"There is a basic level of ignorance in British society - partly wilful ignorance, partly genuine misinformation, partly flat-out denial - about how the Israeli state actually came to be. There seems to be in Britain - in TV commentators, in mainstream academics, in ordinary public opinion - a deep reluctance to acknowledge how, in 1948, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were forcibly evicted, with British backing, off their own land. To recognise this as racist, in the words of the IHRA code, would be "anti-semitic". A large part of the mainstream media anger towards the Labour Party for refusing the "internationally recognised" code is an establishment anger against a political party for refusing to accept the post-war narrative - a narrative, moreover, which has been successfully disseminated and internalised among many people in the UK since 1948. This is the scale of the British Labour Party's problem - if it is to go through with this, it...