Naz Shah showed us how Labour could regain the community’s trust

She supports a two-state solution. She accepts that, for the vast majority of Jews in this country, Israel is bound up with Jewish identity and an attack on it is perceived as involving Jews.

But she is critical of Israel. She feels that the invasion of Gaza was disproportionate. She feels that Arabs within Israel and the occupied territories are discriminated against, and that children are arrested for stone-throwing.

She wants a Palestinian state and when asked what it would look like, she said: "It would be on unoccupied territory and the people within it - Jews, Muslims and Christians - would all be free."

Ms Shah is not particularly well-educated (by her own admission) and not hugely well-read (ditto), but she is very far from stupid. She is not massively interested in reading books as a way to shore up her knowledge - something that came as a shock to me and quite a lot of the audience. She is a practical politician and prefers meetings and discussion. She was happy to confess her ignorance and to assert it as the reason for her behaviour.

That behaviour is unlikely to have been a political ploy. The reality is that her own community is far more critical of her apology - "bowing to the Zionists" - than of her initial comments.

Her personal life is directly affected by her current stance. She inherited a constituency in which, as she made clear, reflexive criticism of Israel was, for her predecessor as MP George Galloway, a substitute for taking even the slightest interest in his constituency. She faces being a not-particularly-observant Muslim woman who has befriended Zionists, and don't think of that as a recommendation.

Ms Shah doesn't put antisemitism as her number- one priority. Islamophobia is a far bigger issue for her. She did not initially see it as racism in the same way that there is racism against black and Asian people. She thought in terms of colour and gender. That is not her position now. But antisemitism does not figure on her political horizon as something she must deal with in terms of her constituency.

She is committed to educating her own community. She does not support indoctrinating children - part of her reason why she would no longer take her own kids to BDS protests - and she was unhappy about Hamas dolls. But she says she was resistant to taking kids to the Holocaust museum because she was unsure it would work.

Again, my impression was that gender issues were a bigger priority than antisemitism.

However, she is willing to listen to the Jewish community about BDS and accepts that an individual choice not to buy is different from a political campaign and protesting outside shops. This isn't yet a battle we have won. But there is sensitivity there to the way we feel.

She is still in the process of working out her position on many things and this is one. She accepts that what she said and did was wrong, offensive and concerning. In my view, she has principles. She talked about Shabir Mohammed who she employed and who has also been suspended from the Labour Party. She was upset for him but accepted that it was right to suspend him. She defended him in front of us.

I was immensely proud of our community. We packed a hall to hear someone who said very unpleasant things about us. We listened sympathetically and - with a few exceptions - with a willingness to be convinced.

Ms Shah isn't a Corbynite - I suspect this was quite a shock for most people, as it was for me. She voted for Yvette Cooper in last year's leadership contest. She is classed as "neutral" by team Corbyn. She hadn't met John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, before she became his PPS.

Ms Shah herself did not have her apology tampered with but it was delayed while the party cranked its machinery into gear. That was plainly a daft decision and it was something she resented. She wanted to apologise immediately: by making her wait, the party put its interests over hers.

Reading between the lines, Ms Shah believes Corbyn is a nice enough bloke and that his team are rubbish. The part of the audience that was genuinely Labour was clear that Corbyn was too friendly with Hamas and Hizbollah to be friendly towards us. Ms Shah did say that this was no longer the case, but I put this down to loyalty rather than belief. Certainly, were we to hear her own considered criticisms of Hamas from her leader, a lot of us would feel a lot better.

Perhaps it was expecting too much from an inexperienced, suspended, repentant, rookie MP to tell us how Labour were going to regain the confidence of our community. The irony was that Ms Shah was an example of how it might be done.

The fact that no one else is doing it is perhaps even more depressing than her original offence.

We continue to conflate antisemites with anti-Zionists, even when the issue is support for everything Israel does. We have to learn that different views are simply different views. They don't need to be freighted with anger or emotive terms. When people from other communities hear our community calling those supporting Yachad traitors, is it any wonder that they don't regard themselves as Zionists? We need to grow up

Simon Myerson is a QC at St Paul's Chambers