The era of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the opposition Labour Party in the United Kingdom mercifully came to an end last week, with the election of the more centrist-minded Sir Keir Starmer as his successor.
For Jews in Britain, especially, the four-and-a-half years that Corbyn spent at Labour’s helm was a nightmare. In the process, the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain gained an international audience as never before, with Corbyn and those around him coming to symbolize the attitude of the extreme left—contemptuous and suspicious in equal measure—to Jewish causes and concerns.
Now that his leadership is in the past tense, did we learn anything from Corbyn that we didn’t know already about the far-left’s hostility to Jews as a self-conscious collective? To put that question another way, was the anti-Semitism that marked the Corbyn era simply more of the same, but uttered by more influential people with much louder voices, or did we encounter something qualitatively new?
To my mind, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Or so they said.
In the end, his rise was hardly meteoric, while his fall was quite spectacular. After four years of media headlines exposing the lurid anti-Semitism that had mushroomed among Corbyn’s supporters, the Labour Party performed disastrously in a December 2019 election it really should have won. Recall that at the time, the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union (Brexit) was in chaos and the bitterly divided Conservative Party had just replaced Prime Minister Theresa May with Boris Johnson. But whatever the doubts about Johnson and the Tories, the most brutal verdict of the electors was reserved for Corbyn, whose eye-wateringly low personal ratings were mirrored in Labour’s own showing. On the morning after the vote, news report after news report emphasized that it had been Labour’s worst defeat since the election of 1935.
Anti-Semitism was always a persistent problem on the New Left, and as Labour leader, Corbyn duly legitimized that strain which codes its attacks with the words “Zionism” and “Zionist,” and which portrays the Palestinians as victims of a Nazi-style genocide launched by an apartheid state. But thanks to the internet, this salonfähig variant of anti-Semitism, whose advocates angrily denied that it was anti-Semitism, found itself in the company of Holocaust-deniers and assorted other conspiracy theorists more commonly found on the far-right. During Corbyn’s tenure, the Labour Party accumulated hundreds of internal complaints about anti-Semitism, of which a good number centered not on offensive speech about the Jewish national movement, but on more traditional anti-Semitic tropes, such as the alleged control exercised by the Rothschild banking family over the global economy.
Anyone who has studied the history of left-wing anti-Semitism will be aware that these seemingly counterintuitive associations have been made many times before by left-wing parties in various countries. In Labour’s case, however, there was a new mode of distribution in the form of social media. Each real-world instance of Labour anti-Semitism was echoed online many times over to the point that the entire problem came to define Corbyn’s leadership.
Anti-Semitism was not the only (and definitely not the most important) reason why Corbyn and Labour lost the 2019 election, but it was certainly a factor. Across the United Kingdom, Labour Party workers reported on doorstep encounters in which Corbyn’s political war against Britain’s Jewish community was cited with bemused disapproval. Still, whatever the damage done to Labour’s relationship with British Jews, theoretically at least, that can be repaired; conversely, Corbyn belongs to the party’s past, his place in the gallery of Labour leaders who never made it out of opposition firmly assured.
What of Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor? In the days that followed his election, Starmer underlined his determination to wipe away the “stain” of anti-Semitism
from within the Labour Party.
He continued that an apology on its own, without corresponding action, would not be good enough, proposing a two-pronged strategy whereby Labour will deal “robustly and swiftly” with outstanding cases of anti-Semitism in its ranks, at the same time transforming its institutional understanding of what anti-Semitism is and how to fight it. Like Corbyn himself, Starmer seems to be saying that the fate of anti-Semitism in Labour’s ranks is to be consigned to history. We shall see.