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.”

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.