Thread by @NudderingNudnik

Very long thread:

I announced a Twitter break at the weekend, in reaction to @TracyAnnO rebuking me for asking some firm questions of her friend @davidschneider

David has long been an enabler and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and in the tweets that Tracy objected to I was making clear that in my view David therefore has some personal responsibility for the appalling & escalating crisis that has engulfed British Jews since Corbyn’s election.

I also criticised David’s tweet of just last week that used the Israel/Nazi trope.
After nearly 4 years in which I have sought to both educate myself about the nature of the problem (left wing antisemitism) and to play my own small part in combating it

(researching, writing, campaigning, debating, identifying & reporting racists) I found it both baffling and intolerable to be reprimanded for being consistent in my approach, even when it involves holding a minor media/creative celebrity to account.

So, I retired to think about what had just happened.
Since my walking away from Twitter in a huff - which coincided with the Jew baiting around the Labour NEC meeting – I’ve had a few days to reflect. And a few days is of course way more than enough for any one person.

My reflections pretty much boil down to these 8 points:
1. In case we weren’t clear before, the NEC meeting, the issued statement & Corbyn’s draft statement clarify that antisemitic antizionism is now institutionalised in Her Majesty’s official opposition.

2.Visceral hated of Israel and Zionist Jews is widely embedded across middle class, educated “liberal”/Left discourse. The causations and delivery mechanisms of this narrative are complex but have been well understood and described by a number of scholars

of contemporary antisemitism in works dating back to the 1980s.

3.The narrative seeks the destruction of the Jewish state and the return of the Jews to the state of contingency and dependency in which they existed before 1948 and identifies this as THE crucial “progressive” struggle in the fight against global capital and repression.

The narrative seeks nothing less than the removal from Jews of political agency.

4.Labour is now controlled by evangelical & obsessional proponents of this narrative and there is almost no prospect of that changing in this political generation. The “moderates” have prevaricated & procrastinated and it is now too late.

5.Despite this, the voting intentions of Labour’s electoral base remain largely unaffected. Labour voters will continue to vote for Labour. Antisemitism is only a vote defining issue for 0.3% of the UK population (Jews) – plus a few committed non-Jewish antiracists.

6.Labour may or may not win the next general election, but the result will not be determined by antisemitism. The fallout from Brexit will shape the outcome.

7.UK Jews are now considering our response to this new reality and many of us are increasingly questioning whether this is a tenable way to live when other options (including life in Israel) may be more attractive.

The conversations have in reality been occurring since 2015 but the urgency is increasing and we are now being gradually more open about our thinking.

8.Campaigning against antisemitism on Twitter, in the media, in political spaces will simply not impact on any of these preceding points. This does not mean we should not bother, but we need to be clear about the limits of what is achievable.

. “Please don’t hate us”, “Look, these people hate us, really”, “It cannot be right that these people who have political power actually hate us” are not effective political platforms. They will not change where we are.

I believe that what comes next for UK Jews & our allies must be to fully take on board “the new 8”, digest them and work out what really needs to happen now as effective and meaningful responses, both communally and individually.

Ends.