AT A RECENT pro-Palestine demonstration in Manchester — where a rally and march has been a weekly event since October 7 — the two Jewish Voice for Labour banners fluttering in the breeze had the words “for Labour” crossed out in thick black marker.

The affiliation with a party its members were once proud of, after former leader Jeremy Corbyn rebuilt its membership and mandate to reflect a genuine socialist manifesto, is now a source of embarrassment and even anger.

Intense discussions have been ongoing as to whether to change the name altogether, while somehow retaining the acronym. Jewish Voice for Liberation was one suggestion. Another was to use a lower case L, representing the labour movement instead of the party. For now, the name remains. But it’s an uncomfortable alliance.

“I think things are worse in the present Labour Party than they were when Tony Blair took it over,” argues one member, Tony Booth, whose background is in education. 

“There is a hard-right leadership regime installed with the economic and social policies of New Labour, which supports the hostile environment for refugees, fails to stand up for human rights and the rule of law, supports the curtailment of rights to free speech and protest, infantilises its membership by forbidding discussion of grown-up issues, is cutting back on environmental commitments, and is complicit in the incitement to, and enactment of, genocide by Israel,” Booth said.

Ironically, by some counts, more Jews have been expelled from the Labour Party or have left voluntarily than non-Jews, amid the purges ostensibly designed to root out anti-semitism within the party. 

As JVL said in a letter to Labour leadership dated August 22 2023, “Jewish members are six times more likely to be investigated and 9.5 times more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party for anti-semitism than non-Jewish members.”

Similarly in the United States, Jewish opposition to the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people has been vocal from the beginning. But there, too, frustration has been mounting as the Biden administration delivers slaps on the wrist to the brutal Netanyahu government while continuing to arm Israel.

More than 500 members and supporters of Jewish Voice for Peace stormed the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month, staging a sit-down occupation that blocked the entrance and temporarily halted business there. At least 200 were arrested. JVP described the action as the largest act of civil disobedience ever held at the venerable Wall Street institution.

“We chanted ‘Stop arming Israel, let Gaza live,’ as cops arrested over 200 of us, dragging elders and descendants of Holocaust survivors out by our arms and legs,” said an official JVL statement.

“Wall Street has been profiting off of genocide, every genocide of this country since the founding of this country, since the founding genocides,” JVP’s director of organising and strategy, Elena Stein, told the US news programme, Democracy Now!

“We are filled with horror beyond words and are attempting to embody just an ounce of that refusal,” Stein said.

The compunction felt by Jews to protest against another genocide with such passion and commitment is a deep-seated one, expressed most powerfully in March 2011 during a speech by Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish-American scholar who specialises in the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Speaking at the University of Waterloo in Canada before a steadily more hostile audience, Finkelstein rejected criticism for comparing the Israelis to the Nazis during the Holocaust.

“Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated,” Finkelstein said. “Both of my parents were in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.”

As the boos rose louder, so did Finkelstein’s voice. “I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering and their martyrdom to try to justify the torture, the brutalisation, the demolition of homes that Israel daily commits against the Palestinians,” he said.

“If you had any heart in you, you’d be crying for the Palestinians.”

The bombardment of criticism levelled at Jews who support the Palestinian cause has only intensified since then. Withstanding it has broken family relationships and led to accusations of anti-semitism even among Jews themselves. 

As Jerome Segal, a US philosopher and perennial candidate for political office, told me in an interview several years ago, standing up for Palestinians will label you, bizarrely, “a Jewless Jew.”

Rejecting that means marching and protesting. In Manchester, one young man summed it up best with the words on the back of his hooded jumper: “The wrong kind of Jews are the best kind.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is currently covering events in England.