The exchange at Conservative Friends of Israel’s annual lunch pointed to an uncomfortable truth that extends well beyond party politics. Nick Timothy’s criticism of Labour rested on a broader question that deserves serious consideration: can antisemitism be confronted effectively while the narratives that increasingly sustain it are left unchallenged?
That question was sharpened by Andy Burnham’s response when asked whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. “I can’t judge,” he said. Timothy’s reply was pointed: “Well, I can. The war in Gaza was no genocide. To use that language is a deliberate and offensive provocation to Israel and to all Jews, a people who really did suffer that terrible crime against humanity.” Those who make that “appalling and baseless claim”, he added, “and those who lack the courage to reject it are cowards”.
Genocide is the gravest crime recognised in international law, a word shaped above all by the destruction of European Jewry. To deploy that false charge against Israel is therefore especially cruel. It accuses the Jewish state – and, by extension, the Jewish people – of the very crime of which Jews were the victims. It’s cynical use is underlined by the fact that the genocide charge has been levelled at Israel long before the war that followed the Hamas atrocities of October 7.
It has always had a particular malice: designed to wound Jews where they are most vulnerable, to demonise the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely evil, and to cast those who support it – including the vast majority of British Jews – as morally suspect by association. In doing so, it also serves to diminish retroactively the singular crime of the Holocaust itself, turning the memory of Jewish suffering into a weapon against Jews.
Burnham’s answer illustrated a wider uncertainty within the party about Israel. Sir Keir Starmer deserves credit for confronting the overt antisemitism that flourished under his predecessor.
But October 7 presented a different test. It required not only condemning antisemitism inside Labour, but resisting the wider moral inversion by which the victims of a genocidal assault – livestreamed by its Hamas perpetrators – were rapidly recast as the principal villains.
On that test, Labour has too often faltered, distancing itself from Israel by suspending export licences, halting trade negotiations, reversing Britain’s opposition to the International Criminal Court investigations of Israel and recognising a Palestinian state while the hostages were still held in tunnels by Hamas.
Together, these decisions contributed to the impression that Israel, rather than Hamas, was the party chiefly requiring pressure, rebuke and constraint. They also helped to entrench a wider narrative in which Israel is treated not as a democratic ally fighting a terrorist enemy, but as the principal aggressor and human rights violator.
Kemi Badenoch made the same point in broader terms. “Labour’s approach to Israel has been to surrender difficult decisions rather than show moral leadership,” she said. Israel, she added, is “our ally, our defence partner, our friend”, but also “a democracy on the front line of a wider struggle”. Its fight against Islamist terrorism, she argued, “is not Israel’s fight alone” but “a fight for the values that Britain and the wider West share: democracy, freedom, and the rule of law”.
This should not be a matter of party-politics. It ought to be a point of basic bi-partisan consensus that Britain cannot hope to tackle antisemitism while ignoring, minimising or legitimising the accusations that cast the Jewish state as uniquely monstrous and those associated with it as morally suspect. Political leaders are not courts of law, but they are responsible for the moral climate they help to create.
To fight antisemitism seriously is not merely to denounce abuse after it appears – it is to reject the falsehoods that give it moral permission.
And no falsehood is more harmful to Jews today than the libel that the Jewish state is guilty of genocide.
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