10 | MARCH 3 • 2022 

opinion
To Combat Antisemitism, We Must Oppose 
 
Anti-Zionism — at Home and Abroad
L

ast month, two Orthodox 
Jewish men were attacked 
with a smashed glass 
bottle as they closed up a shop 
they work at in north London. 
This vicious 
attack, which 
left both men in 
hospital, did not 
grab nearly as 
many interna-
tional headlines 
as the Beth Israel 
synagogue siege 
in Colleyville, Texas, last month. 
But it, too, is a symptom of the 
growing wave of antisemitism 
which threatens Jews across the 
globe.
This is, of course, a law-en-
forcement issue. But it is also, 
and more importantly, an 
ideological battle, one that like 
climate change, terrorism or 
COVID-19, we have to fight 
across international boundaries.
To me, it’s also deeply per-
sonal.
Three years ago this month, 
I resigned as a Labour Member 
of Parliament because I could 
no longer in good conscience 
remain in a party led by Jeremy 
Corbyn.
I was proud to serve as a 
minister under Tony Blair. But 
I was ashamed by the hard-left 
ideology and culture which 
thrived under Corbyn, one in 
which Jews were driven from 
the party while members who 
spouted antisemitism went 
undisciplined.
Thanks to social media, Jew-
haters can spread their poison 
across borders, inciting violence 
and hatred. The British hos-
tage-taker in Colleyville, Malik 

Faisal Akram, for instance, 
is reported to have watched 
Pakistani sermons in which 
preachers called Jews “the big-
gest agents of Satan” who were 
“akin to pigs.
”
But antisemitism doesn’t 
just come in the form of racist 
street thugs, Islamist terrorists 
and the keyboard warriors who 
spend hours posting bizarre but 
toxic conspiracy theories about 
QAnon, the Rothschilds and 
“lizard people.
” Nor is it con-
fined to hate-filled rallies like 
the annual Al Quds Day march-
es, which draw large crowds 
from Tehran and Damascus to 
London and Berlin.
Instead, in many ways, the 
more pernicious manifestations 
of antisemitic anti-Zionism 
come from supposedly more 
respectable sources.
This ideology — antisemit-
ic anti-Zionism — is on the 
march. It is an ideology rooted 
in ancient hatreds which tar-
gets for hate and opprobrium 
the modern-day State of Israel. 
And tragically, in the West, it is 
Europe — in whose bloodlands 
six million Jews were murdered 
eight decades ago — which is at 
its epicenter.
Recently, Amnesty 
International published a 
report which compared Israel 
to apartheid-era South Africa. 
Factually inaccurate and intel-
lectually dishonest, the report 
has little to do with legitimate 
concerns about the plight of the 
Palestinian people. Instead, it’s 
part of a continuing effort by 
some on the left to demonize 
and delegitimize the world’s sole 
Jewish state.

The “apartheid smear” 
originated in the Boycott, 
Divestment and Sanctions 
campaign, a movement which 
focuses obsessively and exclu-
sively on Israel’s “crimes” and 
which has done nothing to 
further the cause of peace in 
the Middle East. That’s not their 
goal. As Bassem Eid, the found-
er of Palestinian Human Rights 
Monitoring Group, has argued, 
“The agenda of the BDS cam-
paign is to try to destroy Israel.
”
It has, moreover, inspired a 
welter of anti-Israel campaign-
ing on university campuses 
which has stifled debate and 
led to an atmosphere of fear 
and intimidation among many 
Jewish students. Last November, 
the CST, which monitors Jew-
hate in the United Kingdom, 
reported that 2019-20 has seen 
the highest number of antise-
mitic incidents on campus in a 
single academic year, despite the 
year being cut short because of 
the pandemic.
The Oxford University 
Labour Club’s 2016 decision 
to support “Israel Apartheid 
Week” lifted the lid on the 
underbelly of antisemitism 
which had infected some ele-
ments of the student body. 
“The student left produces the 
most aggressive and virulent 
propagators of antisemitism on 
campus,
” wrote the former pres-
ident of the university’s Jewish 
Society.
The new hard-left leader-
ship of the Labour party had 
empowered and emboldened 
a racist fringe which now 
attached itself, limpet-like, to 
my party.

Alongside others, I fought 
the scourge of antisemitism 
within the party for three 
years before concluding that I 
couldn’t tell voters in my con-
stituency that Corbyn was fit to 
be prime minister. Thankfully, 
the British public agreed with 
that judgment. Research after-
ward showed that the party’s 
association with Jew-hate made 
it simply too toxic to support. 
A year later, Britain’s human 
rights watchdog concluded 
its investigation by determin-
ing that Labour had become 
“institutionally antisemitic” on 
Corbyn’s watch.
Repairing the moral damage 
the Corbynites inflicted on 
Labour will take time and deter-
mination. But the sheer speed 
with which a small far-left 
fringe was able to capture power 
in Labour offers a warning 
to those who are complacent 
about, or willing to indulge, the 
activities of the “The Squad” in 
the Democratic Party. The case 
of Labour demonstrates the 
need to set clear red lines and to 
call out each and every instance 
of antisemitism at the earliest 
opportunity.
The lesson of Corbyn showed 
the need not just to condemn 
antisemites but also to hold 
their fellow travelers to account. 
Jew-hate will never be snuffed 
out in an environment in which 
anti-Zionism is tolerated and 
condoned. 

Joan Ryan was a member of the U.K. 

Parliament for 17 years and served in 

the government of Tony Blair. She is 

the Executive Director of ELNET-U.K., 

an organization working to strengthen 

U.K.-Israel relations.

Joan Ryan

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