Whether old or new, the British Labour Party has always been a massive thorn in the side of the Jews and Israel.
The days of "Rule, Britannia" are long gone but that does not stop the British from acting with big delusions today.
The recent 2024 victory of the British Labour party in national elections in the United Kingdom has resulted in a clear anti-Israel tilt in the new Labour government's policies. So far, as of this writing, the British Labour government has said they will abide by the International Criminal Court's (ICC) rulings to arrest the Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister for "war crimes" in Gaza, that they will restore major funding to UNRWA that was discovered to be a hotbed of Arab terrorism, and that they will ban British arms shipments to Israel, citing the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) recent anti-Israel rulings.
All this has been done within a short time of taking over the reins of government at 10 Downing Street, and in spite of the new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer having a wife, by the name of Victoria Alexander Starmer, of Jewish origins. Supposedly her father Bernard is from a Jewish family and her mother Barbara converted and they even attend the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London.
Israel and the Jewish People have had a love-hate relationship with the British for a long time.
On the one hand it was the British army that liberated Palestine from the Ottoman Turks in 1917 and recognized the rights of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel granting the Jews the famous Balfour Declaration that: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object..."
It was also the British Army that defeated the German Afrika Korps at the Battle of Al Alamein in Egypt in 1942 stopping the Nazis from entering Palestine and saving its Jews.
On the other hand, when push came to shove in the buildup to the Israel declaration of independence in 1948, the occupying British colonial power under a Labour government that controlled Palestine had to be fought and literally ejected by force by the Jewish resistance movements, such as the Irgun and the Lehi, fighting for Jewish and Israeli independence.
Now in 2024, under a Labour government, the British have once again decided to put the squeeze on the one and only Jewish state of Israel and its leaders.
During the British Mandate of Palestine, 1920–1948, the British often favored the local Arabs and severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. In truth there was little difference between the various British governments during this time in their anti-Jewish policies.
-It was the conservative Winston Churchill who was the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1921 to 1922 who handed Transjordan, that was the eastern part of Palestine, to the Hashemite Abdullah and made him king there.
-It was the rabidly socialist and anti-Semitic British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin who opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine during the years he was in office from 1945 to 1951. Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) proves the disastrous results being a socialist and member of the British Labour party can have on the Jews of Israel.
Going back in history, in 1290, King Edward I of England expelled the entire Jewish population of about 3,000 people from the country. The expulsion was the first known time a European state permanently banned the presence of Jews. Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion on July 18, 1290. It wasn't until the times of Oliver Cromwell that Jews were allowed to re-enter Britain. In 1656 Cromwell made a verbal promise, backed by the Council of State, to allow Jews to return to Britain and practice their faith freely. As a result, Jews from Holland, Spain and Portugal came to Britain and, in time, became more and more integrated into British society.
The Labour Party's Ernest Bevin's hatred of the Jews and Israel
(Sourced and condensed from the Wikipedia article "Ernest Bevin: Palestine and Israel)":
Bevin was Foreign Secretary during the period when the Mandate for Palestine ended, and the State of Israel was created. During the 1945 British election, the Labour Party had pledged to revoke the White Paper of 1939, permit free Jewish immigration to Palestine and turn Palestine into a Jewish state. The Labour Party had even advocated the population transfers of Arabs.
However, once in office, Bevin did a policy reversal and maintained the immigration restrictions. Wanting to protect British hegemony in the Middle East, he broke the party's promise and instead sought to follow through on the White Paper.
Under the White Paper, Palestine would become a binational state with a Jewish settler minority, with strict restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases to protect the autonomy of indigenous Arab Palestinians. In addition to his opposition on strategic grounds, Bevin was an ideological anti-Zionist who thought the Balfour Declaration had been a terrible mistake. He feared that a Jewish state could become a "racial state".
Bevin's policies would spark a war between British security forces and Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine.
Labour Party chairman Harold Laski denounced Bevin as "an outrageous blot on the whole Labour movement." Richard Crossman, a pro-Zionist Labour MP who knew Bevin, said the war was fueled almost entirely by "one man's determination to teach the Jews a lesson." However, Bevin's actions were greenlighted by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who opposed the establishment of a Jewish state on the grounds it would jeopardise Britain's position as the dominant power in the Middle East.
For refusing to remove limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine in the aftermath of the war, Bevin earned the hatred of Zionists. Richard Crossman, a pro-Zionist member of the postwar Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, characterised his outlook during the dying days of the Mandate as "corresponding roughly with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a tsarist fabrication written to inflame antisemitic prejudice.
Crossman intimated that "the main points of Bevin's discourse were... that the Jews had successfully organised a conspiracy against Britain and against him personally". Bevin negotiated the Portsmouth Treaty with Iraq in 1948, which, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Muhammad Fadhel al-Jamali, was accompanied by a British undertaking to withdraw from Palestine in such a fashion as to provide for swift Arab occupation of all its territory.
