• AS supporters of Palestinian human rights, we are deeply disturbed by recent developments in the Labour Party.

The internal report of Labour’s General and Legal Unit, leaked last March, confirmed that until the spring of 2018 the party HQ was controlled by a fiercely anti-Jeremy Corbyn team.

According to the report, this team ignored anti-Semitism complaints in order to discredit Corbyn because of his left-wing views, including his support for Palestinian rights.

Yet rather than addressing the report’s shocking findings, Sir Keir Starmer launched an investigation of how the report was leaked.

The recent report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, initiated by groups hoping to see the party under Corbyn condemned as institutionally racist, reached no such conclusion.

It found only four related cases, two of harassment involving race and two of indirect discrimination: a clear indication anti-Semitism has not been endemic in the party.

The report did affirm that there had been unwarranted interference in the internal investigations in 23 of the 70 cases examined. But in many of these cases the leader’s office evidently interfered not to hamper the investigations but to speed them up.

Yet Sir Keir apologised on behalf of the party for this supposedly damning report, while suspending Corbyn after he endorsed the report then commented without reference to it that claims of anti-Semitism in the party had been greatly exaggerated.

Since becoming party leader last April, Sir Keir has said nothing about Palestine nor a word of criticism of Israel’s continuing house demolitions or illegal settlement building.

In contrast Corbyn is a life-long anti-racist fighter and in no way anti-Semitic even by the grotesque International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, being promoted by the present government, which conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

His long-standing support for the Palestinian people, struggling endlessly against siege, occupation, displacement and discriminatory laws by an institutionally racist Israeli state is to be applauded.

The source of the “leaked report” in March this year by Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) was not the Forde Enquiry Panel. The Forde Enquiry Panel was set up by Sir Keir Starmer as an external panel with the remit to investigate the circumstances of commissioning, leaking and the contents of the GLU’s report. The Forde Inquiry has not reported publicly to date.

SABBY SAGALL
Chair, Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign
HELENA AKSENTIJEVIC
JANET GREEN
STEPHEN KAPOS
ROBERT BOYCE
VICTORIA BRITTAIN
GARETH MURPHY
ROGER HIGGINSON
SUE CAMPBELL