‘Racists are racists are racists and Jeremy Corbyn is a racist.’
Yair Lapid is not mincing his words. One of the leaders of Israel’s main centre-left party broke with protocol this morning at a conference in Jerusalem to urge British voters not to elect Jeremy Corbyn.
He said the Labour leader was an anti-Semite, but that his anti-Semitism was not the ‘new anti-Semitism’ seen in recent decades as a result of the ‘black and red coalition’ of traditional fascists and leftists. ‘This is old-school, plain anti-Semitism,’ he said.
Lapid, a former television presenter, entered politics in 2012 with a new liberal party, Yesh Atid. Earlier this year, it merged into Benny Gantz’s Kachol Lavan, which narrowly beat Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in September elections but was unable to form a governing coalition.
Speaking to the Israel Allies Foundation conference this morning, Lapid said:
‘Usually, you’re not supposed to interfere with elections in other countries, but in this case I’m going to make an exception.
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