ANALYSIS Jeremy Corbyn tries to heal Jewish rift and ends up pleasing no one
3 min read
On reflection, it may have been better if he hadn't bothered.
Jeremy Corbyn's team knew they had to do something - anything - to lance the boil of anti-Semitism which had once again come to a head in the Labour party.
The Labour leader's tetchy response to being doorstepped about it by Sky News the other day demonstrated how irritating and energy-sapping he was finding the whole sorry mess.
By contrast, John McDonnell's insistence in The Independent and on TV that the problem had cut the party "to the core" and would be sorted out by the time of Labour's conference next month struck precisely the right tone.
So it was the right call by Corbyn's advisers that he needed to make some kind of intervention to hopefully begin to build bridges with the Jewish community.
The problem was that those around him could not agree on what form it should take. The Jewish Museum in Camden was approached about being the venue for a speech, but no agreement could be reached.
Then there was talk of a video message posted on social media - a format Corbyn has used to good effect on previous occasions - but that was eventually ditched.
In the end, they opted to play it safe with an article in The Guardian.
Leaving aside the timing - releasing it just as the Jewish community is beginning to celebrate Shabbat is, if you are being kind, unfortunate - the content has all the hallmarks of a student leaving it to the last possible second before rattling out that dissertation that was meant to be in last week.
Remarkably, some passages have been lifted from an article Corbyn wrote for the Evening Standard at the height of the last Labour anti-Semitism crisis in April.
On top of that, there is nothing particularly new in it. The Labour leader's insistence that Labour anti-Semites do not speak for him was a strong message, but he has used similar language before.
And on the genesis of the latest controversy, namely Labour's decision not to fully accept the International Holocaust Rememberance Alliance's working definition of anti-Semitism, alongwith its accompanying examples, Corbyn conceded virtually no ground to his critics, who have demanded full implementation straight away.
Predictably, those critics have been quick to condemn the article. A spokesman for the Jewish Labour Movement - who Corbyn said he looked forward to working with - said: "Other than another article bemoaning a situation of the Party’s own making, nothing has changed. There is no trust left. We find ourselves asking once again for action, not words."
But even the normally supportive Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada website was unimpressed.
We also know that members of Corbyn's own team are split between those who believe he should go further to shut down this row, and those who believe he has gone too far in appeasing his opponents.
After all the angst which led to its production, his latest attempt to heal the split between Labour and Britain's Jews has ended up pleasing nobody.
