Keir Starmer has spent months under pressure to be more critical of Israel and to speak out more on the intolerable situation in Gaza.
Now, for the first time in a very long time, the Prime Minister will be under pressure to be more critical of the culture in his own country, where Jew hate has become normalised to the extent that few were surprised by Thursday’s horrific attack on the Heaton Park synagogue.
Of course, it does not need to be mutually exclusive; politicians can call out anti-semitism while also urging Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different course in his war with Hamas. But too many people in Britain seem to think that the two things are intertwined, that British Jews must be personally held to account for the Israeli government, required to denounce the only Jewish state in the world or face not just persecution but outright violence. British Labour politicians, including Starmer, have been remarkably quiet on this over the past few months in particular.
Their silence has not come because the threat to Jews in Britain has lessened. No, it has merely been normalised. Thursday’s attack underlined that, but it was part of a continuum of behaviour where Jewish students have had peaceful vigils for 7 October victims disrupted by protesters, where synagogues across the country have become used to barricading worshippers inside the building to prevent intruders, and where I’ve been told of an incident in which Jews were told to look “less Jewish” in their working environments to stop other people “feeling uncomfortable”.
The regular marches and protests against the war in Gaza draw many people who really are just worried about the humanitarian crisis. But in the crowds are others who still want to chant about the eradication of the state of Israel entirely, and who know very well the meaning of “from the river to the sea”.
That protests continued on Thursday night and are due to take place this weekend underlines that many participants are – in the kindest interpretation – entirely blind to the plight of Jews in this country, or perhaps even keen to exacerbate that plight still further.
This attitude goes far beyond organised protests – some of which are now celebrating a proscribed terror group, Palestine Action. The other day I watched as friends I thought were reasonable people approvingly shared on their social media a photo of a poster they had seen in a window in Leith in Edinburgh reading “keep Leith a Zionist-free zone”.
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It is – or should be – astonishing that so many people believe that their concern about Gazans also necessitates such open anti-semitism. Where should these Zionists go if the noble people of Leith don’t want them? Clearly not Israel, as they’re not allowed to believe in the existence of Israel, either.
And yet none of these logical leaps from, “I don’t think the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza are the right ones” (a view shared by many in the IDF), to “keep Jews out” are ever really called out. Starmer has become proficient at criticising Israel, but less so at regularly reminding people of the enormous difference between this and sliding into the oldest hatred in the world.
Of course, Starmer started his leadership by trying to turn around a Labour Party deemed institutionally anti-semitic by an Equality and Human Rights Commission report in 2020. But in more recent months he has come under increasing pressure from his own MPs to call out Israel, and has, until this week, talked less about the problems that remain in the country at large.
That will change now, but the next question is how Starmer will approach those problems. He was indeed good at rooting out anti-semites and those who tried to suggest allegations of anti-semitism were an exaggeration and part of a plot against the Left and Jeremy Corbyn in particular. But what the Prime Minister often struggles to do is recognise that as a political leader, he has a huge amount of responsibility for shaping the way debate is conducted.
Often, he has complained from the sidelines about the tone of arguments, rather than realising that he could be participating himself, and therefore not leaving a vacuum for others to fill with their polarising views. The most prominent example of this is of course the way the Labour leader came so late to the debate about biological sex and transgender rights: he spent years complaining that it was “toxic” while refusing to get involved himself.
He cannot do the same now. The stakes are too high.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator magazine
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