Rachel Reeves: I’m an unapologetic Zionist

Reeves added: “The progressive friends of Israel – whatever their criticisms of particular governments – must be willing to say, unapologetically, ‘I am a Zionist’.”

She was speaking as the first Labour chancellor to address the event since Gordon Brown in 2007.

The speech follows a period of strained relations between Israel and the UK since Labour took office last year, particularly following the government’s restrictions on some arms sales and its recognition of the state of Palestine.

Former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy welcomed Reeves’s declaration of clear-cut Zionism, saying in a post on X it was an “impressive statement” and “not something that can be taken for granted in the modern climate”.

Labour MP Luke Akehurst, who battled antisemitism in the party under Jeremy Corbyn, said in an article for the JC the speech shows “the Labour tradition of support for Israel is alive and well”.

The LFI lunch was attended by more than 400 political figures, including cabinet ministers David Lammy, Steve Reed and Peter Kyle, MPs, peers and Jewish communal representatives.

Reeves told those gathered: “We must reject wholeheartedly, the belief that there is something inherently wrong about the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and that doing so is a precondition to driving antisemitism off our streets, out of our schools and away from our campuses.”

Reeves attacked the anti-Israel protests that took place in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s assault on Israel on October 7, 2023.

While “we all respect the right to protest”, she said, “let’s also be clear, that the first anti-Israel protests occurred while Israel was still under attack, that the words, actions and behaviour of some of those who have protested against Israel over the past two or so years have strayed into and even been driven by hate and prejudice and by antisemitism”.

The longstanding LFI supporter left her position as a vice-chair when she was appointed chancellor last year.

Reeling off examples of antisemitism in Britain since October 7, she said: “Ripping down pictures of children abducted by Hamas; chanting ‘death to the IDF’ and ‘globalise the intifada’; equating the actions of Israel with those who murdered six million Jews; propagating dark conspiracies about the supposed power of the ‘Zionist lobby’; stirring the pot of community tensions to prevent Israeli football fans travelling to our second biggest city; demanding that Jewish musicians, comedians and artists engage in some kind of performative denunciation of Israel before they are even allowed to perform.

“Does anyone seriously think that these are not antisemitic acts?”

She added: “Antisemitism is a crime. Gaslighting Jews simply compounds that crime.”

During her near 30-minute address to the gathering in central London, Reeves referred to a trip to Auschwitz she had made with schoolchildren from her Leeds constituency with the Holocaust Educational Trust and its chief executive Karen Pollock MBE, shortly after she was first elected to parliament in 2010.

She said: “It was a cold and very bleak February day. It was a very moving day. We paused at the end of the tour for a short service of reflection. We intoned the words that we repeat every Holocaust Memorial: ‘Never again’.”

“And then, two years ago, Hamas inflicted the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Shoah. Hamas’s intent was to murder Jews for being Jews. It murdered young children and Holocaust survivors, pensioners and peace activists.

"Partygoers at the Nova music festival and young men and women serving on the border attempting to preserve the fragile ceasefire which Hamas had repeatedly broken.”

She added that Hamas “engaged in the premeditated rape, torture and mutilation of Israeli civilians” and said the group proudly “celebrated its pogrom”.

“Those crimes led to a war that has subjected the people of Gaza to two years of hell while Hamas leadership hid in a tunnel network the size of the London Underground. It used the people of Gaza, their schools, their hospitals, as human shields, ‘necessary sacrifices’, in the words of [former Hamas leader] Yahya Sinwar.”

But Reeves stressed that “actions of the Israeli government are not and must not be beyond criticism”, which the Labour government “did not shy away from”.

“The scenes from Gaza on our television are shocking and they’re heartbreaking. No parent doesn’t feel pain and empathy when they see other people’s children suffer.” Adding that the ceasefire provided a “glimmer” of hope, she also spoke of the “joy and relief” when hostages returned home to be united with their families.

Reeves also announced the government would host representatives from Israeli and Palestinian civil society next year in order to “ensure civil society groups are at the forefront of our efforts to advance long term peace and a two-state solution”. She ended by pledging to “keep up the fight for a politics of moderation” amid rising antisemitism from the far left and far right.

“Please be in no doubt. Israel has many friends in the Labour Party… There have always been, there will always be Labour friends of Israel, and I am proud to be among them.”

LFI director Michael Rubin said: “The chancellor laid out in the clearest possible terms that hatred of the world’s only Jewish state rests at the core of modern antisemitism. And she recognised that this simple truth is key to defeating Jew-hate in Britain today.”