In 2012, the Republican Jewish Coalition and various deep-pocketed donors -- some Jewish, some not -- spent tens of millions of dollars trying to convince Jewish voters that Obama was too anti-Israel to vote for, that he was secretly anti-Semitic, and that Jews would be wiser to vote against him. The result? Obama got "only" seventy percent of the Jewish vote, down from 74% in 2012. And given how Drumpf's stroking his anti-Semitic followers, it's not impossible that Clinton will get 85% or more of the Jewish vote in November.
But of course, you might say. The Jews are generally a liberal bunch, here and everywhere. A party on the left would have to work pretty damn hard to drive its Jewish vote under, say, sixty percent, wouldn’t it?
Well, try this. Earlier this month, the UK had a national round of local elections.
The Jewish vote for the Labour Party, by far the largest party on the left?
Eight percent.
Labour has been embroiled in a major “row” over anti-Semitism since Corbyn took office last fall. The storm has been brewing for a long time, but Corbyn’s ineptitude has cracked it wide open. I'd like to like Corbyn more than I do. But the party leadership’s astonishingly tone-deaf attitude toward the Jews has metastasized the problem until it’s become a series of national headlines.
How do you screw up that badly? It's really -- well, see for yourself.
Is it about Israel? Yes and no.
First, the yes:
Consider these two different left-wing narratives about Israel and its Jewish supporters.
One narrative goes like this: Israel has (like the US) serious institutionalized racism. A right-wing government has been at the helm too long, engaged in a wildly self-destructive policy of settlement of the West Bank, failed to restain extremists among the settlers, and in the process is doing deep damage to the two-state solution they claim to want. The thoroughly dislikable Bibi Netanyahu has shown himself to be skilled in only one thing: keeping himself in power by saying whatever it takes, doing whatever it takes, to keep his razor-thin Parliamentary majority together. He mouths the words "two-state solution" but nobody believes him and nobody should. His antagonism of Barack Obama was foolish, counterproductively partisan, and stupid.
The next step in the peace process must be to achieve the post-Netanyahu Israel. Not the way the post-Rabin Israel was "achieved," but by empowering the Israeli left and electing a leader ready to change Israel's course in a meaningful way, ready to more than just grudgingly mouth the words when forced to. And it's the duty of American Jews to play a part in this transition -- not because we hate Israel, but because we hate what Bibi's *doing* to Israel (just as Dubya didn't make us hate America but what he was *doing* in its name). And the way to effect positive change, and to bring the two-state solution about, is to engage with and empower the Israeli left.
The other narrative goes like this: Jewishness and Zionism are not only not the same thing, they are in fact opposites -- that being a Good Jew means repudiating Israel, and working actively for a world in which Israel is no longer a Jewish state. Israel's problem is that it exists; so solution short of its non-existence as a Jewish state will suffice. There is nothing too bad to be said about Israel. It is apartheid. It is founded irremediably in racism and must be disbanded. Zionism is nothing more than Nazism rebranded.
And quite a bit of the "new left" in the UK has been caught in a feedback loop in which each day's condemnation of the absolute and bottomless evil Zionism represents (to them) must ring even louder than yesterday's condemnation of the same thing. Israel cannot be set right without a complete change of its character; Israel can only be wiped away in a great international do-over. But this is not anti-Semitism, oh no -- after all, here is Good Jew X saying "Zionism is Nazism," and we *love* him; here is Good Jew Y saying "Israel is an incurable disease," and we *love* him; here is Good Jew Z saying "Zionists run our government and they must be stopped," and we *love* him.
In fact, their narrative says, the very fact that we love Good Jews X, Y, and Z shows that there is no anti-Semitism of any kind in the party, and that anyone who even considers the possibility is just Some Zionist Causing Trouble. And the proper response is to hoot him out of the hall, because we're the Good Jews. If Jews aren't being shoveled into ovens this very minute, then anti-Semitism is irrelevant, an absolute non-issue, and anyone who brings it up is a liar paid in shekels to do so.
