In Jeopardy

Keir Starmer’s proudest achievement is to have abolished the immemorial protection against double jeopardy, since nothing else concrete ever came out of the Stephen Lawrence case. Is the Metropolitan Police no longer racist? Go round London and tell the black boys that. Go on. I dare you.

The Conservative Party did nothing to defend that civil liberty, of course. It has never suggested restoring it. And it is no surprise that Starmer is re-suspending Labour Party members the complaints against whom have already been investigated and dismissed.

One’s attitude to the Palestinian struggle is the litmus test of one’s attitude to the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain, and until you understand that, then you have not begun to understand anything.

As much as anything else, Labour is being impolitic here, choosing a tiny group of people who rarely vote Labour over several far larger ones whose members have mostly done so hitherto. Now those members might just stop voting altogether, and scores of Labour seats will be lost by default. 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”, and that definition is sufficient. The IHRA Definition is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee, and therefore working-class, experience redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. In forbidding or curtailing criticism of a particular foreign state, the IHRA Definition is incompatible with national sovereignty.

The denial of the ancient indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land, where it created modern Palestinian identity, contributes significantly to the worldwide persecution of Christians. The Palestinian Christians’ ancestors predated the Israelite Conquest, they founded Jerusalem, and they became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did.

They adopted Arabic at the time of the Islamic Conquest, including the conquest of a Jerusalem that had by then been entirely Christian for centuries; that Conquest was contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of another remote former Roman province, meaning that England and Palestine are the same age, as well as sharing a Patron Saint. He is also shared with Egypt and Lebanon. 

Although the Tomb of Saint George at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod and which is the location of Israel’s principal airport, has become a shadow of its former self. It was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims. But three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948. On what remains, see here. 

But it is wrong to tell Israelis to “go home” when the State of Israel was founded in the year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. There are now fourth generation Israelis, who are very much at home.