Labour MP Naz Shah has admitted comments which led to her suspension from the party were antisemitic but insisted she was "ignorant" and not an antisemite herself.
The Bradford West MP has now been reinstated by her party after she apologised in April for online posts including one that suggested Israel should be moved to the US. Her comments came days after the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said antisemitism had got worse in the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Shah's suspension came after the Guido Fawkes political website revealed she had shared a graphic that showed Israel superimposed onto a map of the US with the title: "Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict - relocate Israel into United States". She added the comment: "problem solved".
Shah told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "I wasn't antisemitic, what I put out was antisemitic." She said the posts were written during the 2014 Gaza war and emotions were running high, although she said that wasn't an excuse.
"The language I used was antisemitic, it was offensive," she said. "What I did was I hurt people and the language that was the clear antisemitic language, which I didn't know at the time, was when I said, 'The Jews are rallying.'" She added she had received "amazing compassion" from the Jewish community in recent months.
"I didn't get antisemitism as racism," said Shah. "I had never come across it. I think what I had was an ignorance."
Mirvis has said the Labour party needs to get back on track over antisemitism.
"Since the leadership of Mr [Jeremy] Corbyn, it has become more acceptable for elements which used to be a fringe group to now appear centre-stage and to express their ideology in a more open and confident manner" he told MPs on the influential home affairs select committee.
Labour has conducted an inquiry into antisemitism led by human rights expert Shami Chakrabarti. But Mirvis questioned why only the recommendations had been published and not the report in full. "One wonders what there is to hide," he said.
He added: "Main reservation is the absence of a definition of antisemitism. You can't deal with a phenomenon if there is no definition of it."
He went to say he thought remarks made by the former Labour Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, which exacerbated the row, were deliberately offensive.
"This is not the first time he's started to talk about the Holocaust when asked about Jewish people and Jewish issues. It has in the past been pointed out to him that this is offensive."
