Here’s a yellow flag, waved in a friendly spirit, in respect of Britain’s new foreign minister, David Lammy. He seems like a fine fellow. The Atlantic’s famed foreign correspondent, Anne Applebaum, who spoke with him on the hustings, notes that he says he will be “the first foreign secretary descended from the slave trade.” Bravo. She also reports that Mr. Lammy told her that he wants to, as Ms. Applebaum puts it, “revive the legacy of Ernest Bevin.”

That certainly got our attention. Ms. Applebaum quotes Mr. Lammy as suggesting that the Labour postwar foreign secretary who helped create NATO was “pretty hardheaded about the dangers of the atomic bomb,” and “pretty hardheaded on the need to bind the U.K. to Europe, to the United States.” Mr. Lammy, she reports, wants people to understand that transatlanticism is not just a Tory quality, but in the Labour DNA.

What we’d like to hear from Mr. Lammy is what he thinks of Bevin when it comes to the issue for which Bevin is remembered — his hostility to Israel and the Jews. This, after all, is the issue that tarnished Bevin’s good name. It’s also an issue on which the Western democracies are being intensely tested just right now. It would be hard to see a constructive role for a foreign secretary who followed in the Middle East the footsteps of Ernest Bevin.

This issue came into view with the end of the British mandate in Palestine. Labour, in the 1945 elections, had vowed to end the White Paper that had been promulgated in 1939 and blocked Jewish emigration to the Land of Israel. That regime held sway, incredibly, during the Holocaust. In the event, Bevin betrayed that pledge. He believed that the Balfour Declaration had been an error, and set himself against the creation of a Jewish state.

The point is not so much to dilate on Bevin’s personal animosity toward Jews, an attitude that remains in dispute. The pro-Israel Labour parliament member Richard Crossman characterized Bevins’s views as “corresponding roughly with ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’” Crossman added that Bevin believed that the Jews had “successfully organized a conspiracy against Britain and against him personally.” 

In any event, such a prejudice would hardly have made him exceptional at the time. Yet Bevin’s approach — to sacrifice the Jews in the name of other interests, to placate the Arabs in the hopes that they would relent in respect of violence — is a temptation that still holds sway among factions at London and the District of Columbia. Witness the pressure on Israel to spare Hamas. Witness the appeasement of Iran.  

In 1946, MI5 warned Prime Minister Atlee that the Irgun and Lehi were “training selected members for the purpose of assassinating a prominent British personality. Special reference has been made several times to Mr. Bevin.” MI5 reported that the Zionist fighters planned to “work on IRA lines” to, in their own words, “beat the dog in his own kennel.” This was no idle threat. After the sinking of the Struma, Lord Moyne had been assassinated in 1944, at Cairo. 

We understand the Middle East is only one issue. Nor are we trying to make a megillah out of a passing reference. Sir Keir, though, rose to power in part by virtue of his devotion to purging his party of antisemitism of Bevin’s ilk. This week saw the victories of at least four “Gaza independents,” one of them Jeremy Corbyn. Anyone who has seen the streets of London transformed in the months since October 7 cannot help but keep an eye out for Bevin’s ghost.