Published: 22 October 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THERE HAVE BEEN MANY explanations for the rapid spread of antisemitic utterances within the British left.
For some, the explanation is that it is ideologically ingrained since the birth of socialism; for others, sheer ignorance about Jewish history exacerbated by social media; for still others, an indifference to the Jews per se, that Jews are unimportant in the grand scheme in working for the greater good.
But a central factor is the visceral opposition to Zionism — regarded as racism and solely responsible for the exodus of Arabs from Palestine in 1948.
Many committed Labour figures started off on the far left but eventually moved away.
Len McCluskey was close to the Militant Tendency, Ken Loach was associated with the Socialist Labour League while Seumas Milne worked with the Communist party faction Straight Left.
Views, however, often evolved to meet a changing situation. Indeed, Sir Alfred Sherman, a Jew from Hackney, fought as a Communist in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s but remarkably ended up providing intellectual foundations for Thatcherism in the 1970s.
FULL STORY Ideological myopia has delivered hate in the Labour party (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: Jeremy Corbyn and his senior aide Seumas Milne (Ben Cawthra/LNP)
