HERE is a story about the Labour Party, Jewish people and anti-semitism. It features no actual anti-semites and ostensibly arises from a situation on which all protagonists appear to be more or less in agreement.

But it ends in this: the day before Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) a Jewish woman started to address a meeting of her local Labour Party on the subject of how Jewish women had resisted the Holocaust, whereupon around one-third of the meeting walked out.

So this is a parable of the politics of anti-semitism in and around the Labour Party in the post-Corbyn era. A story of factionalism trumping decency, of divisions within the Jewish community and ultimately of good people doing bad things.

We are in north London, specifically the Hornsey and Wood Green Constituency Labour Party. This was and may still be the largest constituency party in the country, having 3,700 members (down more than a thousand from its peak), many of whom joined under Corbyn’s leadership.

The constituency forms one-half of the borough of Haringey. The council was the site of a high-profile struggle between a pro-developer Labour leadership and left-wing critics, which ended in the defeat of the former. The struggle, as they say, continues, which may not be irrelevant to what unfolded.

In mid-January the executive of the constituency decided that, given the next General Committee (GC) meeting fell on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, it should be marked by speakers on the subject. Two were invited — both of them members of the GC in their own right.

First up was local Rabbi David Mason. He presides at Muswell Hill synagogue in the constituency and is also very active in the Labour Party. I met Rabbi Mason once and found him an intelligent and empathetic man. He is involved with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), Labour’s explicitly zionist affiliate, which is sometimes critical of Israeli government actions and more often critical of Israel’s critics.

He also has an MA in Conflict Resolution, skills that will be needed going forward and have perhaps not been brought to the table early enough in this episode.

He was to be second on the agenda. At ninth was Sue Levi-Hughes who describes herself as a “non-zionist Jew” and was to do a short presentation on the role of Jewish women in opposing Nazi terror. Levi-Hughes is active in the Jewish Socialists’ Group and has run equalities training courses, including on anti-semitism.

Levi-Hughes and Rabbi Mason clearly sit on different points of the Jewish Labour spectrum. Ostensibly, their different affiliations had nothing to do with what happened next. The issue as presented began instead in Jerusalem.

Levi-Hughes tweeted a template message drawn up by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in relation to the evictions taking place in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood thus: “Last night, Israel demolished the home of the Salhiya family in Sheikh Jarrah, leaving the family refugees a 2nd time. Our Govs allow the apartheid state to carry out its ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians with impunity.”

Rabbi Mason also tweeted critically: “The eviction of a family in Sheikh Jarrah is very difficult to see. Yes of course some will run to legal reasons … but it is wrong things come to this.” Not a great deal of difference in essence. However, somewhere a blue touch paper had been lit.

Five days later and on the day before the meeting Mason sent an email to local party chair Anne O’Daly saying that Sue Levi Hughes’s tweet was “totally unacceptable” in its use of the terms “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” and because it was sent in the week before Holocaust Memorial Day, as if there were some sort of exclusion zone around the day within which Israel could act but the world could not comment. He argued that the terms used failed “to meet the nature and spirit of the IHRA definition on anti-semitism.”

The last assertion is troubling since it would vindicate the fears of those who have argued that the IHRA examples could be used to silence legitimate, even if arguable, descriptions of Israel. In a week in which Amnesty International and a dozen organisations in Israel itself have described the treatment of Palestinians as equivalent to apartheid, joining incidentally any number of Israeli former senior politicians, the observation is particularly inapposite.

Nevertheless, Levi-Hughes’s tweet was, he wrote, “incredibly offensive to the Jewish community ... So, I am writing to make it clear that as long as Sue Levi Hughes is on the agenda in connection with the Holocaust and HMD, I cannot and will not participate in the meeting.”

This was an “it’s her-or-me” ultimatum launched on the grounds that certain descriptions of Israel are offensive to many within the Jewish community. I have no doubt that they are, but there is no right not to be offended, as opposed to not being personally abused. Taking cancel culture to the extent of policing speech about a foreign state, however much one identifies with it, will not end well. Rabbi Mason did not respond to an email seeking comment sent through his synagogue.

O’Daly exercised her best endeavours to persuade Rabbi Mason not to maintain his boycott and local Labour MP Catherine West, of whom more anon, urged Levi-Hughes to stand down so the rabbi could reverse his unilateral decision. No deal.  

O’Daly was clear that she would not be a party to changing “the executive committee’s decision to see the presentation created by someone of Levi-Hughes’s knowledge, experience and family history.” Levi-Hughes was not, it should be noted, being invited to share her views on Israel or evictions in Jerusalem, but on resistance to the Holocaust.

So we come to the meeting, held on Zoom. Also, enter Steve Hart, a former chair of the local party who I know pretty well as he was London regional secretary for Unite, in which role he was an unstinting advocate for Ken Livingstone and later the union’s political director. Always a decent man in my experience and certainly no anti-semite of any kind.

Hart objected to the agenda, demanding the removal of Levi-Hughes’s presentation which was by that point the only item marking Holocaust Memorial Day. He was speaking on behalf of a group of attendees who appeared to have received copies of Rabbi Mason’s email. He pressed this to the point of challenging the chair’s ruling that the agenda should remain intact. This fell well short of even a simple majority, let alone the two-thirds required.

When Levi-Hughes started her presentation 34 party members exited the meeting, whilst 89 stayed to listen. This is the introduction to what the 89 heard, despite the no-platformers’ efforts:

“The Holocaust is part of my family history. Both my parents and grandparents were refugees from Nazi Germany in the late ‘30s. This, of course, after several years when Jews were being persecuted, driven out of their homes and physically attacked. My aunt, uncle and cousins perished in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen.

