by Peter Unterweger, former Head of Automotive Department of the International Metalworks Union (IMB)
Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time left-wing rear bencher, was elected to head the Labour Party in 2015 as a result of the wide-ranging disappointments of neoliberal Blair policies, strong growth of Labour membership due to left-wing organizing campaigns and earlier party reforms, which had empowered regular party members to elect the leader. The new leadership and political orientation made tensions with the centrist supporters of Tony Blair, who were still numerous and very influential in parliament and party apparatus, inevitable.
Corbyn is a lifelong fighter for human rights including Palestinian rights. He therefore attracted many similar minded activists. This mindset was quickly targeted by the major Jewish communal and pro-Zionist organizations in the UK and defamed as “anti-Semitism” with the help of Israeli government agencies.
Although a full Labour Party inquiry (Chakrabarti report) did not find any institutional anti-Semitism, screaming tabloid headlines denounced anti-Semitism in the Labour Party; prominent long-time anti-racist activists were personally defamed and, on in several cases expelled from the party, including a number of Jewish anti-Zionist members. Pro-Zionist forces also called for the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of anti-Semitism by the Party. The IHRA fight raged for more than a year, but in the end, the definition including its controversial examples was adopted. These campaigns seamlessly fit into the strategy of Labour’s right wing; the goal was to distract the left-wing leadership and push into the defensive.
Labour lost the 2019 general election and Corbyn resigned. Although the main issue of the election was BREXIT, the fabricated ′′ Labour anti-Semitism ′′ campaign certainly played a certain role in defeat.
In April 2020, Keir Starmer won the election to be the new party leader with financial support from at least one long-time pro-Israeli lobbyist. Almost immediately after his victory, he declared that ′′ I support Zionism without restriction′′ and began to align the party with the guidelines requested by pro-Zionist organizations. In July, he forced a Corbyn supporter and former leadership competitor from her post in the Labour Party’s ′′ shadow ′′ cabinet with far-fetched anti-Semitism accusations. And now, Starmer is using Corbyn’s criticism of secondary findings of a commission (that is widely seen to be close to the Conservative Party) to suspend his Labour membership. Thereby doing just one more service for the pro-Zionist lobby, which – instead of uniting the party against Boris Johnson’s Conservatives – will only demobilize and alienate more parts of the Labour base.
