Leading Jewish organisations have called on Jeremy Corbyn to end the “impasse” over tackling antisemitism in the Labour party, calling the abuse received by Jews on social media during the row this summer “unfathomably vast”.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) and the Community Security Trust (CST) wrote separate letters to Labour’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, accusing the leadership of failing to deal adequately with concerns.
The board’s chief executive, Gillian Merron, wrote: “While Labour could have used the summer to focus on any number of other serious challenges facing this country, the leadership has chosen to make its priority a fight with British Jews about antisemitism. The amount of abuse that Jews have received on social media from those purporting to support Jeremy Corbyn is unfathomably vast. While Mr Corbyn has said that such people do not speak in his name, his un-atoned-for actions undoubtedly give the wrong impression about what is permissible.”
A crunch meeting of Labour’s national executive committee is to discuss the code on Tuesday after a bitter few weeks following the party’s decision to implement a code of conduct that failed to adopt four of the 11 examples of antisemitism given by the IHRA.
Labour proposed a further consultation to take place over the summer following an outcry from Jewish groups.
The party is now prepared to accept all the examples, including one the leadership considers most controversial – “claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour” – but with caveats to allow members to describe actions of the Israeli government as racist and to criticise the circumstances of Israel’s creation.
Writing to Formby on Monday, the JLC and CST leadership said they did not feel able to respond to the latest consultation, pointing to the submissions the groups made to Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry.
“Regrettably, we regard the current atmosphere as being too febrile and too lacking in trust for us to consult in any way that risks being construed as somehow lacking in transparency,” they wrote on Wednesday.
In her letter to Formby, Merron said the adoption of the IHRA definition alone would not be enough to rebuild trust, saying the party must take urgent steps to resolve outstanding disciplinary cases.
She also said there was significant concern over reports about Corbyn in the past few weeks, including comments at a conference in 2013 about British Zionists. Merron said the remarks implied that the Zionist group at the event were not British. “This is a classic racist trope,” she wrote.
The comments, which came to light last week, were made as Corbyn was defending a joke made by the Palestinian ambassador. The Labour leader said a group of Zionists had “no sense of irony” despite “having lived in this country for a very long time”.
On Tuesday the former chief rabbi Lord Sacks called the comments the most offensive statement by a senior UK politician since Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, a comparison Labour called “absurd and offensive.”
