Thirty-eight percent of Britons believe Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the country’s main opposition party, is an antisemite, according to a new poll.
Only 25% of voters agreed that the Labour leader is a committed campaigner against racism of all kinds, including antisemitism.
The poll also shows deep public skepticism about Corbyn’s repeated insistence that his controversial contacts with terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah are designed to bring about an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The annual survey for the British Israel Communications and Research Centre, an independent UK-based think tank, indicates that Corbyn’s tough anti-Israel stance is out of step with most voters. Support for the Jewish state in Britain is holding steady after reaching a seven-year high in polling conducted last October.
The BICOM survey, carried out at the beginning of October by the polling company Populus, tested the defenses deployed by Corbyn in the light of the accusations of antisemitism that have dogged his three-year leadership of the Labour Party.
It found that 38% of voters agreed with the statement “Whatever Jeremy Corbyn claims, his actions and past history point to him being antisemitic.”
By contrast, 25% of voters accepted the view that “Jeremy Corbyn is a committed campaigner against racism of all kinds, including anti-Semitism.” Thirty-seven percent of those questioned said they did not know.
Only 19% agreed that Corbyn had “worked hard to deliver peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” while 35% endorsed the statement that the Labour leader “only seems interested in talking to those organisations deemed to be terrorists by the British government, the EU and the US State Department.” Forty-six percent of those questioned did not know.
Responding to the results, James Sorene, the CEO of BICOM, said: “We were interested to measure support for Jeremy Corbyn’s own explanations for his conduct after accusations of antisemitism. The results are clear – 38% of people believe that Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite.”
“It is also worth noting that the poll was carried out when this issue was no longer being reported in the news,” he said.
A poll carried out for the Jewish Chronicle last month found that more than 85% of British Jews think Corbyn is antisemitic. Similar numbers believe that the Labour party itself suffers from significant levels of antisemitism at all levels. Only 1.7% of the country’s Jews believe Prime Minister Theresa May to be antisemitic.
