Two months after Keir Starmer was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 2020, a Labour Party member wrote him an Open Letter in response to Starmer saying he supports Zionism “without qualification”. The letter was published in Mondoweiss, a website which “provides American Jews with an alternative identity to that expressed by Zionist ideology”, and also by Jewish Voice for Labour.
It has been much publicised that Keir Starmer’s father-in-law Bernard Alexander is Jewish and that the Starmers are bringing up their two children in the Jewish faith. The synagogue to which Barnard and Victoria Alexander-Starmer belong is the Liberal Synagogue in St John’s Wood. Bernard Alexander was born in London in 1929 and Victoria in 1973 so for many years their Rabbi will have been David Goldberg, who joined this synagogue in 1975 and was senior Rabbi there from 1986 until his retirement in 2004.
Rabbi Goldberg remained active during retirement until his death in 2019: indeed in 2012 he published his book "This is Not the Way: Jews, Judaism and the State of Israel" which includes a chapter on "Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism":
“In the short term – meaning the six decades of its existence – the State of Israel, far from solving the problem of anti-Semitism, has exacerbated it, and failed to increase the collective security of its Jewish citizens or alleviate the existential anxiety of Jews around the world.
“And when Jewish representatives insist, as the Israel PR Lobby does, on an axiomatic linkage between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, as though they are two aspects of the same seamless, linear continuity, not only are we guilty of sloppy, ahistorical oversimplification but we are also failing to treat a subject vital to our well-being with the intellectual rigour it deserves.
“The first corrective point that needs to be made is that European Christian anti-Semitism and Arab Muslim anti-Semitism differ greatly in origin, theological animus, duration and magnitude. European anti-Semitism grew out of religious hatred for the accursed Jews who had rejected the true Saviour and killed him. From the time that Christianity became the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire under Constantine (325 CE), the treatment of Jewish communities was determined by ecclesiastical law and depended on the whim of individual Christian rulers and their bishops, usually based not on dogma but on a prudential calculation of how valuable Jews were to the local economy: whether it was more beneficial to plunder them financially and drive them out or to allow them to remain under royal and Church protection and bleed them through taxation instead. All of this was done with theological validation, the Jews’ lowly estate as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity being their punishment for having demanded the crucifixion of the Son of God. Such a justification in Church teachings for reviling, mistreating, torturing, killing, forcibly converting or expelling another group of people simply because they were Jews – a religious motive – is more accurately called Judaeophobia than anti-Semitism.
“…..Unlike with Christianity, Islam’s anti-Jewish bias was not genetically encoded in the very birth pangs of the new religion…. For centuries throughout the territories of the Ottoman Empire, conditions for Jews were generally benign….
“How was it, then, that all the classic themes of European anti-Semitism metastasised to find their lurid modern equivalent in an avalanche of pamphlets, school textbooks, university theses and Internet postings throughout the Arab world? The one word answer is: Zionism. From 1897 onwards, the influx of pioneers into Palestine had a baneful impact on Muslim–Jewish relations, and the 1948 establishment of Israel confirmed the rupture. An infidel government in the midst of Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, where Muslim rule and Islamic law should prevail, is an intolerable affront that abrogates the dhimma pact and can be rectified only by a canonically obligatory perpetual state of struggle known as jihad, usually translated as ‘holy war’….
“Other staples of Christian anti-Semitism, including accusations of Jewish well-poisoning and the Blood Libel, proliferated both preceding and after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Pogroms in Baghdad, Tripoli, Cairo and Tangier that followed the Arab defeat were almost as bad as anything against Jews in medieval Europe…
“When the London Central Mosque opened in Regent’s Park in 1978, my synagogue council sent a welcoming gift. Along with the vicar of St John’s Wood Church and the mosque’s director, Dr (later Sir) Zaki Badawi …. we arranged a series of regular Trialogue meetings between the three faiths, the first of their kind ever held in this country, attracting audiences of several hundred people. The clergy of mosque, church and synagogue met monthly for lunch together, and groups of doctors, teachers and social workers held sessions to discuss common issues.
