Michael Gove. Photo: Reuters / Hannah Mckay.

“Anti-Zionism has become the new antisemitism,” Britain’s Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove said on.

The Jewish Chronicle reported that Gove — a longtime member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ruling Conservative party — told a gathering of the anti-extremist Mainstream UK organization, “More recently, antisemitism has taken a new form.”

“In the past you could be Jewish in the ghetto, or you could be Jewish but had to suffer disability under the law,” he said, but now, antisemitism held that Jewish identity “either has to be removed or Israel has to survive on terms set by others.”

“‘Zionist’ has come to be used as a term of abuse,” Gove noted. “We can see the way in which anti-Zionism has mutated, so anti-Zionism has become the new antisemitism.”

Gove also accused outgoing Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who the overwhelming majority of British Jews consider personally antisemitic, of trying to “smuggle into our political conversation antisemitic expressions and antisemitic tropes.”

Corbyn’s massive defeat in last December’s general election, said Gove, showed that the British public rejected this brand of political antisemitism.

Gove also spoke out against right-wing antisemitism and racism, saying there must be “vigilance against the new identity politics of the far-right which talks about rights for whites.”

“In the same way as some choose to stigmatize and vilify the Jewish community, there are others who are equally willing to use stereotypes to vilify other people who are British, who are our friends and neighbors,” he said.

“What we must do when confronted with hatred and prejudice is stand four-square against it,” he added. “Put whatever political boundaries we have to one side.”

In 2016, Gove was honored with The Algemeiner‘s prestigious Warrior for Truth award.