The Anti-Semites Carry the Day in the UK’s Labor Party

At a conference of the British Labor party on Tuesday, one item on the agenda was a proposal for a better system for punishing anti-Semitism in the party ranks—of which there has lately been no shortage. The proposal, supported by the party’s leadership, was supposed to receive a rubber-stamp vote; instead it provoked an eruption of anti-Jewish rhetoric, and the vote eventually had to be postponed. Marcus Dysch describes the scene:

[A]ctivist after activist—many of them anti-Zionist Jews—took to the microphone to denounce the Jews behind the plan and Israel in general. . . . Surely now it is beyond doubt who is really running Labor. . . . The mainstream has been blown away and the hard left is now extending its grip on the party’s soul.

[The former London mayor and notorious Israel-hater] Ken Livingstone is back on the airwaves; [the left-wing filmmaker] Ken Loach is on television saying history is there to be “discussed” when asked about those questioning [the historicity of] the Holocaust; and [the hard-left party leader] Jeremy Corbyn sits amid it all, on the dais, watching silently.

The situation was so bad—Israel was compared to the Nazis, and activists argued that Jewish groups should be thrown out of the party—that a number of young Jews stayed away [the next day]. . . .

The depth of the party’s problem with anti-Semitism has been on display for all to see—and it has come with a new level of frightening warnings. “Be careful,” one opponent of the proposed rule changes said from the podium, in what seemed to be a thinly-veiled threat followed swiftly by an anti-Semitic [statement] about collusion with right-wing media. . . . To stand at the door of the conference hall and watch a Jewish anti-Zionist wildly cheered—given a standing ovation in fact—as she screamed from the podium about “despicable” Israel was chilling.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, Jeremy Corbyn, Labor Party (UK), Politics & Current Affairs, United Kingdom

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society