One of the only questions I have been asked by both Jew and gentile alike is how much of an impact I believe the left will have on Jewish life in Britain. It is, on reflection, the wrong question; not because the answer is difficult – it certainly is – but because the question contains a premise that is fundamentally false. That question contains in it the notion that there is a safe side: given that the left has given in to the anti-Israel (which is itself a euphemism for the vile Islamist antisemitic drivel that wiggles its way through the cracks of the ‘anti-genocide’ camp), then the right must, surely, be the only reasonable base for any self-respecting Jew. But there is no safe side, nor has there ever been. Jews in Britain have understood this for generations; we have simply, out of a mix of politeness and exhaustion, not always said so in public.

The hatred most recognize needs little introduction: the far right’s antisemitism is sufficiently brazen that it rarely troubles to disguise itself for long (why waste the effort?). Its iconography is aggressive enough as well: swastikas on synagogue walls, the neo-Nazi imagery passed between channels, the Great Replacement theory in which Jews serve as some sort of group of evil masterminds of the white demographic decline. This is the very sort of hatred my grandparents fled eight decades ago. In Britain, it has its own unlovely tradition: Mosley’s Blackshirts marching through Jewish neighborhoods in the East End, the National Front, the BNP, and the succession of rebranded movements that followed, albeit each slightly more presentable than the last, but still exactly identical at their core. This is the antisemitism we recognize immediately.

The other variety is trickier, and it is that trickiness, rather than the hatred itself, that makes it ever so corrosive. You see, the antisemitism of the left does not bother to arrive in black uniforms. It has donned the new clothes of justice and anti-imperialism, and it has learned to present itself as the structural opposite of racism. This is its way in. It says, with the utmost certainty, that it has nothing whatsoever against the Jews themselves (after all, that would be racist, and they certainly aren’t!) – only against the ‘Zios’, against the State of Israel, against colonial power. And, because it deploys the pre-approved vocabulary of the Left – who wants to be a racist, a colonial, an oppressor, after all? – and because it nests inside movements engaged in other causes that are entirely legitimate, the jig continues. The trick has been well........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)