Jeremy Corbyn said of an English Zionist “…. They don’t want to study history”
In response to the media furore, Labour has released a transcript of more of his remarks at that PRC Conference in 2013 (H/T James Vaughan @EquusontheBuses)
It was presumably released to support his statement ‘They don’t want to study history’:
But it shows the opposite –it’s Corbyn who is ignorant of history.
Because:
1. There was only one ‘member’ – not ‘members’ plural – of the government who was opposed to Zionism. As Geoffrey Alderman prophetically wrote three years ago:
I believe his reference to “some of the Jewish members of the cabinet” was more in the nature of a Freudian slip, and that what this error really tells us is that Jeremy Corbyn sees Jews where there are none (or at least very few). Corbyn – in other words – has a problem with Jews, whose political influence he grossly overstates.
2. As for the ‘progressive Jewish element in Britain’, the anti-Zionists in the ‘Cousinhood’ were shown to be in the minority in the Jewish Community when David Lindo Alexander QC , President of the Board of Deputies, was voted out of his position for writing a letter to The Times (jointly with Lucien Woolf, Chairman of the Anglo Jewish Association) saying that Zionism was ‘of little interest to the mass of world Jewry, who just wished to remain loyal citizens of their own native countries’.
And Mr Corbyn, what was ‘progressive’ in 1917 about opposing the idea of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’? Had Israel been created ten years before 1948, millions of Jewish lives might have been saved!
With the benefit of history – which Corbyn had when he made that comment – only the most twisted antisemite could possibly use the word ‘progressive’ to describe the opponents of a Jewish homeland in 1917.
We Are The 99% of Jews ............ 