Labor Party Apologizes to British Jewry

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

What a remarkable moment the accession of Sir Keir Starmer as the new leader of Britain’s Labor Party is turning out to be. On the day he emerged as the successor to Jeremy Corbyn, under whom an anti-Jewish strain had seemed to run unchecked in Labor, Mr. Starmer issued a letter apologizing to the Jewish community of Britain. We can’t recall anything quite like it.

The first thing that strikes us is how pointed was his démarche. The erstwhile prosecutor and human rights lawyer was handed up as Labor’s leader on Saturday. He issued the apology in his acceptance speech, the first chance he had to talk. Then he sat down and dispatched a formal letter to the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl.

In the letter, he repeated what he’d said in his speech: “Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party. I have seen the grief it has brought to so many Jewish communities. On behalf of the Labor Party, I am sorry. And I will tear out this poison by its roots and judge success by the return of Jewish members and those who felt they could no longer support us.” He vowed to bring action along with words.

Sir Keir, who was named after a Labor Party founder, Keir Hardie, a Scott, who in the early years of the 20th Century had been Labor’s first parliamentary leader, clearly has his work cut out for him. Sir Keir Saturday went to some lengths to praise Mr. Corbyn. The logic of that eludes us, given that Mr. Corbyn bears much of the blame for his party’s infection with bigotry.

It’s prudent to remember that Mr. Corbyn had also condemned anti-Semitism. He, too, had vowed — in language that Sir Keir echoed Saturday — to “root antisemites out of Labor.” He had insisted “they do not speak for me.” No one believed him. That was made clear in August 2018, when three of Britain’s Jewish newspapers wheeled on the Labor Party chief.

The three Jewish papers ran the same front page editorial about Mr. Corbyn. They warned that his election as prime minister would confront the Jewish community in Britain with an “existential threat.” (The New York Sun praised that editorial when it was published.) The burden of Mr. Corbyn no doubt contributed to Labor’s historic defeat at the polls in December.

We’d like to think that Sir Keir does not present the same kind of problem as had Mr. Corbyn, who went out of his way to praise some of Israel’s most horrifying enemies. It’s hard, in any event, to see from a distance the logic of an early return to Labor by those Jews who, repelled by the turn it had taken in recent years, defected from it.

There are going to be many tests for the Labor Party on Jewish issues. The big one, though, will be whether Labor can swing behind Israel in this dangerous hour. In respect of Zion, the party has had its share of heroes (think, say, Harold Wilson). Given recent years, though, Labor will require a virtual revolution if Sir Keir is to keep his promises to British Jewry.

Its predicament is all the more compelling in that Labor is not the only party that is beset with this problem. America’s Democrats today have their own Jewish problem; as recently as a year ago, Speaker Pelosi’s caucus shrank from the kind of full-throated condemnation of anti-Semitism that Sir Keir just issued. Will Sir Keir succeed in setting an example from which our Democrats can learn?


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