Advice: this is an in-depth long-form read

There is a question that the Green Party, Your Party and the Workers Party of Great Britain need to answer honestly and directly. At what point does their relentless condemnation of Israel cease to be legitimate political criticism and begin to contribute, however indirectly, to an atmosphere in which Jews in Britain are blamed for the actions of a government over 2,000 miles away?

I ask that question not because I believe Israel should be above criticism. It most certainly should not. Support for Palestinian rights is not inherently antisemitic, although there is a fine line that certain British politicians cross at every available moment. Out of habit.

I do have considerable sympathy for ordinary Palestinians who have endured some quite appalling suffering, nearly all of their leadership’s making. I especially sympathise with Palestinians who live under the rule of Hamas, those who have no say in the decisions made in their name, and with Palestinians who dare to speak against Hamas and risk intimidation or worse. Their suffering deserves rather more than to be turned into a political slogan.

No, my concern is something different.

It is the increasingly one-dimensional political narrative in which Israel is presented as the source of virtually everything wrong in the Middle East, while Hamas’s ideology, terrorism, repression and stated objectives are either minimised, ignored or treated as inconvenient background.

That matters because political rhetoric does not exist in a vacuum.

The Green Party, Your Party and the Workers Party are not themselves primarily responsible for every person who shouts “Zionist” at a Jewish person, attacks a Jewish business, daubs graffiti on a synagogue or assaults somebody because they are Jewish. Nor should anybody pretend that they are. But neither should politicians pretend that words have no consequences. Britain’s Jewish community is not Israel.

While Your Party, led by former disgraced Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is very much a fringe, hard-left, socialist Marxist grouping, and the Workers Party is led by the opportunistic former MP George Galloway, both are threateningly ideological when it comes to Jews. However, while the Green Party is established fairly worldwide as part of the Green movement, in the UK, they have clearly shown a deliberate shift away from climate concerns to an anti-war, not, surprisingly, fixated on Judea, Samaria and Gaza. They rarely, if ever, mention other world conflicts apart from, in essence, but not quite de facto, supporting the regime in Iran.

The Greens (in the UK) now have a very strange mixture of policies, all very much aligned with hard-left socialist, and some may say, ideals that, in the long run, were they to accede to power, would not only break the economy of the country, but the social fabric too. Their most recently elected (in a constituency in Greater Manchester) member of Parliament, Hannah Spencer, in her maiden speech to the UK Parliament, actually did not mention the traditional environmental issues or net-zero policies that were once the bedrock of Green Party Politics.

And as I was writing this, the Green Party Leader in the UK, Zack Polanski, a Jew, is making a bid for the soon-to-be vacated seat of former Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Yet some of his party members........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)