Jon Lansman

“Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party”

“In the 1960s, the left backed Israel. Aged 10 in 1967, I cut out news stories each day of the six-day war. In 1973, Israel, caught off guard by Egyptian and Syrian forces in the Yom Kippur war, was again the underdog, supported in Britain by the Labour opposition but not by the Heath government.”

“I immersed myself at an early age in the history of centuries of Jewish suffering. Expulsion from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492 alongside the Muslims. On and on until the ultimate destruction, before, finally, sanctuary arrived with the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine and create a refuge for Holocaust survivors.”

“I do accept that there were antisemitic left activists around the country, and undoubtedly, they were there in Riverside and Liverpool.I wish we'd never had Momentum branches. It was never our decision to set them up – they set themselves up. We didn't have the resources for a compliance unit.”

“JVL behaves as if it speaks for Jewish socialists. It does not. And too many of its members self-define as 'Jews' only to attack other Jews.”

“Whilst there are of course plenty of dissident Jews in Britain, my observation is that neither the vast majority of individual members of JVL nor the organisation itself can really be said to be part of the Jewish community since the organisation was set up to oppose the conclusion that I'm afraid that every significant Jewish community organisation has arrived at about the Labour Party.I do think it is possible to eradicate antisemitism in the Labour Party and to defend the Labour Left's project but not by denial of the problem within the Labour Party.”