Sir Keir Starmer deserves huge credit for tackling antisemitism within Labour – without which the party would not have won the 2024 general election, according to Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) chair Mark Sewards.
In a wide-ranging interview with the JC, the MP for Leeds South West and Morley discussed the challenges of being a pro-Israel voice in a left-wing party, his fears about the rise of the Green Party and his longstanding affinity and connections with Leeds University’s Jewish Society.
Sewards took on the role late last year after LFI’s previous chair, Jon Pearce, became Sir Keir Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary.
In a political climate where anti-Zionism is on the rise, especially in left-wing circles, and where Labour MPs often line up to denounce Israel in the House of Commons, why would an MP who isn’t Jewish want to take on the role of championing the Jewish state?
Labour MP Mark Sewards (Image: X/Mark Sewards)[Missing Credit]
“I wanted an easy life”, he joked.
“It's a really important role for me, because when I think back to when I first got involved in politics, so back in 2008 I joined the Labour Party. I was 18 years old, … finishing my A levels. And then I went to Leeds University to study law – I couldn't decide on a subject, but law seemed prestigious, so why not – while I was at university, I saw the Jewish Society organising events on campus, organising debates, hosting things, and I didn't know much about Israel-Palestine.
"I didn't know much about the Jewish community, but I did see the protests that were happening outside these events, and the stuff that the Jewish society had to put up with, and, just innately, something just felt wrong about that.”
He continued: “I came to learn all about Israel, about Zionism, about what that means to people, about the Jewish community in Leeds, and then more broadly in the UK. I had fortune of visiting Israel and Palestine with UJS [the Union of Jewish Students] … and that experience never left me.”
The local JSoc at Leeds University played an even bigger role in his personal life. As student politicos, he and his wife Alice, with whom he was two children – “Oscar and Arthur, four and one. They are the light of my life” – both had the endorsement of the Jewish Society for student elections.
“We were brought together by our activism at university and the Labour Party, and the JSoc have a big role to play in that”.
Being an MP with a young family isn’t without huge challenges: “I'd say to anybody thinking about running to be an MP, do be prepared to not see your children four days a week, because that will have a negative effect if you're not prepared for it.”
He and his wife talked everything through even before he was elected and have been able to make things work: “I am probably the luckiest man you know, because I have an incredibly supportive wife”, but not seeing his kids for much of the week is still difficult.
Despite challenging circumstances for pro-Israel voices in Parliament, he jumped at the opportunity to take the leading role with LFI when the opportunity arose to become chair.
“They had to ask me a couple of times, they wanted to be absolutely sure, in this current climate, and I said yes,” he jested.
“I'm sure every parliamentary chair of LFI could say this: there has never been a more important time to advocate for the state of Israel, the idea of Israel, because it's very tempting for a lot of people on the left or on the centre to draw equivalence between the government of Israel and the state of Israel, the actions of Netanyahu's government, and the idea that there should be a Jewish state, full stop.
“Unfortunately, too many people are doing that, and it's leading to some pretty horrific antisemitic incidents, as we've seen. So, it's important that there are people on the left in my party, in the governing party as well, that continue to advocate for Israel, whatever we might think of the Israeli government”, Sewards added.
Hamish Falconer (right) and Labour Friends of Israel chair Mark Sewards.[Missing Credit]
The 36-year-old was blunt about how much more challenging advocating for Israel within the Labour Party is given the current make-up of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, including the sanctioned far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
“They make it very, very difficult. They make it as difficult as possible. The statements they come out with are outrageous.” He says, it is very understandable that MPs have strong objections to them.
“You're talking about a building where you've got hundreds of people who've been elected as campaigners, and they see and hear statements like that, and… their instinct is to take a stand against it, and it's perfectly natural instinct.”
He and LFI backed the government’s decision to sanction the far-right duo.
“We wanted to be clear that advocating for the State of Israel is not the same as standing up for far-right ministers within the government that currently governs Israel,” the Leeds MP said.
He added: Tthat definitely makes it more difficult, but also because of the stance we took there, and because people recognise, you know, we're in a democracy too, Israel's a democracy, it elects different parties, it just so happens that the current complexion is one that we wouldn't necessarily agree with on very much, but because it's a democracy, you can draw that distinction between Israel and its people and the government that currently runs Israel.”
His Labour colleagues have been largely supportive since he became LFI’s chair, with Sewards claiming he’s had no negative comments, but one or two expressing a concern for the negativity he might attract when taking on the role.
Israel's president Isaac Herzog (right) with LFI chair Mark Sewards. (Image: LFI).[Missing Credit]
According to Sewards, there is no shortage of pro-Israel MPs, including at the top of government, pointing to his Leeds constituency neighbour, and chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who at LFI’s annual lunch last year declared herself a “proud” Zionist.
