Why has UK’s Labour Party suspended two election candidates over Gaza war?
Al Jazeera
The party has become embroiled in yet another row over anti-Semitism amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
The British Labour Party, currently the odds-on favourite to win the next UK general election, found itself on the back foot this week when two of its parliamentary candidates were suspended by Keir Starmer, the party’s leader.
Starmer took the decision to suspend Azhar Ali and Graham Jones, on Monday and Tuesday respectively, after claims emerged that they made anti-Semitic remarks about the Israeli state at a Labour meeting in northwest England just weeks after the Hamas assault on southern Israel on October 7.
Mike Katz, the national chair of the Labour Party-affiliated Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), said that every party member present at the meeting “ought to be suspended pending investigation”.
But, for many, the row has also raised questions about whether Starmer is trying to stifle any criticism of Israel at all, despite its forces having killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians since it began its bombardment of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip four months ago.
The controversy began when a UK newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, reported that Ali had said Israel had “effectively green-lighted” the deadly Hamas attack, in which 1,139 Israelis were killed, as a pretext to invade and occupy Gaza.