It is the narrative of the Good Jew. And unlike in the US, where it would never fly, UK Labour's leadership has adopted it wholeheartedly. If you believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, you're simply a Bad Jew and they don't want your vote.
But there's a problem with maintaining such a position. The Good Jew narrative is very compelling indeed — but only to other Good Jews.
Take this yardstick: "If you believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, then you're pretty much a Nazi, certainly a vomitous racist, and you should fuck off as completely as possible as soon as possible."
Now apply that yardstick to the Jewish electorate. What percentage of UK Jews believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state? And the answer is ninety percent.
Yet this is Labour’s stance toward Jews under Corbyn: “Fuck off, ninety percent of you.”
And their Jewish poll results show what any damn fool could have predicted.
---
It’s not just about Israel. It’s also about anti-Semitism.
What percentage of UK Jews say all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism? Nine percent.
But there’s criticism and there’s criticism. Think of it this way: is criticism of Obama racist, yes or no? Well, that’s obviously not a yes-or-no question. Both “yes” and “no” are equally foolish responses. Same with criticism of Israel. Is it anti-Semitic? Depends on the criticism. Just as there’s no shortage of racists trying to pass along racism as “only a discussion of Obama’s politics,” there’s no shortage of anti-Semites trying to hide behind “oh but I’m only making a political comment about Zionism.”
And Corbyn has a serious problem on this front: time and again Corbyn showed that you could say something, no matter how anti-Semitic, and Corbyn will simply classify it as “criticism of Israel” such that *ping!* magically it is free of anti-Semitism.
And the result is that Corbyn has a very awkward history of hanging out with people whose “anti-Zionism” includes, oh, say, Holocaust denial.
A month before the election, a photo popped up of Corbyn at a 2013 event hosted by a group called Deir Yassin Remembered, run by the Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Now, Eisen came out of the Holocaust denial closet in 2005; even I over here in the US midwest knew about Eisen’s Holocaust denial within a year, because it was so clearly a case of anti-Semitism presenting itself as “anti-Zionism” and a slew of activists had disassociated themselves from DYR over it.
But Corbyn Sans Clue all the way to 2013. That’s not a problem, is it?
Then from March to May of this year the party exploded as member after member had anti-Semitic tweets and posts revealed. First it was a wacky old socialist named Gerry Downing going on about Jewish billionaires; by the time it was done it had reached all the way Ken Livingstone, the (repellent) former mayor of London.
Corbyn’s response: Problem? What problem? Of course I oppose all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, although I won’t specifically engage on the anti-Semitism issue. I will belch a few bromides and hope the problem will suddenly stop being a problem. (Ferguson police chief: “all lives matter; don’t talk about black lives specifically.” Corbyn: “All racism is bad; don’t talk about anti-Semitism specifically.”)
The new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has publicly called out Labour’s leadership for their failure to take the anti-Semitism problem seriously, for having so obvious a blind spot to the seriousness of the problem. Corbyn just doesn’t get it.
Last month, as the crisis was making headlines several times a week, Corbyn’s Israeli counterpart, the head of the opposition Labor party Isaac Herzog, sent Corbyn a letter. It was time to mend bridges, he said, and Corbyn’s hands-off approach was doing nothing to get at the core of the problem. Herzog invited Corbyn to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, as a guest of Israel’s Labour party, knowing how powerfully such a visit would change the narrative “Corbyn simply can’t be bothered about Jews.”
What did Corbyn do?
Today it was revealed: Corbyn ignored the letter completely.
Not “I got your letter,” not “have a nice day.”
Just imperious disdainful silence.
Jeremy Corbyn simply can’t be bothered about Jews.
-—
So this is where it stands. Corbyn in his ineptitude has plainly lost the Jewish vote for Labour for his tenure as party leader. What remains to be seen is whether he’s done it for a generation of voters.