(JTA) — The campaign manager of a Labour candidate for British parliament wrote that “many of the left” are worried about support for pogroms by Jews against Palestinians in “a Jewish final solution.”
Brett Hawksbee, the top aide for Laura McAlpine, who is aiming to unseat Conservative Robert Halfon in the London suburb of Harlow in December’s election, wrote this in September, The Jewish News of London reported Friday. He has since apologized.
“The fear of many on the left is that the ideological successors of the bombers of the King David Hotel, the mass murderers who decimated Deir Yassin, would be quite happy to see a pogrom in Gaza and the West Bank, a Jewish final solution to the Palestine problem,” Hawksbee wrote.
Irgun, a right-wing militia in prestate Israel, in 1946 bombed the Jerusalem hotel that was favored by British officials and officers. Militants from Irgun and Lehi, another right-wing militia, killed many civilians in 1948 at Deir Yassin, an Arab village. Nazi Germany called the mass murder of Jews a “final solution.”
McAlpine has not publicly condemned Hawksbee’s remarks, according to The Jewish News.
The Jewish Labour Movement, a chapter within the party, wrote that it is “unacceptable that Laura McAlpine stood by Brett Hawksbee despite his antisemitic comments.”
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, a far-left politician who was elected to lead the party in 2015, has become a “safe space for those with vile attitudes towards Jewish people,” a British parliamentary committee of inquiry asserted in 2016.
