Is Britain good for the Jews?

[david barrett]

This is obviously written by a non-observant, left-wing, ostrich - living in an alternate reality to the rest of us!
No wonder Jews were caught out in late 1930's Germany....

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/S.....2FShowFull

Is Britain good for the Jews?

by Keith Kahn-Harris

At the beginning of June my wife, who is American, received another e-mail from an anxious relative asking whether it was true, as he had heard in a chain e-mail, that the UK government had taken the Holocaust off the national curriculum in response to Muslim pressure.This e-mail was a slightly changed version of a similar chain e-mail that circulated in 2007.

The truth was that a UK government report on education had reported that one department in one school had decided to avoid teaching the Holocaust in order not to have to deal with Muslim denials.

What was significant here was not the lie, but that it was so easily believed. There seems to be a belief held by many within American and Israeli Jewry that European Jewry is imperiled by a serious and dangerous wave of anti-Semitic assaults. Whereas the American and Israeli Jewish communities are treated as alive and viable, the UK, like the rest of Europe, is treated as as good as judenrein. In this context, the most pernicious rumors are easily believed.

THERE IS of course something to be concerned about. Here in the UK we have faced a significant upsurge in recorded anti-Semitic attacks. There is a tendency for anti-Semitic rhetorical tropes to infect criticisms (sometimes otherwise legitimate criticisms) of Israel. Most upsetting is the recent decision passed by the congress of the University and College Union that "colleagues be asked to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions" and that a discussion be initiated into "the appropriateness of continued educational links with Israeli academic institutions."

The resolution has rightly been the subject of worldwide condemnation by prominent Jewish leaders and thinkers. However, some of these condemnations are disturbingly ignorant of the wider context of British society and of Anglo-Jewry and have resorted to hyperbolic language. For example, in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Robert Wistrich the Hebrew University's respected expert on anti-Semitism accuses the UK of being "a European leader in several areas of anti-Semitism in the new century." Wistrich paints a portrait of the UK as a sinister place in which a losing battle is being fought against a rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred. True, he does commend Tony Blair's friendship support for Israel and the recent parliamentary enquiry into anti-Semitism, but there is little else positive in the picture he paints.

IT IS important to put British anti-Semitism in the context of other forms of racism in British society and in the wider world. While anti-Semitic incidents in Britain have been rising, they remain relatively small compared to the virulent racism that British Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and asylum seekers from various countries face in Britain. Moreover, British Jews have faced less severe anti-Semitic violence than French and some other European Jews have. Nor is the United States free from anti-Semitism - it is home to some of the most militant neo-Nazi groups in the world.

Anti-Semitism in Britain has no advocates among senior political leaders and the Jewish community is legally well protected from most forms of discrimination. Anti-Zionism and strong criticism of Israel (which, depending on your opinion, are the same as anti-Semitism) are espoused largely among marginal political groups and figures of the fringes of the major political parties.

Nor is the British Jewish community helpless in the face of the supposed anti-Semitic assault. The latest academic boycott attempt is being vigorously opposed by the UK Jewish communities' Stop The Boycott Campaign and by the largely Jewish-led pressure group Engage. The Jewish communities' defense organization the Community Security Trust is respected by the police, government and indeed by other religious and ethnic communities.

FOR THOSE who would care to look beyond the rhetoric, the UK Jewish community has in fact never been healthier. Recent figures shows that the community's previous decline in numbers appears to have been arrested, although there is considerable debate over whether this is simply due to the growth of the UK haredi population. All the research that has been done on the identities of UK Jews suggests a community that feels settled and comfortable. In research that Steven Cohen and I conducted in 2002-3 - at the height of the second intifada - the "moderately engaged" Jews we interviewed were concerned about anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel but nevertheless felt perfectly integrated into the UK.

Institutionally, there is ample evidence of a renewed self-confidence in the UK Jewish community in recent years. There has been an unprecedented growth in the numbers attending Jewish day schools and in London two new high school projects are under way. There is growing interest in adult education as well, with the Limmud conference inspiring thousands both inside and outside the UK. There has been an extraordinary growth in interest and participation in Jewish cultural activities with Jewish Book Week and the Jewish Film Festival attracting large numbers of visitors. A multi-million pound Jewish Community Center is currently being constructed that promises to be every bit the equal of its Manhattan equivalent.

I do not believe that these expressions of a self-confident, creative and forward-looking Jewishness are proceeding "in denial" of the reality of a community imperiled by anti-Semitism. Rather, anti-Semitism is a manageable problem that the Jewish community is capable of facing while maintaining a positive outlook and building for a future in the UK. In a recent research project I interviewed a number of senior British Jewish communal leaders. All of them felt that the Jewish community was in a healthy state. None of them felt that anti-Semitism was an imminent threat to the survival of UK Jewry. Rather it was a challenge that a vigorous and self-confident community was capable of meeting head-on.

