The Labour Party Inquiry into antisemitism is due to report before the end of June. Everything depends on the Inquiry team understanding what it is dealing with: almost never old-fashioned Jew hatred, almost always antisemitic anti-Zionism – i.e. a programme to abolish Israel, a movement to boycott Israel and a discourse that demonises Israel.

Programme, movement, and discourse should be considered as one, each interacting with and reinforcing the other, creating an environment uniquely conducive to the spread of the antisemitic anti-Zionism in the party.

The Party’s crisis began among a minority on the far-left who refused to accept that ‘history has forged a Hebrew speaking Jewish nation on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean’ as David Hirsh puts it. This minority then adopted the reactionary programme of ending the very existence of Israel. Over the years they justified this programme by a means of a rigid dogma, a code that reduced an entire people to ‘Zios’ and equated Israel with the Nazis. And now we have the grotesque chaos of the party having to suspend its own members, its own councillors, its own Mayors and MPs and to launch an enquiry into antisemitism in its ranks.

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