“I am an anti-Zionist,” the young UK parliamentarian said, “I always have been.”

I watched as the crowd breathed a collective sigh of relief and broke out in a spontaneous bout of cheering and applause for 31-year-old Zarah Sultana, a working class, former-Labour MP – now independent.

“Anyone who visits the occupied West Bank, anyone who sees the genocide happening in Gaza,” she continued, “anyone who understands what settler-colonialism is will find themselves also identifying as an anti-Zionist.”

Sultana’s audience had assembled in a packed Rebel Tent during the Beautiful Days music festival in Devon, in the southwest of England, last month. She was in conversation with journalist Matt Kennard, who asked about her views on Zionism as an ideology.

Her response electrified the audience and set off a firestorm in her nascent political movement.

Kennard had also asked her about the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism during the period that Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party. Sultana did not hold back.

“One of the things that we have to be honest about is some of the mistakes that were made under the Corbyn period. And adopting the IHRA [definition] was a mistake. Conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism was a mistake.”

For nearly a decade it has been a weapon for Israel and its lobby to suppress and criminalize Palestine solidarity the world over.

The Labour Party during Corbyn’s leadership adopted the document as policy, causing massive damage among his grassroots supporters.

Many were expelled from the party at the behest of the Israel lobby. Ultimately, Corbyn himself was also kicked out, suspended as a Labour MP in 2020, never to be allowed to return to the party.

Speaking to Kennard, Sultana implicitly criticized Corbyn’s team for their unwillingness to defend their political project – and the popular movement behind it – against what she termed “the smears that took place” in the corporate media.

“It shouldn’t have happened this way,” she argued, “there should have been robust challenge when the political establishment, the media establishment … attacked the Corbyn project, there should have been a more robust challenge to that.”

The crowd went wild.

Cast adrift since his 2020 suspension as a Labour MP, Corbynism – the left-wing movement that raised Corbyn to the Labour leadership – was yearning for a more combative approach.

Speaking at the festival seemed to be a calculated move by Sultana.

She had already made similar points in an interview with author Oliver Eagleton, published earlier the same day by the New Left Review.

“We have to build on the strengths of Corbynism – its energy, mass appeal and bold policy platform – and we also have to recognize its limitations. It capitulated to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism,” she told Eagleton.

“When it came under attack from the state and the media, [Corbynism] should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies. But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory. This was a serious mistake … You cannot give these people an inch.”

But it was at the Rebel Tent that Sultana first came out explicitly as an anti-Zionist. Later that day she repeated her comment on Twitter/X.

In line with her position that Britain’s corporate media are class enemies, Sultana had initially refused to comment, the paper reported.

Along with other establishment outlets, The Telegraph published attacks on Sultana, including from from such Israel lobby groups as the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

“Calling the recognition of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism a ‘capitulation’ is a grave insult,” Andrew Gilbert, the Board of Deputies vice-president told The Telegraph.

Your party?

The surge of national media attention for the now-independent lawmaker is driven by Sultana’s role – alongside Corbyn – in the launch of a new left-wing party.

Yet the initiative is already beset by internal rifts.

In July, Sultana – suspended from Labour a year earlier – gave up on ever being readmitted to Britain’s current ruling party.

She was suspended after opposing Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s austerity policies.

Unlike other rebel lawmakers, who were eventually restored as Labour MPs, Sultana’s suspension remained in place – due to her vocal support for Palestine, she said.

“Jeremy Corbyn and I will co-lead the founding of a new party, with other Independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country,” she wrote on Twitter. “Join us. The time is now.”

But according to sources close to Corbyn, the former Labour leader was unhappy with what he considered Sultana’s premature launch of the initiative, or the mention of “co-leading” anything.

“Texts show Team Corbyn opposed new party minutes after launch,” The Times of London blared. Left-wingers expressed skepticism about the story, conscious of the media’s decade-long effort to divide the Corbynist movement.

But The Electronic Intifada understands that the reporting was broadly correct.