Another different challenge for LFI is to maintain support for Labour from members of the Jewish community upset by some of the government’s other decisions – including restoring funding to Unrwa, a partial arms embargo on Israel and deciding to back recognition of a Palestinian state while Hamas still held hostages.
He said: “I get why some people are disappointed about the direction that the government has taken, especially when a lot of the events we've seen have come off the back of a horrific terrorist attack on October 7.”
The terrorists’ atrocities that day also hardened attitudes against a two-state solution, something LFI still campaigns for.
But he isn’t ready to discard one of LFI’s longstanding principles when it comes to advocating for an Israeli state alongside a Palestinian state.
Sewards also defends the government from some criticism, saying it does “care about peace in the Middle East and a long-term solution to Israel and Palestine. I do genuinely think it has, it has the right principles in mind.”
Mark Sewards (right) with Democrats party leader Yair Golan (Image: LFI).[Missing Credit]
The Leeds MP was also delighted that the government was introducing the Tackling State Threats Bill, that will see the introduction of measures to effectively proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The interview took place ahead of the Makerfield by-election, amid speculation about Starmer’s future in Downing Street and Andy Burnham’s possible return to Westminster to challenge him for the keys to No10.
Whatever the future, without Starmer taking the necessary action to root out antisemitism from the Labour Party when he took over from Jeremy Corbyn, Labour would still be nowhere near power, Sewards claimed.
“Keir should be commended for tearing antisemitism out of the Labour Party, kicking it out, and then transforming it, so that we could actually win a general election again.
“Had he not dealt with the antisemites, we would not be in power now. That's just very, very clear to me. And having attended so many meetings, so many miserable meetings throughout that entire sordid period, I'm so pleased to see where we are now, despite all the problems we currently have in government, compared to where we were back then, and Keir should absolutely be commended for that.”
In the event of a leadership contest, he and other Labour MPs would be making sure there would be no return to the politics of the Corbyn years.
“I'm reasonably confident that we will not go back to those days, because all of my colleagues, or most of my colleagues, were there in the party while we had to fight and defeat antisemitism and tear it out by its roots.
"They saw what it's like, we're seeing what's happening to the Green Party now, and seeing it happen to another party – especially after it's happened to you – I think just underlines the dangers involved with letting these kinds of people back into our party again.”
Sewards was at the 2024 local election count in Leeds where Mothin Ali – now the party’s deputy leader – screamed Allahu Akhbar in front of the Palestinian flag after his election victory to a ward on Leeds City Council.
His behaviour towards a Leeds University Rabbi and social media posts on October 7, have been covered extensively by this paper.
Ali is, to Sewards, symptomatic of what has gone wrong with the Green Party in recent years.
“He represents something pretty extraordinary that's happened to the Green Party. They have transformed almost overnight … into a version of the Labour Party that existed between 2015 and 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn, but it's a version that's actually worse than that now.”
“I stayed in the Labour Party to remove all the antisemites; to take back the party from the antisemites that had taken control of so many different CLPs [Constituency Labour Parties] … and it was a really difficult period. It was time when many of us even questioned our membership, but then decided no, we're not going to allow the second biggest party in the UK to be taken over by these people, and eventually it took two general election losses, but we eventually got there.
"Now the Green Party is accepting a lot of those people into its ranks, but worse still, it's actually accepting people that we never accepted in the Labour Party, and it's not hard to see, is it, the trajectory of where they're going.”
But, despite the gains during last month’s local elections, the public will see the Green Party and reject it, in the same way it did with Corbyn’s Labour, the 36-year-old claimed.
“I think they will see what the Green Party is transforming into, and at that point, they'll become unpalatable to large sections of the electorate, and it will mean that they can't win an election in the way that they want to.”
Sewards isn’t complacent though and said it was up to the Labour Party to help “expose exactly what they are”, and praised Steve Reed, the communities secretary, for his robust criticisms of the Greens during the campaign, accusing one candidate of using imagery “that could have come from the Third Reich”.
It is somewhat fitting that one of his first visits as chair of LFI was back to Leeds University’s Jsoc, to show solidarity amid the outpouring of anti-Israel hostility on university campuses.
“My interest in this was kicked off all those years ago when I got involved with the Jewish Society”, but he says the situation is now far worse than he could have ever imagined.
“People shout 'Free Palestine' at them on Friday nights because they know they're going to Hillel House and they know exactly what's going on there. I just think that's that's ludicrous.
"Some of them hide their ethnicity in seminars because their lecturers speak about how proud they are that their son or daughter, I forget which, got arrested for supporting Palestine Action … some of them hide who they are from their flatmates, their housemates,” he says, a situation he describes as “insane”.
For him, it “clearly underlines the need to deal with antisemitism here in the UK, as well as to deal with the nefarious actors who are instigating it.”
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