sked to name the greatest single cause of the climate crisis, you might waver between, say, industry or electricity generation or agriculture, but in 2007 the former Labour cabinet minister Clare Short had a novel answer: Israel. At a conference in Brussels, Short said the global finger of blame should point at Israel because, if it wasn’t for that country’s conflict with the Palestinians, the world would be amicably united in dealing with carbon emissions. Israel, she said, “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming”, an act of distraction that would ultimately lead to “the end of the human race”. The memory of Short’s insight returned on reading the Independent’s Thursday interview with the actor Maxine Peake, in which Peake falsely claimed that the knee on the neck that killed George Floyd in Minneapolis was a technique “learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services”. It was Rebecca Long-Bailey’s refusal to delete, and apologise for, a tweeted endorsement of the Peake interview that saw Keir Starmer make his first shadow cabinet sacking – a move with serious implications for his party and his leadership of it, and perhaps beyond. The link between Peake and Short is a cast of mind that sees the worst events in the world and determinedly puts Israel at the centre of them, even in defiance of the facts or basic common sense. Whatever horrors are unfolding, the hidden hand of the world’s only majority-Jewish country must be secretly behind them. For a long while, my favourite illustration of such thinking was the Washington DC council member who in 2018 blamed a day’s heavy snowfall on “the Rothschilds”. But Peake might now have a claim to top spot. To look at the US, with its four centuries of racist oppression and white supremacist violence, its many decades of police brutality, and to decide that the Floyd killing was not something US police might have come up with all by themselves – that they required the instruction of faraway Israel – is to stray from rational analysis into the wilder reaches of conspiracy theory. In the words of Dave Rich, author of The Left’s Jewish Problem, such ideas perfectly “mimic the thought structure” of age-old antisemitic theories of a Jewish plot to bring global ruin: they simply insert the world’s only Jewish country, Israel, where “the Jews” used to be. The story has played out in several of the familiar ways. Once again, Jews and their allies have had to patiently explain to the likes of John McDonnell that this isn’t mere “criticism of practices of Israeli state”, as he tweeted – and not only because, as Peake herself confessed, she had got her facts wrong. Long-Bailey’s defenders on the left have argued that she didn’t really notice the antisemitism, that she was merely affirming a constituent saying admirably radical things, not realising that that is precisely the problem: the failure, even after several years of this stuff, to see anti-Jewish prejudice when it stares them in the face. Once more, Jews have had to wonder why those who are usually so intolerant of microaggressions against other minorities are so curiously forgiving of pretty macro aggressions directed against Jews. But there’s a big difference this time – because now, after five painful years, Labour is led by someone who gets it. What a relief it was to hear Starmer identify the core accusation amplified by his colleague not as “inappropriate” or “unhelpful” but as “antisemitic”. He and his team did not need a 12-step education programme to see the problem, nor did they insist on a seminar-room debate about the finer definitions of what is and what isn’t anti-Jewish prejudice. Instead, they understood that they are running a political party, not a student union: the scope for error is narrower. By his action, Starmer has shown he grasps that politics is painted in primary colours. Most voters will barely be aware of this episode, let alone follow the nuances. If anything cuts through, it will be that the new Labour leader promised zero tolerance of antisemitism and he meant it. (Though it seems Starmer offered her a way out, had she agreed to apologise, which she refused to take.) That’s been noticed by Conservatives, who after five years believing themselves essentially unopposed, and therefore able to get away with anything, now recognise they are up against someone serious about power. The contrast with Boris Johnson’s failure to sack Robert Jenrick, let alone Dominic Cummings, is striking – and not flattering to the prime minister. It’s possible that Starmer has overreached, provoking the Corbynite diehards in ways that could cost him. But the scale of his victory margin in April, and his success in getting his own choice of party general secretary, have led him to calculate that his position is stronger than others might imagine. Starmer’s response is not the only cause for cautious cheer here. Peake’s retraction is also welcome: even if she didn’t apologise, she conceded that she had got it wrong and acknowledged the link between what she’d claimed and antisemitism. Tellingly, she admitted to having made an “assumption”, a habit all too common on the far left: a readiness to assume that if there’s evil afoot, then Israel must be pulling the strings. It also helps that Amnesty International has disavowed attempts to suggest a report of theirs in any way substantiated Peake’s false claim. Suddenly, the likes of McDonnell, Jon Lansman and Len McCluskey, still banging out the old denialist tunes, look isolated and out of time. It might be fanciful, but perhaps something else might come out of this. If people can absorb that Israel is not responsible for all the world’s evils, but rather for a very specific injustice that desperately needs resolution, then perhaps we can move away from a conversation that casually echoes centuries-old slurs against Jews, and towards one that at last addresses the on-the-ground reality. That reality is getting worse for Palestinians, with the prospect of annexation of the West Bank looming ever closer. We need to hear that, without getting diverted by medieval fantasies about Jews.