Whether it was his refusal to see what was wrong in a mural depicting Jews as hooked-nosed bankers making money off the backs of the poor; his sugges… - Jonathan Freedland

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Whether it was his refusal to see what was wrong in a mural depicting Jews as hooked-nosed bankers making money off the backs of the poor; his suggestion that Jews might be born in this country but would never quite grasp "English irony"; his praise for a book that blamed 19th-century imperialism on finance houses run by "a single and peculiar race"; his warm embrace of a man who had repeated the ancient lie that Jews consume the blood of gentile children – pick your example – it was Corbyn who made British Jews feel an anxiety they had not known for the best part of a century. It was he who acted as a magnet, drawing in assorted cranks and bigots to join a party whose great name they soiled by their very presence.

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About Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Saul Freedland (born 25 February 1967) is a British journalist, broadcaster and weekly columnist for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London

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Alternative Names: Jonathan Saul Freedland Sam Bourne
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Additional quotes by Jonathan Freedland

This is where you wind up when you view this conflict in monochrome, as a clash of right v wrong. Because the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land.
So, this is not a football game. It has no need for spectators who root for one team against the other, goading their chosen side to go to ever further extremes. This is not a game, for one grimly obvious reason. There are no winners – only never-ending loss.

[Referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working definition of antisemitism] [T]he only pro-Palestinian who needs to fear the IHRA is the one who wants to say Jews are disloyal to their own countries, that Jews are Nazis and that the very idea of Jews having a homeland of their own is "a racist endeavour". You can say all of those things more easily under Labour's new code – the age-old accusation of disloyalty, for example, is no longer classified as antisemitic – which is one reason why the vast bulk of the Jewish community opposes it.
But the IHRA itself, properly applied, allows plenty of scope. You can, if you want, say everything the state of Israel has done since its birth has been racist. All it prohibits is branding as a racist endeavour "a state of Israel" – the principle that Jews, like every other people on Earth, should have a home and refuge of their own.

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This poses its own danger for democracy. Because there can be no collective decision-making – which is what democracy amounts to – without a collective, agreed-upon basis of facts. If we can’t first agree that the house is on fire, we can’t begin to talk about putting out the flames.

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