(JTA) – Britain’s Labour Party has adopted a definition of antisemitism that is laxer than the one used by the country’s executive branch. The Labour definition as reported July 5 by the LBC radio station is based on the one adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, and since then by several countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and five others in the European Union, as well as the EU as a whole. But Labour omits at least four points featured in the original one, including accusing Jews of “being more loyal to Israel” than their own country; claiming that Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor”; applying a “double standard” on Israel; and comparing “contemporary Israeli policy” to that of the Nazis. “Labour now holds its members to a lower standard of anti-racism than the law demands,” The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland wrote on Twitter.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, who has called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends” and who is fighting accusations of harboring antisemitic sentiments, has come under intense scrutiny in the media over antisemitic rhetoric by its members. In 2016, an interparliamentary committee accused Labour of creating a “safe space for those with vile attitudes towards Jewish people.”

The Labour definition does contain references to Israel, including that “Israel’s description (of itself and frequently by others) as a ‘Jewish State’” is an issue that “can cause particular difficulty in the context of deciding whether language or behavior is antisemitic.” It also defines as antisemitic the actions of “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust” and “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism” to “characterize Israel or Israelis.”

Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl and Jonathan Goldstein, the chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council umbrella group, condemned the new definition in a statement July 5. “It is for Jews to determine for themselves what antisemitism is,” they said. “It is impossible to understand why Labour refuses to align itself with this universal definition. Its actions only dilute the definition and further erode the existing lack of confidence that British Jews have in their sincerity to tackle antisemitism within the Labour movement.”

CAP: Jeremy Corbyn