“The contacts continued throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its aftermath, although there were growing tensions. Eventually Dr Badawi, the Revd John Slater and I decided to drop the public meetings, because the atmosphere had become too confrontational and combative, stirred by unfolding events in the Middle East.
“Those who refuse to acknowledge that the Israel–Palestine conflict has been the major factor in the rise of Arab anti-Semitism and the consequent embitterment of Muslim–Jewish relations worldwide are deluding themselves as wilfully as those Labour ministers who refused to accept that the London suicide bombings of July 2005 by British-born Muslims had anything to do with the 2002 USA–UK decision to invade Iraq…
“I was visited recently by the moderator of a European-based and European Union-accredited Council of Religious Leaders. His brief was to ask my opinion about the current level of anti-Semitism in the UK…. My impression was that although criticism of Israel had become sharper and more widespread, on the whole British Jewry did not feel any more vulnerable on account of the upsurge in anti-Semitism that according to alarmist reports in the American and Israeli press was supposedly sweeping Europe. My visitor then told me that in his area of London, where few if any Jews live, members of the local Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities – which historically have had minimal contact with Judaism – had confessed to him how angry they have become with Jews generally, on account of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians…
“Everyone would agree that anti-Semitism – meaning blanket hostility to all Jews qua Jews – is a despicable creed and should be beyond the pale of any civilised society, along with homophobia, Islamophobia and racism….
“[But] Zionism as a national movement and ideology should no more be protected from critical analysis than capitalism, socialism, theism, secularism, colonialism or Islamism……There are perfectly respectable intellectual arguments that often have been voiced by Jews themselves to query the goals of Zionism and the actions of Israel…..
“In recent years a number of Jewish academics on the political left …. have resuscitated the idea of a bi-national state as the answer to the intractable Israel–Palestine conflict. However much or little other Jews may think of their proposition, it is a perfectly valid one to put forward….
“With a sense of historical perspective allied to calm debate and reasoned analysis, it should be possible, and would be helpful, to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, particularly when the latter is not questioning Israel’s right to exist but asking critical questions of government policy vis-à-vis Israel being the Jewish state rather than a state for all its citizens ……
Conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as one and the same and insisting on an inseparable link between the two – a collective anti-Semitism, as it were – may deter criticism in the short term. As with overuse of the Holocaust,familiarity eventually breeds indifference, until the excuse no longer holds up. Then both Israel, which likes to describe itself and be regarded as the collective expression of the Jewish people, and those Diaspora cheerleaders who have enthusiastically encouraged that identification will have to find a better defence than blaming all criticism of Israel on covert anti-Semitism.”
My mother, Nora Seymour, was active in another Liberal Jewish Synagogue and was involved for many years in interfaith dialogue, so she knew Rabbi Goldberg and both were signatories to this Open Letter organised by British Friends of Peace Now and published in the Jewish Chronicle on 14th November 1997:
"Dear Mr Netanyahu, This month commemorates the second anniversary of the death of Yitzhak Rabin. We remember his achievements for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We remember the manner of his passing. You have often invoked his memory - but we deeply regret that you have not invoked his message.
“In your year as Prime Minister, you have presided over a rising tide of violence against those who profess different views. You have reinterpreted the Oslo Accords in such a way that the peace process has been emptied of all meaning. Your rejectionism has strengthened the hand of the peace-wreckers amongst the Palestinians.
“Even those who did not vote for you hoped that you would provide 'peace with security" as you had promised. Today, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's existence, there is neither peace nor security. We support your demand for total security, but we do not see this as the sole issue in the conflict. Along with a majority of Israeli citizens, we fail to understand in what way the expansion of existing settlements will further the peace process.
“Why are you so reticent to negotiate with those Palestinians who desire peace and condemn terrorism? Is it because deep down you wish to retain the Territories at all costs? Land with conflict rather than peace with hope? We call upon you to put a halt to actions which undermine the peace process and to return to the original spirit of the Oslo Accords.
“As Jews who care deeply for Israel's well-being, we believe we speak for a majority of British Jews who have not forgotten Rabin's wise leadership of the Jewish people."
