Palestine pledge
Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry used a Labour Friends of Palestine and Middle East fringe meeting at the party’s Brighton conference to pledge that the first priority of the next Labour government would be to recognise the state of ‘Palestine’.
Security risk
Apart from a Jewish exodus, by far the most likely casualty of a Corbyn government would be the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, according to journalist Con Coughlin.
He points out that Mr Corbyn has made no secret of his sympathies for Russia, Iran, and North Korea and referred to Hamas as “friends”.
One “highly influential American security source” had told him in November that a Corbyn government would be “a disaster for the US and other Western allies who work closely with London on a whole range of global security issues.”
Faulty labels
Products from Jewish settlements in the so-called West Bank cannot carry the label ‘Made in Israel’ but must be labelled as originating from an ‘Israeli settlement’, the European Court of Justice ruled on 12 November.
The court justified its decision as informing consumers, but Tomas Sandell of the European Coalition for Israel, claimed that it recalls “some of the darkest chapters of European history, when the labelling of Jewish businesses with a Star of David was also seen as a form of consumer information.”
Just two days before the ruling, Jewish communities across Europe commemorated the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht. On 9-10 November 1938, over 7000 Jewish businesses across Germany were attacked, looted and destroyed.
Mr Sandell called the EU court ruling “counterproductive to peace and a gift to radical forces in Europe and the Middle East who want to isolate, boycott and delegitimise the State of Israel and demonise the Jewish people”.
Synagogue security threats
Jewish communities across the UK are being told to “keep doors closed and locked” at their synagogues in the wake of recent security threats.
The Community Security Trust decision to issue such a warning follows anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues across Europe, particularly in Germany.
Meanwhile Kent police have formally identified the desecration of four Jewish gravestones as a hate crime after being called to the Chatham Memorial Synagogue on High Street, Rochester.
Tube adverts illegal
Anti-Semitic propaganda has spread to the London underground. Illegal adverts accusing sportswear company Puma of sponsoring “Israeli apartheid” have been posted inside tube trains, with the so-called Special Patrol Group apparently claiming responsibility.
Death of a heroine
Yvette Lundy, a well-known member of the French Resistance and a Nazi concentration camp survivor, has died aged 103.
Ms Lundy supplied fake papers to Jewish families, men fleeing forced labour and escaped prisoners of war during the Nazi occupation of France. In 2017 she was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour – one of France’s highest civilian decorations.