Those outside Britain who wish to support the Jewish community here should recognize that it has a bright future ahead of it. The fight against the recent manifestations of anti-Semitism in Britain should not take place in ignorance of the everyday reality of British Jews.

The writer is a sociologist based at Goldsmiths College, London. He is the convenor of New Jewish Thought.
www.newjewishthought.org

[david barrett]

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ANTISEMITISM EMBEDDED IN BRITISH CULTURE
Interview with Robert Solomon Wistrich
Jerusalem Issue Brief, JCPA, June 2008

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templ.....sh_Culture

“The United Kingdom has been a European leader in several areas of antisemitism in the new century. It holds a pioneering position in promoting academic boycotts of Israel . The same is true for trade-union efforts at economic boycotts. Although the anti-Zionist narrative is worldwide and widespread in the European Union, this discourse in the UK probably exceeds that of most other Western societies. Thus antisemitism has achieved a degree of resonance, particularly in elite opinion, that makes the country a leader in encouraging discriminatory attitudes. Trotskyites who infiltrated the Labour Party and the trade unions back in the 1980s are an important factor in spreading this poison.”… There is also no other Western society where jihadi radicalism has proved as violent and dangerous as in the UK . Although antisemitism is not the determining factor in this extremism, it plays a role. This Islamist radicalism has helped shape the direction of overall antisemitism in the UK .

“Another pioneering role of the UK , especially in the area of anti-Israelism is the longstanding bias in BBC reporting and commentary about the Jewish world and Israel in particular. Double standards have long been a defining characteristic of its Middle East coverage. This has had debilitating consequences. The BBC plays a special role owing to its long-established prestige as a news source widely considered to be objective. It carries a weight beyond that of any other Western media institution. …”

Medieval England : A Leader in Antisemitism…

“Antisemitism in Great Britain has been around for almost a thousand years of recorded history. Medieval England was already a leader in antisemitism. In the Middle Ages, England pioneered the blood libel. The Norwich case in 1144 marked the first time Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children for their Passover matzot. In the twelfth century, medieval Britain was a persecutory Catholic society , particularly when it came to Jews. In this environment the English church was a leader in instituting cruel legislation and discriminatory conduct toward Jews, unparalleled in the rest of Europe .

“From the Norman Conquest of 1066 onward there was a steady process-particularly during the thirteenth century-of persecution, forced conversion, extortion, and expropriation of Jews. This culminated in the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 under Edward I. It was the first ejection of a major Jewish community in Europe . …

“The return of the Jews to the British Isles began very quietly and informally in 1656 under Oliver Cromwell. This was the beginning—drop by drop—of the formation of a new community that over time would contribute a great deal to British society.”

Antisemitism without Jews

“The long absence of Jews from the shores of the British Isles did not mean that in the intervening period, antisemitism disappeared. This is an instructive early example of how society does not need the physical presence of Jews for the potency of the anti-Jewish stereotypes to penetrate the culture. …

“One interesting question is how could Shakespeare draw such a portrait of Shylock [in The Merchant of Venice] probably without ever encountering a real flesh-and-blood Jew? There are many theories about that. Yet he and Marlowe before him [in The Jew of Malta] managed to portray the Jews as major villains whom the populace would instantly recognize as the ‘antitype.’ I am not, of course, saying Shakespeare was an antisemite in the ideological sense (his portrait of Shylock is more complex than that). But the force of the anti-Jewish stereotype is so powerful that this is what is ultimately retained in the ‘collective unconscious’ of English culture.

“This Shylock image influenced the entire West because it fits so well with the evolution of market capitalism from its early days. Shakespeare portrayed the subject in a way that is to a certain extent realistic, reflecting the rise of a commercial society in Venice and of economic competition. But Shylock has come to embody an image of the vengeful, tribal, and bloodthirsty Jew, who will never give up his pound of flesh. Rightly or wrongly, this is what most people remember. Shylock is the English archetype of the villainous Jew. Those who talk about how humanistic, universal, and empathetic his portrait is, are ignoring not only how it was perceived at the time but its historical consequences. …”

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

During the nineteenth century… “The British Empire reached its pinnacle of power and influence. England had become a relatively liberal society. Jews could feel proud and self-confident in proclaiming that they were British citizens. In the Middle East, Britain was even considered a protector of the Jews. It was more tolerant than most of its rivals and more open to intervening and trying to correct the disabilities of Jews in other parts of the world. So this was a kind of ‘golden age.’

