Why does the Board still want to engage with Labour?

As the crisis has developed and gone on, however, it is clear that one of those two bodies does not understand what is actually going on and how to confront it.

 While the JLC has stood firm and made it clear to Labour that there can be no relationship with a leadership that – at best – enables antisemitism, the Board has repeatedly misunderstood how Labour should be approached. Infamously, it offered a platform at its Chanukah party to a senior member of the Shadow Cabinet and invited the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, to its annual dinner.

The President of the Board, Marie van der Zyl, defended its engagement with Labour by saying: “Suspending relations with the party may create headlines but it would get us nowhere and leave us no wriggle room. I have always said that engagement does not mean concessions.”

This utterly misguided approach is the crux of it and has led to today, when the Board and the JLC have had to send separate letters to the Shadow Cabinet.

The JLC’s is sensible and clear. The Board’s on the other hand, is misguided, wrong-headed and counter-productive.

The chairman of the JLC, Jonathan Goldstein, writes: “As members of the Shadow Cabinet, you now face a very difficult and unavoidable decision, in which inaction will signal your support for what has happened and what will follow. Please, do not under-estimate the importance of your actions for the future well-being of British Jews, or for the wider message that you give about racism, liberal democratic values and our British society.”

He goes on to the fundamental point: “The Labour Party’s antisemitism problem is cultural, not mathematical.”

As for the letter from Marie van der Zyl, the President of the Board: no one who understands what is actually going on and how to fight it could possibly send such a letter.

The Board suggests a series of measures for Labour to take “to resolve this crisis”, as if the only problem is that Labour has somehow omitted to tick the necessary boxes to enable it to receive a hescher.

In a sentence that is almost beyond belief, Ms van der Zyl singles out Labour’s “bland, generic statements”. Ms van der Zyl writes: “Labour’s media handling throughout the three and a half years of this scandal have served to exacerbate the mistrust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community and wider public alike. Bland, generic statements should give way to condemnation of specific harmful behaviours - and, where appropriate, condemnation of specific individuals.”

But it no longer makes the slightest difference what Labour says. Who cares? Who gives a damn about Labour’s “bland, generic statements”, other than for dark amusement at their repetition? What matters is not what Labour says to journalists. What matters is that it is led by racists for whom antisemitism is a political tool.

Ridiculously, Ms van der Zyl then writes: “The Party should confirm publicly that it will seek to understand and engage with the Jewish community via its main representative groups, and not through fringe organisations and individuals…” Seriously? The Board actually thinks that the real issue now is that Labour talks to the likes of JVL? JVL is an utter irrelevance.

It is close to astonishing that there are still people left in our community who have not twigged that the lesson of the past near-four years is not that Labour isn’t doing the right thing and needs to be told what to do, but rather that the party is now institutionally racist.

Those leading the party have not refused to act against antisemitism because they haven’t worked out how to; they have refused to act because they don’t believe they should – because they have a view of Jews that is core to their political DNA.

The point is not that Labour is engaging with JVL rather than the Board; it is that the very idea of engagement with an institutionally antisemitic party is a disgrace that no serious representative body for Jews should even contemplate.

But nothing comes close to Ms van der Zyl’s final suggestion for sheer jaw-dropping inappropriateness: “…Seumas Milne and Karie Murphy also shoulder a significant share of the blame. They must take personal responsibility for resolving this crisis.”

The idea that Mr Milne and Ms Murphy are in any way capable of “resolving” a crisis of which they both a cause and symptom - that they are capable of some kind of last-minute conversion to the cause of stamping out anti-racism - is so staggeringly wrong that it explains so much else about the Board’s handling of this issue. Seumas Milne and Karie Murphy have no role to play in any attack on Labour antisemitism. They would be the target of any such project.

There is no more room for dialogue or engagement. These are not people with whom we can or should ever work. There is no room for good faith engagement or actions to be taken, after which we can all work together. Labour’s leadership and its culture itself is the issue, not the party’s procedures.

It is astonishing that, after nearly four years of this, the Board of Deputies has not grasped this.