And the paper provided evidence: screenshots from a WhatsApp group of influential left-wing activists and former Corbyn staffers who had been secretly working to set up a new party in a small organization called Collective.

Other left-wingers in a second informal group close to Corbyn and his team – called the Organizing Committee – proposed a co-leadership with Sultana, which would set up the next generation of leadership.

At the next UK general election, likely in 2029, Corbyn will be 80. Sultana will be 35. Her backers argue she would offer the left a fresh start.

Indecision

Some on the left also want Corbyn to choose a successor because of questions over his leadership style – or lack thereof.

Notoriously indecisive, Corbyn often avoids public confrontation, preferring to act through intermediaries and aides. He often goes to ground rather than taking a controversial line.

I asked Corbyn this week for an interview with The Electronic Intifada Podcast to discuss what he thinks the new party’s policies on Palestine should be, as well as how best to fight back against the anti-Semitism smears.

Multiple WhatsApp messages were read by Corbyn himself – but he did not respond to the invitation. A third invitation was sent to his media officer Oly Durose, who responded that “Jeremy won’t be available to do this right now.” He offered no reason or alternative dates.

The right time never seems to come.

Corbyn last gave an interview to The Electronic Intifada in the summer of 2015, when he was first running to be Labour Party leader. Yet after he won, a new press team came in.

Many of Corbyn’s previous supporters told me they are frustrated with five years of prevarication over whether or not to launch a new party.

They say he could have launched one when he was first kicked out as a Labour MP in 2020, and would likely have won several seats in the 2024 election.

In the secret negotiations, the Collective, effectively Corbyn’s own faction, broadly opposed a co-leadership with Sultana.

Shortly after Sultana’s announcement that she would “co-lead” the new initiative with Corbyn, his powerful former chief of staff Karie Murphy purged the Collective’s WhatsApp group.

Among those removed were anti-war activist and former Respect party leader Salma Yaqoob and Andrew Feinstein, a former South African MP who ran against Keir Starmer in last year’s general election. Both are perceived to support a co-leadership.

According to The Times, Corbyn “was furious about Sultana’s post” announcing the new party and demanded she remove it – to no avail.

This was followed by an awkward silence.

For several weeks, Team Corbyn appeared to pretend that Sultana had never made her momentous declaration. Aside from one ambiguous post congratulating Sultana on leaving Labour, and stating that “real change is coming,” Corbyn said nothing about it in public and never confirmed the launch of a new party.

Three weeks after the younger MP’s announcement, Corbyn backed down. He went along with Sultana’s initiative, posting a joint statement with Sultana announcing the “Your Party” project.

It is unclear who is in charge of organizing the conference.

Max Shanly, a left-wing former Labour Party youth organizer (who was himself targeted with “anti-Semitism” smears during the Corbyn period) has warned of “a coup of sorts in the working group responsible for the Your Party founding conference.”

To date, “Your Party” has a reported 800,000 email sign-ups. It remains to be seen how many will actually join the party. But if even only half join, it would be Britain’s largest political party.

And even before the party is formally launched, there are encouraging signs for its supporters. One recent poll found that one in three 2024 Labour voters would consider voting for a Corbyn-Sultana party.

Anti-Semitism smears

Many Corbyn supporters are frustrated by his refusal to fight back against the “left-wing anti-Semitism” smears that destroyed his leadership of Labour between 2015 and 2020.

As The Electronic Intifada reported for years – and as I documented in my book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn – instead of fighting the smears, Corbyn and his team often made concessions to this defamation campaign.

In practice, many of Corbyn’s most loyal supporters were purged from Labour – including high-profile figures such as Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson.

This ultimately played a major role in Corbyn’s downfall as Labour leader.

Feinstein has been adamant the new party should not make the same mistake.

He argues that “it is incredibly important that those of us who are involved in the emerging new party confront any attempts to weaponize anti-Semitism head on by calling it out for what it is: a shameful tactic of people with right-wing and far-right-wing political agendas.”