“Yet here, too, the picture is more ambivalent than is often assumed. This was particularly so in the late nineteenth century with the immigration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe into Britain . At that time there was strong xenophobia. This dislike of foreigners has always been a factor in the insular British mentality. There was a conservative antisemitism resistant to the Jew as an alien who could never be fully English. The Aliens Bill of 1905, directed at halting the immigration of Russian Jews , was a case in point.

“In the twentieth century, after the Russian Revolution, a linkage between Jews and communism that was intertwined with antisemitism became a pronounced theme in British public discourse. There was considerable publicity around the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This ended when Philip Graves, a London Times correspondent, exposed it as a forgery. …

“In the literature around 1900, one often finds examples of a full-fledged left-wing conspiracy theory in which British imperialism is being manipulated and controlled by ‘Anglo-Hebraic’ financiers… promoted by distinguished English intellectuals, enlightened journalists and writers, as well as the prominent liberal economist John Hobson. The entire episode shows striking similarities with trends in left-wing political circles in recent years. The radical Left asserts that former prime minister Tony Blair was led by the nose into a disastrous, neo-imperialist war in Iraq by a clique of rich British and American Jews. The so-called American neoconservative conspiracy had spilled over to Britain , serving Ariel Sharon and the Likud government that was then in power in Israel . British trade unionists, then and now, proved susceptible to this kind of conspiracy theory.”

Right-Wing Antisemitism…

“In the Second World War, Britain was not willing to attempt to rescue the Jews of Europe in any meaningful way. It was not only imperial Realpolitik that made the British close the gates of Palestine . We know that officials in the Colonial and Foreign offices and people in the administration in Palestine were far from immune to antisemitic sentiment while supporting an Arab state after the 1939 White Paper.

“During the war the British government was obsessed by the fear that their fight against Hitler could be construed as a war on behalf of the Jews. To avoid ‘fighting a Jewish war’ became a kind of alibi for the British authorities to do almost nothing for the Jews. Britain ’s solemn commitment to create a Jewish National Home in Palestine was in fact betrayed in the hour of greatest need for European Jewry. This is a serious stain on the British record, which until then had many positive sides.”

Toward Israel’s Creation

“After 1945—in the three years before the creation of the state of Israel —relations between Britain and the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine , reached their lowest point. … After the Mandatory Government in Palestine executed members of the Irgun, a Jewish underground organization, the latter reacted by hanging two British sergeants. This led to anti-Jewish riots in 1947 in a number of British cities…. Britain was far from immune in this postwar period to the kind of antisemitism that existed elsewhere on the European Continent, in the Americas , or the Middle East . …

“Winston Churchill’s record on Zionism was, of course, far more positive. But it was not as unequivocal as we often assume. There is a discrepancy between his wonderful rhetoric and what Churchill—as a lifelong Zionist—actually did for the Jews when he was in power. He was very intransigent on key issues. The gates of Palestine were kept shut under his premiership. During the Second World War, Churchill was in favor of the White Paper and kept it in place, despite his strong condemnation of it in 1939 when in opposition. … [Yet] he had the historical vision to understand that Israel ’s re-creation was a major event in modern history. In expressing its meaning Churchill was at his best.”

The British Roots of “Zionism Is Nazism”

“It is important to remember that in the 1940s the ‘Zionism is Nazism’ libel was rather popular among highly placed Englishmen. True, the Nazi-Zionist equation was predominantly a Soviet contribution to postwar antisemitism. But it did not originate there. Indeed, a number of Britishers can claim first-class honors in this field. An example is Sir John Glubb Pasha, who was commander of the Arab Jordanian Legion fighting against Israel in 1948. … Glubb was obsessed with the idea that Jews had anticipated Hitler’s master race theory. Nazism, in his view, was a pale copy of the Hebrew original as revealed in Old Testament sources. …

Toynbee

“In the 1950s and 1960s Arnold Toynbee, the renowned British philosopher of history, was immensely popular. … But he also claimed that the Jews were worse than the Nazis because they had knowingly imitated their evil deeds and become ruthless persecutors. Today, a disturbingly large number of English people—misguided, intoxicated, and half-brainwashed by parts of the media—would probably agree with Toynbee. …

“In the 1970s, the anti-Zionists in Britain -some of them Jews and expatriate Israelis-were already vilifying Israel as an ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘racist’ state. Even then there were claims that Zionism equals apartheid. Among the most extreme demagogues were Jewish Trotskyites, who were the most vitriolic in their loathing for Zionism. …”

Muslim Antisemitism

“Then there is the more general Muslim contribution to antisemitism in Britain , which is growing all the time and has become a significant factor. The exploration of Muslim attitudes in the UK is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, it appears that close to half of British Muslims believe in a Jewish conspiracy that dominates UK media and politics. The percentage of Muslim perpetrators of violent antisemitic acts is nearly ten times greater than the Muslim percentage of the general population. …

“At the other extreme, the far-Right British National Party sees a climate emerging where it might do better than in the past. The fascists would frankly like to see a Britain without Muslims. On the other hand, they also see eye to eye with many Muslim extremists on issues concerning Israel and the Jews. These British fascists admire Osama bin Laden.”

