menachem Begin administration’s massacres in Sabra and Shatila. Under Livingstone’s GLC, support for Palestine found a place in the spectrum of left-wing, anti-racist politics, and Left support for negotiations with the PLO toward a Palestinian state began to appear. This was part of the context in which the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovitz, became a fierce defender of Thatcher, capping a trend in which Tory candidates increasingly had rabbinical support, especially from Orthodox synagogues. However, Thatcher’s administration was less pro-Israel than her encomiasts suggest. Arguably, it was less so than the SDP, which chose “zealous” support for Israel as one of its unique selling points in its fight with Labour. Thatcher criticized Menachem Begin, whom she disliked, and deemed the massacres in Lebanon “barbaric.” Her foreign secretary spoke of supporting a Palestinian state, and Thatcher cautiously endorsed negotiations with the PLO toward land-for-peace. Jewish residents of her Finchley constituency at one point protested outside Thatcher’s office over her government’s Middle East policy, after she endorsed the EEC’s Venice Declaration calling for an end to Israel’s “territorial occupation” and supporting Palestinian self-determination. Meanwhile, the leadership of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley was strongly pro-Israel. Hattersley denounced “creeping antisemitism” on the party’s left, in response to resolutions supporting a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine. And there was a natural overlap between the monomaniacal drive to break the Left, exemplified by Kinnock’s chief whip, Michael Cocks, and the aggressively pro-Israel politics of his wife, Valerie Cocks, the head of Labour Friends of Israel. If being pro-Israel was the issue, Jewish voters might just as well have preferred the Kinnockite Labour Party, or David Owen. Indeed, if Thatcher’s alliance with an increasingly conservative Jewish establishment were just about Israel, Jakobovitz’s defence of Thatcher would not have focused on criticizing welfare, union-bashing, and condescension toward inner-city black people. The right-turn built on existing social trends and class attitudes, which were in no way particular to Jews. Insofar as Israel is being talked of as the cause of this, it is a displacement. It is striking, despite all this, that two years of repeated antisemitism scandals in which attitudes to Israel featured prominently barely altered Labour’s support among Jewish voters. This, despite the fact that Corbyn was more consistently critical of Israeli policy than any previous leadership. But given the general surge for Labour, the fact that Corbyn didn’t improve Labour’s standing among Jewish voters demands explanation. Lacking detailed psephological data, it is difficult to say what the figures actually mean. Consider what happened in some of the London constituencies with the highest numbers of Jewish voters, in 2017. In Finchley & Golders’ Green, Hendon, Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and Ilford North, Labour increased its vote share while the Conservatives lost votes in every single one. Compare to the middle-class Hertfordshire constituency of Hertsmere where, despite a definite Labour bounce, there was an increase in the already huge Tory lead. In two of the London constituencies, there was also a small boost for the Liberal Democrats, likely coming from 2015 Labour voters. It seems unlikely that the composition of the Jewish vote in these seats didn’t change at all. As with all other parts of the electorate, there was probably a degree of polarization. Older and more affluent Jewish voters repelled by Labour, and believing it to be antisemitic, will have either migrated to the Tories or the Liberal Democrats. But this was made up for by younger and poorer Jewish voters being excited by Labour’s platform. Either way, it seems likely that insofar as the antisemitism scandals, and the arguments about Israel, made a difference, they mostly confirmed the drift of those who already wouldn’t go as far left as Ed Miliband. The failure of those voters to support Labour is not a Jewish aberration to be explained, but a logical reflection of class-being, and the corollary support for the dominant institutions of British society. None of this is to say that the issue of Israel is completely irrelevant to these shifts, or to class politics. Unsurprisingly, the radical left has learned to oppose the racist and class oppression of the Palestinians. And while the trade union movement has largely swung behind the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign supported by Palestinian civil society, the British military establishment and security state has long been partners with that oppression. As support for Israel has narrowed politically, it has become one a mainstay of the middle class right-of-center vote: having an elective affinity with military bellicosity and orthodox views on the economy, but not being the cause of either position. A vocally pro-Israel politician of either major party will tend to support this broad, center-right governing consensus. It is, however, to suggest that those on the Right or the Left who make Israel the benchmark are buying into a fetish. Israel is “the issue” only inasmuch as it condenses, for these people, a great deal else. Beyond these arguments, Israel has not been “the issue” for most people. Corbyn’s right-wing critics may want it to be, but are likely to be disappointed. But so, by a strange logic, are some of his left-wing defenders.