Mr Corbyn’s team will have done their “research” and concluded that Jewish voters are not only dispensable but will be easily replaced by all those who will flock to Labour as a result of its radical stance. Mr Corbyn’s team clearly believes these new voters will swell the ranks of Labour and easily make up for the lost Jewish vote.
For the Corbynites, that Jewish vote is unimportant because Labour understands the reality of today’s UK Jewish community. They understand it is not an all-powerful cabal as depicted by antisemites but a fragmented community of some 250,000 men, women and children who may punch above their weight, but are now feeling fearful and threatened. Threatened because, for the first time since the 1930s, a mainstream political party has allowed into its ranks blatant Jew-haters.
It is also a community aware that its fears are casually disregarded by many senior figures of a mainstream political party.
So, if 17,000 have left, Labour is confident it can win support from many single-issue voters such as those furious over London property prices, Brexit, tuition fees, etc. And Labour has already replaced its Jewish voters with radicalised young people, for many of whom today’s Labour Party, with its tolerance for anti-Jewish rhetoric, will feel like a natural home.
Many Jews have felt that Labour was a natural home for anti-Jewish rhetoric (and even for blatant antisemitism) for several years. Let me just Google “Ken Livingstone Holocaust row” or “Chakrabarti Inquiry” and I can give you precise dates.
Nor is it news that Jeremy Corbyn is a hard-line opponent of Israel. But until the last few weeks, Labour was able to shrug off criticism of Mr Corbyn’s anti-Israel rhetoric because being anti-Israel is not at all the same as being anti-Jewish. Oh no, not at all the same thing, despite the fact that the “anti-Israel” campaigners save all their venom and all their campaigning for Israel - and never muster any anger for other regimes around the world. Now why could that be?
But we’re straying off the point… except we’re not, because however much some people might try to claim there’s a difference and however much some people might try to separate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, these ugly bigotries are at the point on the hate-spectrum where the frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Zionists meet the frothing-at-the-mouth Jew-haters. Though, naturally, the far left is so much more eloquent, so much better at framing their arguments in political terms to disguise the fact that it is under-pinned by an ugly bigotry.
Mr Corbyn denies the link, of course. But however hard he wishes that anti-Zionism was not the same thing as antisemitism, the ugly reaction to broadcaster Emma Barnett last year, and many of the vile, anti-Jewish comments made on social media in recent days, shows the link.
So perhaps in one way (and certainly unintentionally) Mr Corbyn has done the Jewish community a service. He has done so by making it clear that there is an irrefutable link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism - by making it impossible for the ‘haters’ to claim they are opposed only to an ideology.
Once the proud home of anti-racism, today’s Labour Party is a safe-haven for antisemites. So many dead Jewish Labour MPs and stalwart Labour supporters must be spinning in their grave that we should expect a small earthquake in Britain any day now.
But that is what happens to a party when a leader fails to stamp out the first antisemite. Perhaps the leader didn’t do so because he thought it was only an anti-Zionist.
But then suddenly, all the Jew haters come scurrying and Labour is their new home.
And, of course, anyone who opposes any of this is not a legitimate opponent of Labour’s policies but can safely be dismissed as ‘A Jew’ or ‘A Zionist.’
But that will be the ultimate undoing of Mr Corbyn and his cronies.
Those angry, radicalised voters may be attracted to today’s Labour Party, with its tolerance for anti-Jewish rhetoric, but this is where the Metropolitan Liberal Elite along with the silent majority of decent British men and women of all religions will decide that this version of the Labour Party is unacceptable.
They will reject this extremism as they have thoughtfully rejected all forms of extremism in the past.
