Booker Award-winning novelist Howard Jacobson said in an interview with the BBC’s Chris Cook last Friday that he had noticed “a new viciousness” in the anti-Semitism of the British Left since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party last year.

The issue of anti-Semitism has been dogging the Labour Party since Corbyn’s election, but became especially acute in the last week, when a member of parliament and a former mayor of London were suspended from the party for making anti-Semitic remarks. Jacobson noted that what had been happening in the Labour Party “has been brewing for years.”

I’ve written articles in the last 15 years in the paper, and some of them are still fished up now and turn up as if still current. People write and say, “That was a great article you wrote the other day,” and I say, “No, I wrote it 15 years ago.” Nothing much has changed in the last 15 years, I don’t think.

Except for, and this is what I do think—I think with Jeremy Corbyn a voice has been given, a confidence has been given to some people who were a little more wary beforehand. Jeremy Corbyn—it’s a classic case of someone who has been brought up just to assume that case of Israel as an imperial power in the pay of the Americans and the Westerns. An oppressive imperial power. He was just fed on that, he’ll never change that. It’s like milk. To ask him to change his mind on Israel is like asking him to approve of people that go to public school. It can’t be done, it’s part of his genetic makeup. But when he came into power, and I felt that when I was writing for The Independent, a new kind of thread starting to appear at the bottom of one’s articles, a new virulence, a new viciousness. It’s as though Jeremy Corbyn unleashed something. It had been there all along but he gave it a new voice.

When asked if he could see British Jews voting for Labour, Jacobson replied, “I don’t see why they would right this minute.”

Jacobson also countered those who say that those who are critical of Israel are falsely accused of anti-Semitism.

I think that being critical of Zionism and critical of Israel are not quite the same thing. I think anyone should think twice about being critical of Zionism, if I’m right, and I am right. It was and remains a liberation movement. But be critical of Israel all you like. Critical is a comical word in this context. The whole idea “critical of Israel” is like a phrase now, or a term. We don’t talk about being “critical of China” or “critical of Turkey.” “Critical of Israel” just goes together. And I like the word “critical.” I used to be a critic. Criticism is an act of discrimination, an act of intellectual and moral discrimination. Criticism: “That works, that doesn’t work, that’s a good bit.” What I hear often, when the Left talks about Israel, is not what I call criticism. It’s a denunciation, it’s a vilification.

When someone says… “[Israeli Jews] glorify in the killing Palestinian babies.” When someone says, “There’s reason to believe that the IDF troops, the Israeli soldiers went to help in the Haitian earthquake and just might have harvested the organs.” When I hear people saying, “there’s genocide going on there,” “there’s apartheid going on there.” When every act of violence is a massacre. That’s not the language of criticism. That’s an inordinate language whose aim is to call into disrepute every aspect of Israeli society, and, in the end, every Israeli Jew. At that point I say that people that talk like that aren’t entitled to say, “I’m just being a critic of Israel.” They’re being something else.

In addition to being one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed authors, Jacobson is also a columnist for The Independent. During the war between Israel and Hamas in 2009, Jacobson wrote a column decrying the intolerance and hatred that was informing much of the criticism of Israel at that time.

It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don’t mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.

A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.

But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, “criticism” of Israel, pure and simple. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians this country has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. Deviate a fraction of a moral millimetre from the prevailing othodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question.

[Photo: Chris Cook / BBC ]