He called it “a detailed and precise and incredibly important corrective to the mendacious mainstream” and said that “I honestly believe that if Nelson Mandela was alive today and a member of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party that he would be expelled for his views on Israel and on fighting racism.”

Some of Corbyn’s critics on the left argue that he wasted years in the forlorn hope that he would be re-admitted to Labour.

This was never likely under Starmer, who declared during the 2020 Labour leadership campaign that he was a supporter of “Zionism without qualification” and is financially backed by pro-Israel lobbyists such as Trevor Chinn and Gary Lubner (the latter of whom is also a South African apartheid profiteer).

Corbyn had waited until the last possible minute to announce his independent candidacy in May 2024 – running for re-election to his parliamentary seat against the Labour candidate.

He hesitated for another year about starting a new party – despite encouraging signs from the 2024 general election that many voters wanted a left-wing, pro-Palestinian alternative.

Feinstein came second in Starmer’s constituency, and four other new independent candidates (aside from Corbyn) overturned Labour majorities, winning seats on platforms advocating an end to British involvement in the genocide in Gaza. Several others came close.

Yet if Sultana’s clear-eyed anti-Zionism delighted potential new party activists, Corbyn himself was not so pleased.

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Corbyn was asked what he thought of Sultana’s criticisms.

He then prevaricated more, justifying his concessions and saying he had been “under a great deal of pressure to adopt the IHRA” definition by some of his closest supporters “and that was duly done.”

He didn’t comment on his views about Zionism.

In a 2018 opinion piece for the Guardian, Corbyn claimed there were “honorable” Zionists and that it was “wrong” to describe Zionism as racism.

The article was reportedly written by Corbyn’s influential adviser James Schneider, who appears to have driven much of the former leader’s disastrous approach to the issue.

Corbyn came under fire online from some of his own supporters for his perceived weakness on the issue, and for failing to stand up for Sultana when the Israel lobby attacked her for “anti-Semitism.”

But it wasn’t just online.

At a demonstration in London last week, one prominent Palestine activist and supporter of Your Party, asked Corbyn his view on Zionism.

In an encounter that later went viral online, Anika Zahir (known as “Ani Says” to her 126,000 social media followers) asked Corbyn: “Will you be coming out, like Zarah Sultana, and declaring yourself an anti-Zionist?”

He deflected the question, replying that he was “here to speak for the Palestinian people … I’m sorry – that’s the point of being here today. Thank you very much.”

He walked away. His media officer Oly Durose also attempted to shut Zahir down, saying they “weren’t doing any more interviews.”

Corbyn even angrily asked Zahir to “turn the camera off please” – which she did.

The interaction – most of which was first posted online by anti-Zionist researcher David Miller – sparked controversy on X. Some Corbyn supporters said it was unfair given his years of Palestine solidarity work, while critics said he should have been able to answer a simple question.

Among Corbyn’s defenders was independent lawmaker (and Your Party supporter) Adnan Hussein, who (ironically) accused Zahir of a “witch hunt.” The following day he appeared to double-down, apparently accusing her of “extremely sinister actions against a good man.”

Zahir responded on social media that the backlash she was facing included Islamophobic vitriol. One X user even falsely claimed that she was David Miller’s wife.

“He is not a god”

Speaking to The Electronic Intifada this week, Zahir said she had supported Corbyn for years, and had even made a point of supporting him via postal vote in 2017’s general election, despite living out of the country at the time. She said she had followed his activism for Palestine since 2010.

“So I’m an expat in a completely different country, isolated from British politics, but as soon as I hear Jeremy Corbyn, I was ready to fill in the forms and make a vote,” she said.

But she said her encounter last week had now left her disillusioned: “I feel like I’ve just come out of a cult.”

She said she spent all her free time around activists who are “openly anti-Zionist and I see them putting in the work.” She said it wasn’t personal, but that she had wanted to know where the new party would stand on Zionism.

It was a mistake to put Corbyn on a pedestal, while expecting other politicians to answer activists’ questions, according to Zahir.

