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This month marks five years since Jeremy Corbyn stepped down as leader of the Labour Party, and a chapter of acute anxiety for British Jews seemed to have come to a conclusion. Corbyn’s five-year tenure brought out into the political mainstream a battle about Israel and antisemitism that had been raging in left-wing circles for decades.
And while Corbyn is now gone as a formidable political power, Corbynism lives on as a mix of domestic resentments and foreign projections.
The most damaging misunderstanding about Corbyn and the problem of antisemitism was the instinctive framing of the issue as a prejudice, rather than as a fully formed ideology. Antisemitism, in this sense, was understood as a kind of personal moral failing, the accusation against Corbyn being that in his dotage he had held on to outdated stereotypes about a certain minority group.
This is the genesis of the now clichéd rejoinder that he hadn’t “an antisemitic bone in his body”. But the problem was never a personal weakness, but a comprehensive worldview that is remarkably entrenched in much of the Western left, and which rests on three pillars.
First, that Israel is essentially evil, a state and a society conceived in sin, and a bearer of inherited and ineffaceable guilt. Second, that Western, and especially American Jews, operate a powerful network of moneyed interests seeking to silence critique of Israeli sin. And third, that the Holocaust, while no doubt horrific, wasn’t especially unique, and that anyway the Israelis were guilty of similar crimes.
Each pillar reinforces the other two and helps block out unpleasant thoughts that might lead to doubt or even reassessment. The combination of all three serves as a foundation for understanding events both global and local, a comprehensive doctrine that lacks an agreed-upon name, though I would offer “geostrategic antisemitism”.
As with so many more benign trends, Britain is just ten or so years ahead of the US. And the long march of geostrategic antisemitism’s institutional capture in the US is only about a decade behind Britain’s. Each major milestone – the capture of academia, the arts world, the various NGOs, a few major newspapers and journals of the smart set – was reached on these shores well before crossing the pond. And just as in Britain, so in the United States there is no realistic path to building a majority coalition around antisemitism either in its geostrategic or conventional forms. But that doesn’t mean that a determined hard core of elites can’t capture mainstream liberal institutions or even the Democratic Party.
A progressive or “woke” alliance that codes any concern about antisemitism as itself a form of racism has already proven effective at entrenching itself in a host of left-wing movements and organisations that have little or nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East. A primary standoff between, say, two mainstream liberals and one progressive in the 2028 Democratic primary could propel an otherwise unpopular Corbyn-style candidate to the pole position, and a string of Trump policy catastrophes could lead to a default Democratic victory. Is there any doubt that Corbyn would be in Number 10 right now if he had faced the shambolic Conservative government in the 2024 general election?
It’s not the most likely scenario, to be sure. But it is a real possibility – especially as so many citadels of establishment liberalism, once long-time homes for Jews and Zionists, have fallen to the mob over the past 15 years.
American liberals, American Jews, and especially liberal American Jews would be well advised to be extra vigilant about this British import, which no tariff will protect them from. The British experience of the 2010s has a few useful lessons and warnings for what awaits the Americans in the 2020s.
There are two groups that demand extra attention. The first are the liberal anti-antisemites. These are the people from within the left-liberal camps who were willing to stand up to antisemitism as it is – a conspiracy theory about powerful people at home supposedly using money and influence to further their bloodlust abroad. They reject the idea of making it qualify as a protected pathology under the terms of woke progressivism.
In Britain, this voice, an authentic liberal voice opposed to actual antisemitism including in its own camp, was remarkably silent from 2000 until well into the Corbyn era. In those years, the only people fighting back against antisemitism from academia, NGOs, or other minorities more in the favour of the progressive left were largely either from the right or Jewish themselves.
And then somewhere around 2017 or 2018, that silence was broken, and voices from within the mainstream of the political left in Britain started criticising antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party and in the left in general. Once the taboo was broken, it suddenly emerged that there were many who felt the same way. It was a crucial turning point in the defeat of Corbyn and the recovery of the Labour Party.
The second group that merits close attention are the proud-to-be-ashamed Jews, the micro-minority “anti-Zionist” Jews who leverage their status, however tenuous, in the community to “expose” both Israeli crimes and, what the antisemites themselves crave to hear, the “complicity” of powerful Jews at home. The mainstream community wastes a great deal of time fretting over what motivates this crowd when it needs to understand that it is a demand-based problem, not a supply-based one.
Rather than treating low-information Oedipal ravings from tortured dissidents as a serious challenge and thus granting the lied-to-at-summer-camp a form of legitimacy their counterparts from any other minority group never get, the Jewish community should be focusing its efforts on the institutions that promote these tokens. Just as it needs to begin seriously focusing on the institutions of higher learning and non-governmental work that have been given a free pass to mobilise against the Jewish people both in Israel and the diaspora.
Shany Mor is a lecturer in political thought at Reichman University and a senior research associate at Bicom.
