In his excellent overview of the ‘Labour antisemitism’ controversy, Daniel Finn analyses the distinct contribution made to this establishment smear campaign by the British Jewish leadership:
What really sets Israel’s British supporters apart is their capacity to smear critics of the foreign-policy consensus at Westminster. This is where they provide an invaluable service for the conservative establishment.
The British Jewish establishment is formidably organised, amply resourced, and integrated into broader elite networks. At the same time, it is able to draw upon and exploit the moral legacy of Jewish suffering, which uniquely resonates in British political culture. Since 2015, this unusual combination of political power with the moral authority conferred by victimhood has been conscripted in the service of a Conservative-led propaganda offensive against Labour.
Finn brings out Jewish organisations’ unique contribution by way of contrast with a hypothetical Turkish lobbying campaign:
Turkey’s AKP regime routinely accuses its Western critics of Islamophobia and anti-Turkish racism, but if anyone tried to repeat those charges in a British context, it would sound very odd. In any case, there is no particular taboo against Islamophobia in the country’s political culture: the ruling party can run an openly racist campaign against a Muslim candidate without facing any consequences, and the defence secretary can remain in his post after defaming a Muslim cleric as an ISIS supporter.
Charges of antisemitism, on the other hand, are politically toxic. Pro-Israel groups take advantage of this to slander their opponents, and have their accusations signal-boosted by the right-wing press. To complete the loop, anyone who points this out is bitterly denounced as an apologist for bigotry.
The ongoing effort by Hindu nationalists to thwart the Labour Party’s election campaign offers another instructive comparison.
In October 2019, an umbrella group styling itself the ‘British Friends of India’ attacked Labour’s opposition to Indian repression in Kashmir. Just as the Jewish establishment has pretended to speak on behalf of an entire community and framed its foreign policy disagreement with Labour in terms of ‘antisemitism’, so the British Friends of India trumpeted its ‘unprecedented’ list of signatories and accused Labour of having ‘sown the seeds of community disharmony in the United Kingdom’. This initiative was followed up with determined campaigning, reportedly orchestrated by the Overseas Friends of BJP UK, to rally Hindu voters against Labour. Conservative-leaning British Hindu organisations have lent their weight to these efforts, characterising Labour’s position on Kashmir as an ‘Anti-Hindu Hate Campaign’ and ‘exhibition of anti-Indian racism’ that has generated ‘real fear for the well-being and safety of British Indians in the UK’. The National Council of Hindu Temples rhetorically queried: ‘For the many and not the few . . . / and not the Hindu and not the Jew?’
But while the Hindu lobbying effort replicates, in certain respects, the Jewish campaign against Labour, it is also worth noting a key difference. Whereas the Hindu campaign has gained traction in its core constituency—a friend reports, in line with others, that in a single morning’s canvassing she encountered three Hindu voters who said they would not vote Labour over its position on Kashmir—it has attracted near-zero interest from the public at large. Does anyone truly believe that Labour is ‘anti-Hindu’? Aren’t claims to this effect transparently an attempt by a religious group to exploit the rhetoric of anti-racism to defend its favoured state? Who, outside Britain’s Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities, knows that Kashmir even exists? By contrast, Britain’s Jewish lobby is sufficiently organised, sufficiently resourced, and able to tap into a sufficiently deep reservoir of public awareness and sentiment, to influence not just its own constituency but the national conversation.[1]
The Hindu lobby could never have served the Conservative campaign against Corbyn like the Jewish lobby has, because accusations of ‘anti-Hinduism’ simply don’t resonate in broad public opinion the way that accusations of ‘antisemitism’ do.
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[1] This distinction is overlooked by Omar Khan, of The Runnymede Trust, when he writes that ‘geography—the relative diversity and spread of Britain’s ethnic minorities—provides insulation against’ efforts ‘to mobilise individual ethnic communities on the basis of narrow appeals to that group, without offering a wider political vision’. This might generally be true, but in the case of the Jewish community, ‘narrow appeals’ may form part of a broader public relations strategy.
Jamie Stern-Weiner 