Mick Hartley

One of the main elements of modern antisemitism is the singling out of Israel for special opprobrium, far over and above the criticism aimed at any other country. At yesterday's unveiling of the Chakrabarti report in antisemitism within the Labour Party, the Labour Party leader gave a perfect demonstration of the nature of the problem when he casually compared Israel to ISIS. You couldn't, as they say, make it up. You might even suspect him of making some kind of subtle point, but there's nothing subtle about Corbyn's leaden leadership. The man is a disaster.

On top of that, the Chakrabarti report itself failed to take into account the nature of modern anti-Semitism – looking, rather, for neo-Nazis and, unsurprisingly, not finding any.

Alan Johnson, in Haaretz:

If ever there was a teachable moment for the British Labour Party, this was it.

The “why” questions had piled up. Why had so many Labour Party members been suspended for anti-Semitism? Why were they spreading conspiracy theories about Israel being behind ISIS? Why did some want all Israeli Jews to be shipped over to the United States? What on earth is going on in the heads of people who bang on about “the Jewish Zionist bourgeoisie" being the "vanguard of the capitalist offensive”? And what’s with all these party members comparing Israel to the Nazis? And dear me, did one really say Hitler was a "Zionist god"?

The Chakrabarti Inquiry, headed by Shami Chakrabarti, was launched by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in response, in order to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party. The report’s findings were presented on Thursday. That report should have educated the party about the new anti-Semitism. Old-fashioned Jew hatred has shape-shifted once again and now takes the form of modern anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, it should have said.

Spurning the “few bad apples” explanation, the report could have said, “Look, while the party does not have a neo-Nazi problem, it does have a problem with an anti-Israelism of a particularly excessive, obsessive, and demonizing kind, and it’s now co-mingling with an older set of classical anti-Semitic tropes, images and assumptions to create anti-Semitic anti-Zionism. What ‘the Jew’ once was in older anti-Semitism – uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on – the Jewish state now is for some of our members, and that’s why we have the shame of anti-Semitism in the party.”

But Chakrabarti’s report did none of that.  Instead it reduced the scale of the party’s crisis to “a series of unhappy incidents.” In short, a few symptoms of the disease were called out – the use of the word “Zio,” the use of the Nazi analogy, accusing Jews of dual loyalty. That is to be welcomed, but there was silence about the disease itself.

And David Hirsh, in the Jewish Chronicle:

What Shami Chakrabarti failed to do in this report was to explain how to recognise contemporary left wing antisemitism. She failed to describe it, how it operates, how it is sometimes hidden, and what its key tropes are.

She had every opportunity to do this in a way which could be easily understood because her inquiry was precipitated by a number of examples of left wing antisemitism. She could have gone through them and explained why they were antisemitic. She did no such thing. Indeed there were two incidents which happened at her very launch which illustrate precisely the kind of antisemitism which requires explaining and opposing….

In my submission to the Chakrabarti Inquiry, I wrote: “A bad apple theory will not do as an explanation for the current phenomenon of antisemitism on the left. We need to understand what the problem is with the barrel which has allowed so many apples to turn bad.”

I added: “There is a relationship between a broad culture of emotional, disproportional and irrational hostility to Israel which is accepted as legitimate in much of left politics, and the specific examples of Jew-baiting by Labour people which were the catalyst for setting up this inquiry.”

The Inquiry report does not touch on this key relationship….