While the Labor party could once count on the support of the vast majority of British Jews, and British Jews could count on Labor to be favorably inclined toward the state of Israel, those days are long gone. This has been especially true since the far left took over the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Dave Rich explains:
[The] anti-American, anti-imperialist strain of the British left [that now dominates] has deep roots, but the 2003 Iraq war gave it a new impetus, and opened up a broad rift in the Labor party. On one side are supporters of the [Tony] Blair legacy that includes a warm embrace of Israel and of Labor Zionists; on the other stand Corbyn and other veterans of the Stop the War Coalition. Despite the initial mass protests against the Iraq war, the coalition was run by an activist core of far-left groups like the Socialist Workers party allied with Islamists like the Muslim Association of Britain. For this alliance, a visceral objection to Israel’s existence was a key point of unity.
The Muslim Association of Britain has been described by a government minister as the British “representative” of the international Muslim Brotherhood organization. The Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood is Hamas, the radical group that governs Gaza—and which Corbyn has praised for its commitment to “peace and social justice and political justice.” This is not the only case of Corbyn’s appearing to align himself with Islamism: from 2009 to 2012, he was a paid host on the Iranian state-owned Press TV.
For many British Jews and others, Corbyn thus personifies a tolerance among parts of the left for reactionary Islamists that is at best naïve, at worst malign—not least because it overlooks Islamism’s history of murderous repression toward democratic socialists in Muslim-majority countries.
Read more on New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/opinion/anti-semitism-and-the-british-left.html