Voices: Diane Abbott’s suggestion that Jews don’t experience racism is not only absurd – but dangerous

Diane Abbott’s suggestion that Jewish, Traveller and Irish people do not face racism was extraordinarily problematic and has been roundly condemned.

For Keir Starmer, her comments bring associations between Labour and antisemitism right back into the headlines, but he might at least be grateful that her letter in The Observer was so unambiguously bad that the party whip could be suspended without hesitation.

Abbott offered a quick apology, which may go some way to defusing the situation, but her excuse that the letter was an initial draft sent in error remains unsettling. That the position published on Sunday was the foundation from which she was working is not encouraging.

With regard to Jewish communities – so central to this controversy because of all the recent attention on Labour and antisemitism – Abbott’s letter reads like something almost purposefully designed to be included in the next version of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count.

Drawing a hard dividing line between discrimination experienced by different parts of the British population is a dubious exercise – the very point Tomiwa Owolade made in the article that Abbott was responding to.

Proposing that hatred toward Jews is not a form of racism is an extremely difficult position to maintain. Abbott refers to pre-civil rights America and apartheid South Africa, but if we’re using 20th-century history to make our arguments, the Holocaust is the example that so clearly undercuts her position.

The idea that Nazi intolerance toward Jews was not expressed in racial terms would be absurd. The notion that, with the defeat of Nazi Germany, antisemitism suddenly stopped being about race is similarly hard to maintain.

In reality, the history of racial prejudice against Jews and Black communities is deeply intertwined. James Smith, co-founder of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, has rightly argued that public Holocaust remembrance in Britain should engage more with the historic links between Nazism and white supremacy spread through the slave trade.

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Others have suggested we go even further back into history, proposing that colonial violence against non-white peoples found some of its earliest justifications in the pre-existing discrimination against Jews in Christian Europe.

None of this is to say that past and present relationships between Jewish identity and race are always simple. And working out the exact definition of antisemitism is a sometimes fraught business, not least when it intersects with the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The government and several key Jewish community organisations support the definition published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, but critics of this formulation should not be lightly dismissed; they include, for example, the director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.

Healthy discussion on these questions is vital. This summer, the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies is holding a conference on the theme of race to engage with these very issues. But there is a world of difference between credible debate and the position put forward by Diane Abbott.

David Tollerton is a senior lecturer in Jewish Studies and Contemporary Religion at the University of Exeter and the incoming president of the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies