In the same week that Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi — a co-founder of pro-Corbyn pressure group Jewish Voice for Labour — was suspended from the party, she spoke at a fringe JVL event.

Alongside her was a sign that said: “Reinstate Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, suspended Jewish NEC member.” The word “Jewish” was written in red letters. They see antisemitism in Labour now; during the Corbyn years, they saw it less.

I have been fascinated by Jeremy Corbyn’s Jewish supporters for years. I have read about them online; I have followed their writings and on occasion I have met them face-to-face.

In 2017, while writing for an American magazine, I met Wimborne-Idrissi at the British Library. I was keen to understand her.

I wonder now if my hunger to understand her was a mirror of her hunger for approval beyond the Jewish community: a plea for internal security.

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Jeremy Corbyn (Getty Images)

I approached with openness, as I did not want to believe that Jews would place other Jews in material jeopardy. I believe there are criticisms of Israel to make. I believe there are some criticisms of Israel that respectable people should make. I was disturbed by some of the language used about JVL: the word capo, for instance, should not be used.

Wimborne-Idrissi was courteous, but closed to me.

It was like interviewing water. I didn’t recognise the British Zionist Jews she spoke of, or the Israel she imagined. She conceived of a vague, rainbow nation. I wasn’t sure if she was credulous or manipulative, but she seemed to exist in a remote parallel dialogue where Israelis and Palestinians are avatars for something else, perhaps her own relationship with her Judaism, or herself.

JVL deals in insinuation and culture wars. They believe the Israel-Palestine conflict is Manichean. You are for one side or the other, never both, or part of both. They believe accusations of antisemitism are rooted not in fear but in hatred of Palestinians and those who support them.

They believe that Israel is a demonic enterprise, though they do not say it outright. They have never managed to say, for instance, that JVL is anti-Zionist, and they have no plan as to what should happen to the Jews in Israel when Palestine is free.

They leave that for others to fantasise about, and they do; it is impossible to listen to non-Jewish JVL supporters without hearing dreams of new pogroms.

I can forgive them for what they believe personally. Millennia of persecution can make you ashamed of what you are and if that is true of JVL — and I believe it is — they are not conscious of it. Their bias against the Jewish majority that opposes them is absolute.

But I cannot forgive them for what they release in non-Jews. At the JVL launch, in a ballroom by the sea, non-Jewish Ken Loach — the director of Perdition, a play that calls a Jew a Nazi and has him murder Jews — was welcomed with cheers of joy by non-Jewish JVL supporters. At a later JVL meeting, I saw Tony Greenstein attack an LBC journalist. When the journalist was ejected, they clapped.

At the 2017 Labour Conference itself, Wimborne-Idrissi addressed the hall and her testimony was again greeted with ecstasy. “This party does not have a problem with Jews,” she said. It should have had a caveat: “This party does not have a problem with anti-Zionist Jews”. But it didn’t.

Each notorious accusation of antisemitism in the Corbyn years was defended by JVL. Ken Livingstone was not an antisemite, they said, even when he called Hitler a Zionist.

The insinuation reversed Perdition, in which Jews are Nazis, but the result was the same: if Nazis were Zionists, then Zionists are Nazis. Jews are Nazis. If Jews are Nazis, what are Nazis themselves? A fiction. Who are their victims? Many fictions.

Again, I do not suggest this is conscious. They are not clever. But consciously or not, they have released the ancient libel: most Jews, Zionist Jews, cannot be trusted.

They maintain that Jeremy Corbyn was not attacked for his unease around “men of a single and peculiar race” — they believe this unease is invented by his enemies — but for his socialism. If you believe that socialism is goodness, that is a Jewish conspiracy.

Still, they have discovered antisemitism in the Labour Party at last. It exists towards themselves. They believe they are being “purged” not due to the danger they pose to other Jews — their rhetoric leaks out into the wider culture and is absorbed by people more willing to use their fists — but due to their socialism.

Their socialism is the least of it; their socialism is the only thing about them I don’t fear. Expulsion will come for them, but self-knowledge never will.