Jackie Walker is a former UK Labour Party and Momentum activist who identified as an anti-Zionist and a Black Jewish woman. She was expelled from the Labour Party in March 2019 following a series of highly publicized controversies regarding her criticism of Israel, her views on Zionism, and remarks she made about the Holocaust and slavery. [1, 2, 3]
Political Stance: Walker defined her opposition to Zionism as a rejection of a political ideology rather than antisemitism. She argued that Zionism is a political system and maintained that criticizing the Israeli government or opposing the concept of a Jewish state is a legitimate political position. [1, 2]
Labour Party Controversies: In 2016, Walker was removed as vice-chair of the grassroots left-wing group Momentum and initially suspended from the Labour Party after a leaked video from an antisemitism training event showed her questioning the definition of antisemitism and suggesting that Holocaust Memorial Day should be more expansive to include other genocides. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
Expulsion: After a lengthy suspension and investigation process, Labour's National Constitutional Committee ruled in March 2019 that the charges against her were proven, leading to her definitive expulsion from the party.
" I wrote 'many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade'. These words, taken out of context in the way the media did, of course do not reflect my position. I was writing to someone who knew the context of my comments. Had he felt the need to pick me up on what I had written I would have rephrased – perhaps to 'Jews (my ancestors too) were among those who financed the sugar and slave trade and at the particular time/in the particular area I'm talking about they played an important part.' ... [My claim] has never been that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic Slave Trade, merely that, as historians such as Arnold Wiznitzer noted, at a certain economic point, in specific regions where my ancestors lived, Jews played a dominant role 'as financiers of the sugar industry, as brokers and exporters of sugar, and as suppliers of Negro slaves on credit "
Walker was born in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City in 1954. In 1956, her mother, with Walker and her step brother, were deported to Jamaica, which Walker attributes to McCarthyism. There, racial discrimination barred her mother from many jobs, and she had to leave her children with relatives for months while she travelled looking for work. In 1959, Walker's mother, with her children, moved to London. Her mother suffered from periods of severe depression since her 30s, as well as physical illness in later life. Family life was characterized by abject poverty, cramped, squalid and chaotic living conditions and continual racist attacks, despite her mother's best efforts: as a result, Walker and her step brothers spent time in care homes or with foster families. She was the only black child in her primary school and suffered from racial bullying both at school and when in care. When Walker was 11, she witnessed the sudden death of her mother at the age of 50, after which Walker lived in care homes and was then permanently fosterered.
her mother, Dorothy Brown, was a black Jamaican and Sephardi Jew who was descended partly from a Portuguese Jew who came to the West Indies during the days of Christopher Columbus, and a female slave who converted to Judaism on marriage. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1915, Dorothy won a scholarship to study medicine in the United States, where she married and had a daughter and then gave up her studies. In 1949, she was committed temporarily to a mental institution, where was on occasion held in isolation, placed in a straitjacket and subjected to ECT treatment, by her husband, who was seeking to end the relationship. Her eldest daughter was put into care and was ultimately fostered while her second child was returned to her on her release. Later, her mother attempted to retrieve her elder daughter but without success. Released, and active in the civil rights movement, she met Walker's Ashkenazi Jewish father, Jack Cohen, whose family fled anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire around 1918 and came to New York, where he became a jeweller