“The history of the Holocaust is part of my present. It is a part of me, ingrained into me. I live with it and I live with the trauma my parents unwittingly passed down to me and my sister…Their fear that we would be recognised as Jews outside of the Jewish area we lived in became my reality and I ditched my recognisably Jewish name as soon as I could.

“Now I am proud to use my Jewish surname Levi. I put together this presentation to honour the memory of all those who fought so courageously against Nazi horrors, with a particular focus on women.”

Did matters rest there? They did not. Re-enter Catherine West, MP since 2015 and loosely on the soft left of Labour. Instead of delivering her MP’s report, West said she thought what had occurred “was very shoddy” treatment of Rabbi Mason, concluding that “today’s meeting shows we still have a problem with anti-semitism in the party.”

That last point is clearly in a sense true, if not in the sense West meant. It is hard to see an organised walkout of a presentation by a Jewish woman on the Holocaust in any other light and that is certainly how Levi-Hughes felt it, although there were also some Jewish members among those leaving the meeting.

Steve Hart continues to justify the action. He told me: “I requested that Sue Hughes be disinvited out of respect to David Mason and our local Jewish community. It is clearly a matter of fact that the language of the tweet was offensive to the Jewish community and, in the interests of unity, wanted to show solidarity with David Mason.” Actually, it is doubtful that the “Jewish community” would be of one mind on the matter.

As a unity initiative, the walkout does not seem to have been the most successful. Hart seemed indifferent to the optics of the stunt, but acknowledged he was unaware that Levi-Hughes had lost family in the Holocaust. Hart, too, deplores what happened at Sheikh Jarrah, but he opposes the use of language like “apartheid” in relation to Israel.  

Within an hour, Jewish News reporter Lee Harpin had been briefed on these events, or a version of them. His report was revealing, although not in respect of Levi-Hughes’s ethnicity, which went unremarked in the first version to appear —  it was later updated — which is odd given the paper’s constituency. But let his sources, all apparently among the Hart faction, speak for themselves:

“‘Catherine West really kicked arse tonight with her speech.’ Another local member described it as a ‘big moment’ in a long-running battle between moderate and left-wing factions in the local party… the hard-left faction was left with what one member described to Jewish News as ‘a bloody nose’ on the night. Another said: ‘It’s been a long-time coming. But finally, it looks like our CLP is getting its act together.’”

In other words, for the walker-outers this was little to do with anti-semitism, or Israel, or the Holocaust. Marking Holocaust Memorial Day was simply another pretext for a factional punch-up. Left unexplained was why Harpin’s source thought the majority had received a “bloody nose” when if there were any winners it was that majority, but the use of such rhetoric in relation to boycotting a speech by Jewish woman on such an occasion seems inappropriate.  

Steve Hart acknowledged that the local party is “desperately factionalised —  it does get pretty vicious.” On that, he is clearly right.  

Levi-Hughes seemed still somewhat traumatised by the episode when I spoke to her over a week later. “Have we really got to the point where one Jewish person’s right to describe events of the Nazi period, including the exile and murder of members of their own family, is conditional on them accepting JLM’s stance on Israel/Palestine,” she asks.  

“My two daughters have asked me to leave the Labour Party because it is no longer a safe space for myself as a Jewish woman. I feel I am going to be targeted,” she added. Given the attitude shown by Harpin’s interlocutors, that is not surprising. This was, objectively, a factional walkout with anti-semitic impact, whatever its protagonists intended.

It rumbles on. At least 55 GC delegates have written to Catherine West to “express our full solidarity with... Levi Hughes and deplore the attempt, by a minority of delegates, to prevent her giving a presentation about Jewish women’s resistance in the Holocaust at a GC meeting on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day. Their walkout was disrespectful and shameful.

“We further call on our MP Catherine West to provide a written apology to Sue for her remarks and for the hurt and disrespect shown to Sue and her family.” West has made no further public comment on the episode as of this writing, even though her twitter feed has been full of criticism of her conduct. She did not respond to emailed questions from the Star.

What lessons can be extracted from this miserable saga? One is that there remain deep divisions over Israeli conduct within the Jewish community. Those differences particularly resonate within the labour movement, where non- or anti-zionist Jews form a larger proportion than they do in the community as a whole.

The Labour Party’s wholesale assault on the legitimacy of those Jewish people who support the non-zionist Jewish Voice for Labour, for example, or have similar opinions leads to conduct like that seen in Hornsey and Wood Green appearing OK, when really it isn’t. There must be better ways of accepting the diversity of opinion among Jewish Labour supporters regarding Israel.

A second is that the issue of anti-semitism in Labour has more than ever become a factional football. The Harpin report on the meeting is powerful evidence here. Even the most solemn occasions in the Jewish calendar can be prejudiced by factional posturing, in this case by the local party’s right-wing who would rather hear nothing at all on Holocaust Memorial Day than hear from the wrong sort of Jew, if doing so supposedly bloodies the left’s nose.

Out in the real world, at the same time as the Hornsey meeting, two elderly Jewish bakers were subject to a violent assault in Stamford Hill, just across the borough, in an apparently anti-semitic attack. A man has been arrested and denied the charges. Is that not where the imperative of opposition to Jew-hatred and of solidarity with the community, lies, rather than Twitter rows about Israel?

That an attempt was made to no-platform a Jewish woman addressing the Holocaust in a Labour Party meeting that very same evening should be a matter of shame.