mytitsareontheinternet-blog

[mytitsareontheinternet-blog]

Being Jewish/Being Labour

My very first political experience came in Year 4 when I had to argue against Liverpool Football Club building a new stadium in Stanley Park, the iconic separator of Anfield and Goodison. Earning myself a lot of praise for my naturally argumentative streak and on a high from my first real debate, 9-year-old me wanted to be a politician for the best part of 3 hours. I recall my dad telling my neighbour of my new-found career path and said neighbour telling me to “always fight for the poor.” At the time I probably, definitely shrugged that remark off, now I see how that comment is representative of the city I grew up in. 

Welcome to Liverpool, a city built and repaired by the EU when Thatcher’s reign wanted to drive our city into the ground. A city that has fought and continues to fight tirelessly not only for the justice of the Hillsborough victims but to erase everybody’s misconceptions about a city of workers, artists, volunteers and activists that welcome the world with open arms. It is almost a moral obligation to vote Labour in this city, in more recent times “Did you vote Labour or Tory?” is becoming as common as “Are you a Red or a Blue?” You owe it to your city, to your family, to your friends and to your community to vote Labour in Liverpool, no matter who is in charge.

My second political experience came aged 10, completely unbeknownst to me. My grandad randomly goes silent and teary and takes our dog on her second walk of the hour. She definitely didn’t need to go out again, she wasn’t expressing any want to… Now I see my grandad just didn’t want us to see him break down. As I’ve gotten older, the more my family have opened up and the more honest the world has become around me, I learned that my grandad suffers from severe panic attacks. This is believed to be from the trauma of losing loved ones to the Holocaust and a series of antisemitic attacks that he has been the victim of a handful of times in his life. These revelations have made me angry, not only have my family lost loved ones and not only do we have to grieve family that could’ve been, we have to watch something that supposedly ended 75 years ago still snatch the livelihood from our nearest and dearest even now.

I’m in my last year of school, and everyone around me seems… weirdly excited about politics. It was almost like One Direction split up and British Parliament was the next best thing. I don’t know if there was something in the water or if Jeremy Corbyn’s rebranding of a rebranded Labour lit a fire up everyone’s arse, but knowing very little about him, I really liked him. He wants everyone in the country to have a garden? Oh, what a world. A wholesome, transparent and faultless politician? That is everything everyone ever told me an MP wouldn’t be, and there is nothing more exciting than being 17 and proving a boomer wrong. A year goes by and I’m still wooed by this man, sure he has a few haters by this point but who doesn’t… It’s not like Tories don’t have a reputation for saying and doing anything to protect themselves and as a Scouser, I knew that fact all too well.

Throughout the rise and fall of Corbynism, I turned 18, I started making my own money, I reconnected massively with my Jewish heritage and I was forming all kinds of relationships, I just wasn’t as invested in it anymore. I blindly voted based on a honeymoon-like misconception I had of a politician when I was a teenager. Coming up to the General Election 2019, I started to make some discoveries about Corbyn and the never dying anti-semitism accusations that came with his name. At first I thought these claims came from opportunistic Tories that would later turn their back on Jews when they got the outcome they wanted, and don’t get me wrong, a lot of it was just that, a lot of these accusations came from people that don’t care about Jewish people at all. I simply found it hard to believe that somebody who had it so right about every other aspect of my identity, could be so wrong about my ethnicity and religion.

Time proved me wrong. I quickly realised not all of these accusations came from fake allies riding on the back of Jewish activism to push their personal agenda. In fact, most of them never and I was confused. I confided in Labour Party members on multiple platforms about my confusion and upset and I simply just wanted people to be able to justify why the face of Labour called anti-Jewish terrorist organisations his “friends.” I wanted people to tell me why this man thought English humour was lost on British Jews. I wanted everyone who told me to support this man and his cause to explain why he was defending antisemitic caricatures and why he uses the word Zionist so loosely and why he can’t help but defend countless Holocaust deniers. I, myself, was met with the same abuse and anti-semitism that my grandad described. As well as what seemed like a reluctance of people coming to my defence, which left me more perplexed because this was unusual for Labour and its members when racism surfaces.

Despite what I was put through, how unwelcome and unheard I felt in a party bouncing with activism calling out social injustice, I felt like I would be a traitor not to have marked an X in the Labour box on my ballot. Part of me was saying you’re voting for a party, not a person. I thought about Steven Smith from Kensington being sanctioned, I thought about nurses and doctors and patients on corridors, I thought about the soaring numbers of food banks and rough sleepers. I thought about myself and the career I want to pursue in medicine and how I’m even going to get there when I know I’d struggle to make ends meet at university. The other part of me was reminded that I was now blacklisted from most Labour forums for being a Jewish Labour member with concerns, that Luciana Berger was forced out of her position as Wavetree’s MP as a Jewish woman because the anti-semitism that she received was so unbearable and of course, Labour’s leader wasn’t shy of antisemitic behaviour himself. This made me feel like a traitor putting X in the Labour box too. I couldn’t win. I did so on the grounds that I wanted a Labour government, I always had and I justified this on the basis that I would continue to to fight anti-semitism within the party, no matter how silenced I was. I wanted Jewish people to be able to access Labour and campaign with Labour without feeling either unwelcome or tokenised.

It was tough. It still is. It’s going to take a while to drain the party of antisemitism and it’s going to take even longer for Jewish people to be at the forefront again, but Labour isn’t inherently anti-semitic, it doesn’t have to be, there is a future for Jewish voices in Labour, but there is also a future where I will no longer advocate for a party that doesn’t advocate for me.