2 min read
I am Rabbi of a community that is particularly politically motivated. It is a home for people of all political persuasions and has as members a good number of activists in the Labour Party.
So over the past few days and weeks, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been streaming with articles, blogs and opinions on the problem of left-wing antisemitism.
Interestingly though, one member of my congregation expressed the view that this was really nothing new. He remembered student days in the early 1990s where virulent left-wing anti-Zionism was common place at National Union of Students' conferences.
Has anything really changed on the far left? Well, I did agree with him that things had been hard 20 years ago and more. I remember myself being head of the London School of Economics Jewish Society and fighting the fight, not against far-right bigotry, but against the hatred for Zionism espoused by the Socialist Workers Student Society. I even got myself into trouble with them for comparing the far left's attitude towards Israel to the far right's. Those were the days.
Now the big difference is that this left-wing anti-Zionism and antisemitism has an outlet within the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
But do we really need to worry? Mr Corbyn isn't much of a leader, is he, and is unlikely to become prime minister, given that he cannot even unite his own party. Yes, I understand that the thought that he could make it to Downing Street is difficult to swallow for our community, but I think that there is even more to this new mutation of antisemitism, as former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks called it in a recent book.
Another congregant mentioned to me that at work, she was able to discuss with colleagues that she was planning trips to Israel with her family. But the conversation became tense when she mentioned that she was a Zionist. This was difficult for her colleague to accept.
This is a conversation that I have had over the last two years and more with many members - that it is becoming more difficult to talk out there in society about Zionism and its integral relationship with the state of Israel.
And this is a combination that we need to deal with as a community. On the one hand, the liberal left continues to allow breathing space for antisemitic tropes in its midst. On the other hand, liberal postmodern British society has clear problems with the state of Israel and with Zionism because of how it perceives Israel acts as a political entity and a society.
But we must not close ourselves off from others. I have, for instance, developed a good relationship with the leadership of the Wightman Road Mosque, a building that in fact used to be Wood Green Synagogue, in north London.
At the time of Operation Protective Edge in 2014 I visited them to talk through how our communities felt. I listened to their worries about Israel's campaign in Gaza, and they listened to my opinions on what was happening in that tragic war. We had different perspectives. We disagreed. But we were engaged with each other's story.
And so we need to engage with others from different backgrounds, different faiths, different cultures. We need to explain, as Jonathan Freedland put it in a recent article, that none of Israel's "problems are rendered logically inevitable by Israel's existence".
We need to be honest that there are directions in which we would like Israel to travel. But that is totally independent of the moral right we have as a people to self-determination and statehood.
David Mason is rabbi of Muswell Hill Synagogue in north London