And now?
Until recently, the British Labour Party was led by rabid anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn
(Sourced and condensed from the Wikipedia article "Political positions of Jeremy Corbyn: Israel and Palestine; Accusations of antisemitism"):
Jeremy Corbyn was a member of the Labour Party from 1965 until his expulsion in 2024. He served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. Corbyn identifies ideologically as a socialist on the political left. In 2009 Corbyn said "It would be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I've also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well." He referred to Hamas as "an organisation dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people," and said that the British government's labelling of Hamas as a terrorist organisation is "a big, big historical mistake."
In a television interview following the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Corbyn, when questioned, repeatedly refused to designate Hamas as a "terror group". Some days later, in an opinion piece in Tribune magazine, he wrote that Hamas is a "terrorist organisation" and that the Israel army has carried out "acts of terror too"
In 2018 Corbyn said that, if elected, his government would immediately recognise the Palestinian State as a way of supporting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Arab Palestinian conflict. He declared that the Labour Party condemned the "shooting of hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza by Israeli forces and the passing of Israel's discriminatory nation-state law".
Corbyn's critics, including British Orthodox Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks have accused him of antisemitism in relation to past associations and comments. Britain's three main Jewish newspapers jointly called a Corbyn-led government an "existential threat to Jewish life" in Britain.
In 2019, Corbyn was criticised for a foreword he wrote in 2011 for a republication of the 1902 book Imperialism: A Study by John A. Hobson, as the book contains the antisemitic assertion that finance was controlled "by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience" who "are in a unique position to control the policy of nations". In his foreword, he called the book a "great tome" and "brilliant, and very controversial at the time"
A September 2018 poll carried out by polling firm Survation, on behalf of the Jewish Chronicle, found that 86% of British Jews and 39% of the British public believed Corbyn to be antisemitic. In November 2019, a number of British public figures urged voters in a letter published in The Guardian to reject Corbyn in the impending general election, alleging an "association with antisemitism".
Unfortunately, the pyrrhic victory of the British Labour Party in 2024 will not stop its historic machinations against the Jews and Israel
The United Kingdom's parliament has 650 members in the House of Commons each representing a constituency that elects one member of parliament during an election. In this political system each constituency chooses between multiple candidates and the one that gets the most votes wins even though there may have been more combined votes cast against the winning candidate in that constituency. Therefore, say candidate A wins 3000 votes, candidate B wins 2,950 votes and candidate C wins 2,500 votes, then candidate A wins in that constituency even though more votes were cast for candidates B and C combined who together won nearly double the votes that candidate A won.
Israel does not have such a political system. Israel's parliament, the Knesset, is based on a proportional representation system that does not distribute votes by constituencies but tallies up votes according to the percentage of votes cast for a political party that then is allocated seats in the Knesset in proportion to the percentage of the vote that it wins.
In 2024 the British Labour Party only won 33.7% of the popular vote. That means that if seats in the British parliament were allocated based on the proportion of the votes cast, the Labour Party would not have gotten 411 seats but would have gained only about 216 seats, that is a third of the 650 seats in parliament. The combined center-right opposition would have had a majority of seats and could have formed a center-right political alliance and government with a comfortable majority of seats.
The opposition Conservative Party won 23.7% of the popular vote, while the Liberal Democrats won 12.2% of the popular vote and the Reform UK party won 14.3% of the popular vote. To sum up, the left-wing Labour Party won 9,704,655 votes while the center-right parties won: 6,827,311 for the Conservative Party; 3,519,199 votes for the Liberal Democrats; and 4,117,221 votes for the Reform UK party. That means that the Conservatives plus the Liberal Democrats plus the Reform UK parties won a combined grand total of 14, 457, 731 votes as opposed to the Labour Party's 9,704,655 votes, but because of the way the United Kingdom's political system of constituencies works, they lost to Labour by a landslide because the center-right vote was split among various center-right candidates and parties.
It is therefore very clear that the overwhelming majority of the British People do not support the Labour Party and in fact oppose its policies in both home and foreign affairs. This will not stop the Labour Party from acting arrogantly and with self-conceit, promoting and enacting policies that are harmful to both the Jews living in the United Kingdom, and towards the Jews of the State of Israel. Israelis are now only beginning to see the tip of the iceberg of what the Labour Party would like to do to undermine Israel and its Jews.
Sadly for the world and the Jewish People, the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel ominous shadows of the British Labour Party's past leaders', such as Ernest Bevin, Clement Attlee, Jeremy Corbyn, and now the actions of current Labour leaders Keir Starmer and his new Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and their supporters in the hierarchy of the Labour Party's far-left, Marxist and Communist roots and wings and their pro-Arab and anti-Jewish policies are going to get worse before they get better as long as the Labour Party remains in power in "merry old England"!
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin was born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College–Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach – Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988–1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994–1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995–2015. He is also a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York.
He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at izakrudomin@gmail.com