“I asked a politician a baseline question,” she said. “Suddenly we’re not holding accountability. Is that not how revolutions fail? When we don’t hold leaders accountable? Because every man is fallible.”

“He is not a god,” Zahir added.

The Court of Corbyn

Oly Durose, the media officer, is a former Labour parliamentary candidate who was endorsed in 2019 by David Lammy, now Britain’s foreign secretary.

Durose is far from the only Labour Party remnant still close to Corbyn.

James Schneider – the strategist who reportedly wrote the 2018 Guardian article that claimed it was “wrong” to call Zionism racism – is another.

He has reportedly been tapped to help organize the new party’s founding conference. Also said to be on that committee is Karie Murphy, who purged Feinstein and others from the Collective WhatsApp group.

Schneider is facing questions from some activists about a direct conflict of interest relating to his wife Sophie Nazemi – who works as the Labour Party’s director of communications.

Murphy’s record on the anti-Semitism smears, meanwhile, is also far from stellar.

As I showed in Weaponising Anti-Semitism, Murphy (like Corbyn) opposed part of the IHRA definition (the infamous “examples,” which included smearing opposition to Israel as a racist state as “anti-Semitism”). She was, for a time, supportive of Chris Williamson, the left-wing former MP who loyally backed Corbyn but was thrown under the bus before the 2019 election.

“Full retreat”

But in Williamson’s book, Ten Years Hard Labour, he wrote that Murphy went into “full retreat mode” along with the rest of Corbyn’s team and ultimately did not resist the plan to “investigate” and suspend Williamson for his entirely correct statement that Labour under Corbyn had climbed down on the issue.

The following year, Murphy publicly boasted of how many “anti-Semites” she had helped push out of Labour. Her examples of such “anti-Semitism”? Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone, both suspended for anti-Zionist statements.

If Corbyn genuinely wants to unite his movement behind a new party, he needs to admit his past mistakes. Failure to fight the anti-Semitism smears had disastrous effects on the left-wing movement.

That will happen again if Corbyn and his team do not change course.

Corbyn’s repeated climbdowns and U-turns on the issue made him look a weak leader to voters – not just to activists. Credible polling after the 2019 general election found that many voters thought “Jeremy Corbyn was not an appealing leader,” with divisions in Labour fueling that perception.

“They didn’t defend us”

The party suspensions, investigations, internal reviews, reports, media witch-hunts and expulsions woefully divided and demoralized the activist movement.

When I did my nationwide book tours between 2023 and 2025, I was surprised at the disillusionment and even anger at Corbyn among some of the grassroots.

These were ordinary people in local trade union branches, Palestine solidarity groups and community organizations, who had worked hard for Corbyn in the hope of changing the country for the better.

“We cannot let Corbyn and [his close ally John] McDonnell off the hook,” was one activist in Liverpool’s verdict. “They didn’t defend us. They didn’t defend themselves and we have to look elsewhere.”

Many pro-Corbyn activists were pushed out of their local Labour Party branches on the pretext of anti-Semitism – even under Corbyn’s own general secretary Jennie Formby.

They became thoroughly disillusioned with the ex-leader’s failure to fight back.

Such views are likely far more prevalent than Corbyn himself realizes, so it is no wonder that Sultana’s more combative approach is resonating.

Zionism is a maximalist ideology, which accepts nothing less than complete and utter fealty. Israeli embassy proxy, the Jewish Labour Movement (which Corbyn had coddled and supported), played a key role in driving Corbyn out of Labour.

Pro-Israel groups sabotaged and smeared him to the end. They and their allies are certain to do it again if he becomes leader of the new party.

Yet there is no sign that the former Labour leader is ready to start fighting back against Zionism and weaponized anti-Semitism smears.

If Corbyn – who retains a great deal of affection and respect for his solidarity with Palestine – can’t offer a more assertive form of leadership, then perhaps he should not stand in the way of those who can.

Asa Winstanley is an associate editor with The Electronic Intifada.

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