Confessions of a Leader of Britain’s Anti-Semitic Left

During the years when Jeremy Corbyn led the UK Labor party, and anti-Semitism within the party’s ranks became a full-blown crisis, Chris Williamson became one of several members of parliament who attracted attention for his obsessive hatred of Israel, his paranoid beliefs about the power of the “Zionist lobby,” and his dismissiveness of the concerns of Jewish leaders. Since his expulsion from the party and departure from parliament, his activities have included a weekly radio show sponsored by the Iranian government called Palestine Declassified. Marc Goldberg reviews Williamson’s recent memoir, Ten Years Hard Labor:

From 2017 until his suspension in 2019 it is fair to say that Williamson represented for many one of the main symbols of Labor’s anti-Semitism problem. According to Williamson this is because he was “in the crosshairs of the Zionist lobby.” A lobby which he describes as “aggressive” and “fanatical.” He claims that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labor had behaved unlawfully to its Jewish members, had been “appropriated by the Zionist lobby.” What precisely the Zionist lobby is we are left to ponder. [The major institutions of Anglo-Jewry, along with the] Jewish Labor Movement, are all mentioned in the book as if they are a part of it.

Williamson’s major criticism of Labor is that it took complaints of anti-Semitism too seriously:

Williamson criticizes Corbyn because “rather than rebutting the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears, he indulged them.” He refers to a “fake ‘anti-Semitism crisis’” within the Labor party. In fact, the book is peppered with references to the “smear” of anti-Semitism and also claims it was “bogus.” The attempt to argue both that he thinks that the Labor party had done an excellent job of tackling the “scourge of Judeophobia” and that it was a “smear” at the same time appears to be contradictory.

Williamson claims that his fellow MP Naz Shah’s public apology for her own previous anti-Semitic discourse was “craven” and that one of her [controversial social-media] posts, implying that Jewish Israelis should leave their homes and live in the U.S., was “a perfectly reasonable and moderate observation to make” adding that “there was no way that I was going to fold like a deck of cards as Shah had done in the face of a coordinated smear operation by the Zionist lobby.”

At present, Williamson laments, “the Labor party is a victim of state capture. Much of its international policy is now effectively dictated by the state of Israel.”

Read more at Fathom

More about: Anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labor Party (UK), 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