I will put the topic back on course with this excerpt of a review of the book The Left's Jewish Problem by Dave Rich. It is reprinted from New Statesman

Note the figure of 20 suspended members later rose to 50 after the review was written.



With Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader last year, this particular leftist world-view entered the heart of the party. In 2008, Corbyn wrote of the Balfour Declaration – the UK government's promise to British Jews of a homeland in Palestine – that it had "led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of Palestinians . . . Britain's history of colonial interference . . . leaves it with much to answer for." The description of Israel as a colonialist enterprise, rather than a movement for sovereignty through national independence, and the culpability of an "imperial" Britain, encapsulate the twin impulses that drive Corbyn's beliefs about foreign affairs.

The problem, Rich argues, is that it is just a short step from these beliefs to the ideas that Israel should not exist and that its Western supporters, who include most Jews, are racists. Combined with a resurgence of social media-charged conspiracies about Zionist wealth and power, the left has formed an anti-racist politics that is blind to anti-Semitism. Jews are privileged; they are wealthy; they cannot be victims.

Thus, "Zionist" has become not a term to describe a political position but an insult; thus, Jews, unless they denounce Israel (their "original sin"), are excluded from the left that now dominates the Labour Party. When such ideas become normalised, anything is possible. Jackie Walker, the recently suspended vice-chairwoman of the Corbyn-supporting group Momentum, can claim with sincerity that "many Jews" were the "chief financiers" of the slave trade, a modern myth and piece of bigotry popularised by the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan – a notorious anti-Semite – in a 1991 book.

By the middle of this year, as many as 20 Labour Party members had been suspended or expelled for alleged anti-Semitism. At times, Rich appears bewildered. Though he never articulates it, the question "What has happened to my party?" echoes through these pages. Is it a case of just a few bad ­apples, or is the whole barrelful rotten? The answer, Rich concludes convincingly, in this powerful work that should be read by everyone on the left, is sadly the latter.