The New Dark Age

Killing Corbynism: Zionism’s War on Socialism by Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Incarnadine Imprint (2026)

In the Financial Times of 25 April, the conservative columnist Camilla Cavendish wrote casually of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “vanquishing of the anti-Semitic Corbynite left.”

She writes such false oversimplifications regularly, like many other political commentators in the British mainstream media. Labour’s “anti-Semitism” during the years of Jeremy Corbyn — 2015-2020 – as leader of the then-opposition Labour Party is taken journalistically as a given. It is a throwaway piece of reporters’ “dash-matter” to describe his and his supporters’ identities, then and now.

A lie has entered the political language most people use.

Killing Corbynism sets out Israel’s final capture of Britain’s political class and commentariat during the past decade and the smearing of all Israel’s opponents or critics as bigots, anti-Semites, racists and terrorists.

Gordon-Nesbitt shows how the Zionist campaign helped to defeat Corbyn in his attempts to become prime minister of a proper, socialist, human-rights-protective British government: first in 2017, when he did surprisingly well; and again in 2019, when he did not.

Israel and its British-based Fifth Column of propagandists and character assassins helped deliver the party leadership to his deputy, Starmer, now prime minister, an active Zionist and supporter of Israel before and since the start of its genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians after 7 October 2023.

A similar campaign – by present-day Labour under Starmer and by Israel’s teams in the British media, politics, public life, parliament, business and the arts and including Zionist organizations posing as charitable institutions – is under way now, this time against the Green Party. This leftist party has been picking up much electoral support among the many British who support the Palestinian cause.

Although Corbyn has been a London Member of Parliament since 1983, and was known as a leftist supporting a wide range of human rights causes, it was not until he suddenly became leader of the Labour Party in opposition, after the Conservative election victory of 2015, that he drew the focused attentions of Israel and its rainbow alliance of backers and workers in the UK’s establishments.

The coffers of the pro-Israel lobby are filled by businesses and Zionist organizations here and in Israel.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its Ministry of Strategic Affairs are at the heart of the successful deception campaign to merge criticism of Israel – or criticism of Zionism as a political movement – with traditional, racist anti-Semitism.

The book lists 60 of these Israeli front organizations, many of them posing as charities. Gordon-Nesbitt selects just nine charities from the Zionist alliance, the best known being the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and UK Lawyers for Israel.

In 2015, these and other groups, including Israel’s hard-working teams of propagandists and supporters at Labour Party HQ, in the Labour parliamentary party and at local council level, were deployed to abuse Corbyn, lie about his past, create false “anti-Semitic” incidents and tropes for him, and, using disinformation combined with hysterical and often foul-mouthed imprecations, to paint him as a racist and Jew-hater.

Period of shame

The book is packed with examples, but the two that stick in my mind from the time – for me, a terrible period of shame about British politics and journalism – are the “Muralgate” affair and “Wreathgate.”

“Muralgate” emerged in a blog in 2015, which reported that in 2012 Corbyn had objected publicly (on Facebook) to the destruction of a mural painted on a London wall by a leftist street artist. This showed six capitalists sitting at a table borne on the backs of faceless black and brown men. Two of the capitalists were Jewish, Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg. The Israel machine went into overdrive.

Observer journalist Nick Cohen asked: “Is there a difference in [sic] supporting anti-Semites and being one?” Three years later the mural was resurrected by one of Corbyn’s most virulent parliamentary enemies, the MP Luciana Berger. Pro-Israel organizations called it “blatantly anti-Semitic.”

It was not. It was, plainly, a leftist commentary on the capitalist system. But “Lady” Berger (after losing her seat in the 2019 elections upon quitting the Labour Party as a pre-election attack on Corbyn) is now in the House of Lords and Corbyn is a backbench independent MP, expelled from Labour.

Another egregious case was “Wreathgate.”

Just before the general election of June 2017, the London Sunday Times (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and The Jewish Chronicle, London’s Zionist weekly, published stories saying that in 2014 Corbyn had attended a wreath-laying event in Tunis, former HQ of the Palestine Liberation Organization, for Palestinian terrorists involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic killings of Israeli athletes.

The story was nonsense.

The ceremony was a memorial event for an Israeli air strike on the PLO’s area, in October 1985, which killed as many as 70 Palestinians and 25 Tunisians. This was where and why Corbyn laid his wreath. Such facts never hindered this much-repeated story; and it took its place among the stores of ammunition plundered to assassinate Corbyn during the coming five years.

It has to be said that Corbyn’s grip on answering these charges was sometimes loose, and he tended to make apologies when no apologies were necessary, all of which the author makes clear. But the tidal waves of lies and misreporting were probably unstoppable by any single politician or party system.

Media lies

The BBC was a prime mover in all this.

I remember many occasions on which a BBC report or discussion would have the Zionist or pro-Zionist accusers repeating false charges on air against Corbyn, nearly all citing his or his party’s “anti-Semitism.” For the required “balance,” Labour apparatchiks, often senior right-wingers – the very people who were the dedicated enemies of Corbyn within Labour – would explain how they were trying to deal with anti-Semitism, admitting thereby that it existed in Labour.

The debate was rigged. Hardly ever did a pro-Corbyn Labour voice get an airing.

The climax came in the BBC’s prime-time, so-called “flagship” current affairs program Panorama, titled “Is Labour Antisemitic?” on 10 July 2019, five months before the general election. It was presented by a freelance regular on the program, John Ware, a Zionist, who later formed part of a consortium that bought The Jewish Chronicle.

The documentary largely featured pro-Israel Labour Party MPs and staff complaining – in often emotional tones – of anti-Semitism. However, they were not identified as the Israel apparatchiks they were. It was a shocking piece of slanted journalism.

The BBC defended it to the last and even used excerpts in their news bulletins. Ofcom, the broadcasters’ regulatory body, did nothing.

The use of the charge of Labour anti-Semitism, and false stories to support it, across the UK media and political debate and inside the party itself, made public criticism of Israel virtually impossible. The pro-Israel onslaught silenced even those who knew the campaign for the lies and half-truths it was.

Put succinctly, a foreign government financed and promoted with treacherous help from its British agents and assistants a political, racist libel that made impossible proper debate about foreign affairs running up to two general elections.

This alien intervention helped to kill both social justice inside the UK and any semblance of international justice in Britain’s policies toward Israel and Palestine for many years ahead. The same tactics are now being redeployed against the Green Party, which under its Jewish leader, Zack Polanski, has inherited the Corbynist mantle.

This book is a handbook for those who wish to make sure such a betrayal of Britain and British democracy never happens again, and that the truth about Israel and Palestine can be told unhindered.

Tim Llewellyn is a former BBC Middle East Correspondent.