People who don’t join political parties imagine that membership is an expression of opinions held in common. It starts that way, but over time, party loyalty comes to be defined at the threshold of tolerable extremism. What ugly attitude can you rub along with without recoil because, politically speaking, it’s family?
That is the question that Lee Anderson, a former deputy chair of the Conservative party, forced on fellow Tories with his assertion that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.
The whip was withdrawn. Rishi Sunak saw a line being crossed but struggled to name the crossing point, observing only that Anderson was “wrong”, not racist or Islamophobic. There was an awkward void in the place where the Conservative leader located the wrongness.
The transgression was severe enough to merit expulsion from the parliamentary party, but it can’t be defined by words that are applied without hesitation by anyone who really understands the offence.
The prime minister doesn’t want to call it Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hate because that would cast a net of opprobrium over everyone in his party who agrees with Anderson. They are too numerous to anathematise. It would drag in Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, who has written that Keir Starmer is “in hock” to Islamists who have nobbled parliament and “bullied our country into submission”.
Some Conservative MPs reject such paranoid hallucinations for what they are. Most finesse the question as a matter of rhetorical taste. “Not the words I would have chosen,” is a standard non-repudiation. It avoids naming the ingredient that is too spicy for more subtle Tory lips.
Press for clarity and the conversation is diverted on to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, antisemitic placards appearing in the throng, chants celebrating a Middle East with Israel erased and, since Hamas pursues that goal by indiscriminate murder, a shadow of intimidation felt by many British Jews.
Those are not imaginary issues, but they can be raised without plunging into the murky water where Anderson and friends swim. “Control” is the keyword. It unlocks the insinuation that Khan is a cipher, a sleeper agent. He might sound like a mainstream politician of the centre-left, but that is a front. He might have a commendable record of running a multiethnic capital with respect for the cultural sensibilities of its diverse communities, but his true agenda is sectarian.
That is not a plausible depiction of the actual Sadiq Khan. But Anderson speaks to an audience (mostly outside London) that doesn’t see beyond the mayor’s Muslim faith and the colour of his skin, taking them as proof of ulterior and unsavoury allegiance.
Encoded in the attack on Khan is the old “cricket test”, formulated by Tory grandee Norman Tebbit. Tebbit’s question: do immigrants and their children cheer for England in the Test match, or do their non-native hearts crave victory for some other land? The cricket test sets a cruel bar for belonging in Britain. It can only be cleared by jettisoning intimate components of identity. That is nationalism doing what nationalism does – narrowing the criteria for who counts as part of the nation and policing the boundary with menaces.
The left traditionally rejects that way of thinking, with one exception. A socialist variant of the cricket test applies to Jews who feel some cultural, religious or family affinity to Israel, which is most of Britain’s Jewish community.
Formally, the test is not racial. The passport for admittance to left virtue is repudiation of “Zionism”, which is a polyvalent word, narrower than Jewishness, wider than Israeli. It has a complex history, disputed among Jews themselves, which is what gives it utility in laundering the ancient animus. Much of the “anti-Zionism” that exonerates itself from racism replicates the imagery and idiom of what, a century ago, was denounced as “International Jewry”.
The progressive Geiger counter that crackles on contact with most particles of racist radiation passes silently over talk of “Zionists” exerting control over the media, finance and British foreign policy.
No alarm was raised at the meeting of Lancashire county council’s Labour group in which Azhar Ali, later to become the party’s candidate in the Rochdale byelection, said that the Israeli government had knowingly permitted the Hamas atrocities of 7 October as a pretext for military aggression in Gaza. It took a few days for Ali to lose Keir Starmer’s endorsement.
Many were dismayed by the propagation of a wild conspiracy theory while doubting that antisemitism was in the room. But it takes irrational fixation on the evil of a Jewish state, and intuitive reluctance to empathise with a narrative of Jewish victimhood, to embrace the idea that Israel organised a blood sacrifice of its own people to facilitate conquest of Palestinian land.
Conspiracy theory as conduit into the mainstream is a common factor in the spread of antisemitism and Islamophobia. It is the difference between conversations about “Islamism” or “Zionism” as terms that Muslims and Jews might recognise, and the deployment of those words as pseudoanalytical camouflage on blanket vilification of a minority community.
Purported vigilance against “Islamism” is a bridge between the mainstream right and the morbid ultranationalist fantasy where Muslim communities in “no-go areas” wage demographic war to replace Christian populations. “Anti-Zionism” causes a blurring of vision on the mainstream left that makes it hard for some people to distinguish between the struggle for Palestinian justice and railing against inveterate Jewish bloodlust.
I have written this far without a personal expression of horror and despair at the plight of Gaza. Does a Jewish journalist have to declare non-affiliation to the Israeli government, and confess to a sickening dread of every news bulletin, as his licence to participate in conversations about the Middle East?
We are not all freelance ambassadors for a foreign state. We are often made to feel like it, which induces an impulse of resentful emotional retreat. I imagine something similar is felt by British Muslims after terrorist attacks carried out in the name of jihad. It is hard not to resent the suspicion of complicity, the unspoken charge of guilt by cultural adjacency, that flickers in a stranger’s eyes.
None of these experiences is exactly equivalent. Antisemitism on the left and Islamophobia on the right can’t be formulated as a balanced string of political algebra. But there is a grim symmetry of blind spots, self-righteous denial and selective outrage. There is an unhealthy division of vigilance with partisans from each end of the political spectrum appointing themselves arbiters of the prejudice they have decided belongs to the opposite side.
Jewish and Muslim identities are not signifiers of ideology or party loyalty. But British politics, in its relentless polarising vortex, seems unable to treat them, treat us, as anything other than potential recruits for a dangerous round of mutual antagonism. And we are tired, I am tired, of having personal identity, family attachment, culture and innermost anxiety scored and folded into darts for other people to hurl across party lines. So very tired.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 28 February 2024. The Israel comments from Azhar Ali that led to Labour withdrawing its support for him were made at a meeting held prior to Ali being selected as the party’s candidate in the Rochdale byelection. This has been corrected. Also, this meeting was held in Hyndburn, not Rochdale as an earlier version said.
