LABOUR is not an anti-Semitic party and Jeremy Corbyn is not a racist. There, I’ve said it. However, the party does certainly have a problem with Jews, or perhaps that should read a problem with Israel. This matters because the failure of the party to resolve this rancorous internal dispute is rendering it incapable of presenting a convincing alternative to the disintegrating Conservative government. If Mr Corbyn can’t cope with a synthetic row like this, how can he be fit to govern?

I say it’s synthetic because the Labour anti-Semitism row isn’t really about actual hatred of Jewish people. Mr Corbyn may have inadvertently “liked” an online image of a piece of street art which included obscure images of wealthy Jews, and he is a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. But these do not make him racist. Anti-Semitic people believe that Jews are an inferior and evil race who should be oppressed, demonised and kept apart from Christian society. That’s not what we are talking about here.

Over the years, Jewish groups got fed up listening to the pro-Palestinian groups in Labour condemning the “racist and apartheid state of Israel” and equating Zionism, or Israeli nationalism, with fascism, as the former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was wont to do. This was in many ways understandable. Some Muslim voters, and members of some Palestinian organisations, do indeed hate Jews as a race, and engage in hate speak on social media. Many Jews feel Mr Corbyn hasn’t done enough to challenge this.

There’s a guilt-by-association parallel here with the anti-English racism of the so-called cybernats during the 2014 Scottish referendum. Unionists like JK Rowling insisted that there was online evidence, not least in offensive comments directed at her, that the SNP was still “an anti-English party”. This was simply wrong. The SNP expunged anti-English racism in the 1960s, in much the same way as the Church of Scotland expunged anti-Catholic sectarianism in the same period. This doesn’t mean that some Kirk members don’t still hate Catholics. And some SNP supporters undoubtedly hate the English. But political leaders can’t be held accountable for random abuse on the internet which they have repeatedly disowned and condemned.

Mr Corbyn can be held accountable for the left-wing Labour NEC member, Peter Willsman – the latest to be accused of anti-semitism, because of his rant that: “some [Jewish critics of Labour] support Trump – they’re Trump fanatics”. His outburst, at a private NEC meeting on July 17, was certainly unpleasant to listen to, and Mr Willsman has been condemned as a “loudmouth bully” by Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. However, what he actually said was not, by any sensible definition, racist. Some Jews do indeed support Donald Trump, enthusiastically, because of his controversial decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. One of them is Jonathan Arkush, the former president of the Board of Deputies.

Mr Willsman also aggressively rejected the claim by 68 rabbis that racism is “severe and widespread” in Labour, and questioned whether much online anti-Semitism had been faked. This is not unreasonable. He went on to challenge anyone present to say if they’d experienced anti-Semitism in Labour, and a couple of hands went up. Was that racist? In some eyes: yes and there have been calls for his expulsion.

In the Jewish Chronicle, the Labour MP Luciana Berger, said Mr Willsman should not have questioned the existence of anti-semitism in the Labour Party because “two councillors and 252 people are being investigated for comments they have made at Dame Margaret Hodge MP”. This is somewhat circular, since Dame Margaret is under censure in the Labour Party for calling the party leader “an anti-Semite and racist”. It’s hardly surprising there was some kick back from that on Twitter.

Dame Margaret claimed Mr Corbyn is anti-Semitic because the party has failed to recognise examples of anti-Semitism cited by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA. After its definition of anti-Semitism (which, confusingly, Labour does adopt), the IHRA goes on to define as racist statements “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.

However, as the Jewish former appeal court judge, Stephen Sedley, has pointed out, these clauses are designed to “neutralise serious criticism of Israel by stigmatising it as a form of anti-Semitism”. Thus the widespread claim that the Israeli government is conducting apartheid by denying Palestinians full civil rights could be classed as anti-Semitic under this definition. Some Labour members question whether Israel has a right to exist because it was founded on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, mainly Palestinians, in 1948.

In essence, the Jewish groups are saying that it is anti-Semitic to deny or dispute the extent of anti-Semitism in the party. The Jewish Labour Movement has claimed that Labour has broken the Equality Acts because it has failed to adopt the so-called “Macpherson principle” that “a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. But this quote, from the 1999 Macpherson report on institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police, is widely misunderstood. Macpherson was referring to incidents that needed to be investigated; it was not a bigotry test.

This is obviously a fraught issue. But it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of Labour to resolve it. It could surely adopt the IHRA definition with a freedom of speech rider stating that criticism of the Israeli state is not anti-Semitic. Instead, Labour seems paralysed by the row which has been raging for months. It has been exploited by unreconstructed Blairites hoping to bring down Mr Corbyn.

But the question for the rest of us is this: if Labour cannot reconcile these internal factions, and manage rivalry between identity groups, what hope has it of forming a workable government? With the chaos over Brexit, and the May Government collapsing, we need a credible opposition party. Labour’s Jewish problem is also Britain’s.