By Michael Champion - 5th October 2009
Hostility towards Israel has become entrenched in the institutions of the UK, Stephen Crabb has warned at a fringe meeting at Conservative party conference in Manchester.
He said the Labour Party was rife with anti-Israel sentiment and had become an incompatible place for friends of Israel.
Many of his Labour colleagues were afraid to speak out in favour of Israel in case "they are met with a wall of vitriol", the Conservative MP said.
Addressing a fringe meeting in Manchester, the Pembrokeshire MP acknowledged that anti-Israel opinion was not exclusively the preserve of the left, but said the predominance of “distasteful and unattractive” remarks now came from the mainstream left.
Crabb cited joint motions by Unison, Unite and the Fire Brigade Union -where Israel was likened to Apartheid South Africa- as an example of negative attitudes towards Israel.
As well as the Unions and Church of England, Crabb said that various NGOs often delivered "crude commentary" about Israel's political position.
And he said the language and tone of comments directed at Israel from MPs in Parliament was often "shocking".
In particular, the international development committee, in its investigation in to accusations of human rights abuses Gaza, called for dialogue with Hamas; something Crabb described as unconventional and removed from mainstream thought.
He also accused the BBC of biased reporting about Israel.
The largely pro-Israeli audience in the meeting laughed with incredulity at a February 2008 headline about a suicide bombing Crabb recalled which read 'Rare suicide bomber hits Israel'.
Crabb said he thought Israel's close relationship with America was a major reason the Left took such a hostile stance.
He also stated that many of the left think of Israel as a product of Western colonialism, and coupled with her success as a capitalist, westernised nation, her politics is largely antithetical to those of the Left.
Douglas Carswell agreed largely with Crabb and offered a four-point theory about why the left oppose Israel with such hostility.
Carswell's first cause of hostility was a generational one stemming from the end of Empire in this country.
He argued that the generation who fought and endured the Second World War became largely disenchanted with Britain's post war decline and had bad memories of the Stern Gang and King David Hotel bombings.
Carswell's second point was that anti-Semitism was becoming more prevalent in this country, and that once the preserve of the BNP and skinheads, it was now being expounded by radical extremists.
The third point was that the left's inclination toward supranational politics was fundamentally at odds with the case of Israel; her independence and self-defining nature, and particularly her success as a nation state, is an example which disproves the lefts multilateral and 'anti-nationist' approach.
Finally, he said left wing ideology now rests on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, rather than Marx and Methodism.
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