Majority of Labour supports BDS, considers ‘Israel’ apartheid state, poll says

A recent survey by British firm YouGov demonstrated that several members of the UK’s Labour Party support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and consider ‘Israel’ to be an apartheid state.

The survey indicated that 61 percent of Labour members support the BDS movement, and only 8 percent oppose the BDS.

The survey also showed that almost half of those polled agreed with the statement that “Israel is an apartheid state, systematically discriminating against Palestinians.”

In a sample size of 1,073 members, 49 percent of those polled said they agreed, while 35 percent said ‘Israel’ is not an apartheid state.

Only 16 percent said they didn’t know.

In January, the leading Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, described ‘Israel’ is an apartheid state that “promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”

B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within ‘Israel’ itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

“One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.”

The poll also showed that despite the best efforts of right-wing Labour leader Keir Starmer to purge the party of the left and of Palestine solidarity activists, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn, Israeli apartheid is still a tough sell in a party which claims the mantle of socialism.

YouGov was commissioned to conduct the poll by anti-Palestinian newspaper The Jewish Chronicle, to mark the first year of Starmer’s leadership.

The paper’s new deputy-editor, Jake Wallis Simons wrote of the poll that: “The bombshell findings today highlight the scale of the challenge facing the new leader, who has a mountain to climb in his bid to purge the party.”

The paper did not run a headline showing that the majority of polled Labour members support BDS and consider ‘Israel’ to be an apartheid state. Instead, it buried the finding in an analysis piece by Wallis Simon.

The Jewish Chronicle’s coverage focused on Labour’s alleged “problem with anti-Semitism.”