Sir Keir Starmer

• SIR Keir Starmer and senior shadow cabinet ministers hosted officials from Israel’s Labor party, including taking them door-knocking for local elections in Barnet.

Further the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, hosted the delegation for dinner and the group also met the shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and discussed campaign tactics with senior figures in Labour HQ including the general secretary David Evans.

The Israeli Labor Party (ILP) has a long history of racism. In the recent past Isaac Herzog, while leader of the ILP stated his apartheid view to: “separate from as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible… We want to… complete the barrier that separates us.” And he said that intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is a “plague”.

In Starmer’s acceptance speech as Labour Party leader he said, “I support Zionism without qualification”.

There is overwhelming evidence from Palestinian and Israeli organisations (B’Tselem, Yesh Din), the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and more, that Israel is an apartheid state.

Starmer’s response: “Israel is not an apartheid state.”

Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism is wedded to Labour’s approach to “combating anti-Semitism”.

Starmer has overseen that five times more Jewish than non-Jewish Labour members have been investigated, suspended or expelled for “anti-Semitism”, including pro-Palestinians like ourselves.

Is there any precedent for a United Kingdom party to take a foreign power electioneering?

Are we to understand from this that taking the Israeli Labor party door-to-door in Barnet, tells voters that a vote for Starmer’s Labour is interchangeable with a vote for Israeli apartheid?

We are appalled.

MICHAEL KALMANOVITZ
SAM WEINSTEIN
International Jewish
Anti-Zionist Network UK