The BBC and Other Media

“Since the Second Intifada, the BBC as well as some major British newspapers have reported daily on Israel in an often tendentious, biased, and one-sided fashion. Under no circumstances will the BBC refer to any act of Hamas or other Palestinian terrorist organizations as terrorism. These killers are always referred to as militants, which has trade-union connotations in Britain . It is the term used when, for instance, shop stewards advocate a factory strike.

“Within the distorted BBC system , the reporting of Israeli civilian fatalities and Palestinian suicide attacks made them seem no more than minor pinpricks compared to the retaliations by Israel , the definitive ‘rogue state.’ The BBC invariably disconnects jihadi terrorism from any notion that it is part of a hate culture and the result of ideological indoctrination. The explanation is that these murderous deeds are driven by the relentless, ‘racist actions’ of the Israeli government. It is Palestinian misery and oppression that allegedly brings about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. I believe this is a false, simplistic, and one-sided account. Terrorism is mentioned without connection to an ideology and the issue of antisemitism in the Arab or Islamic world is virtually nonexistent.”

The Jewish Lobby

Another favorite topic of the British media is the power of the Jewish lobby. One well-publicized example occurred when the veteran Labour MP Tom Dalyell said in a 2003 interview in Vanity Fair that Tony Blair was surrounded by a ‘cabal’ of Jewish advisers. Of the three people he mentioned, only one was Jewish, Lord Levy. …

“There are exceptions to the anti-Israeli attitude. The most important was former prime minister Tony Blair, who was as sympathetic to Israel as one can reasonably be under the circumstances. The paradox is that, while Blair and his successor Gordon Brown have been pro-Israeli and pro-Jewish, Britain is still one of the leaders of current European antisemitism. That is the sobering reality and it needs to be honestly addressed.

“There is much to be said for the claim that Blair’s support for Israel during the Second Lebanon War was the straw that broke the camel’s back and brought him down as prime minister. He was undefeated in elections yet had to resign under pressure from his own party. Blair and Brown fit into a line of statesmen who came out of the British Christian tradition, which has a historic affinity with Zionism. These leaders include Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson, and Margaret Thatcher-individuals of vision and great political talent. In my opinion they represent the best in the British political tradition.

“ Britain can also pride itself on the publication of the Report of the All-Party Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, which did a fair and thorough—though not perfect—job of investigating the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in the UK . I gave extensive evidence to that inquiry, though for some reason the recording equipment did not function properly and hence there was only a brief summary in the final document. The Report does not contradict anything I have been saying, though it was too soft on Muslim antisemitism and lacked any historical perspective.”

Ken Livingstone

Among those who have contributed to the current hostile mood is Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London until May 2008. In the 1970s, he knocked on my door to ask for my vote in a local North London election. It turned out he was a passionate admirer of Leon Trotsky and was enthused to learn that I had just written a book on the Bolshevik leader—the kind of Jew he could empathize with—a radical leftist, an international socialist, and an ‘anti-Zionist.’ A few years later he became a coeditor of the Labour Herald, the Labour Party’s paper in London . In 1982, during the First Lebanon War it published on its front page a caricature of then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in full SS uniform with the skull-and-bones insignia on his head. He was standing atop a mountain of skulls. The caption was in big, black Gothic script: ‘The Final Solution.’ Underneath it Begin was saying: ‘Who needs shalom when you have Reagan behind you?’ This cartoon could have come straight out of Pravda.

“Livingstone always presents himself as an antiracist. He claims to be against any form of discrimination that affects minorities and outsiders. Supposedly he was the friend of gays, lesbians, new immigrants, Afro-Caribbeans, and Muslims. Yet Livingstone has often related to Anglo-Jewry as a kind of Israeli fifth column in Britain and as accomplices of its ‘racist’ policy. …

“What is interesting is that in Britain , as in much of Europe, the proclaimed antiracism of the left-wing variety often feeds the new antisemitism—which is primarily directed against Israel . Of course, if one suggests that such leftists are antisemites in disguise, they are likely to become enraged and retort that one is ‘playing the antisemitic card.’ This has become a codeword for saying, as it were, ‘You are a dishonest, deceitful, manipulative Jew’ or a ‘lover of Jews.’ Zionists supposedly use the ‘accusation of antisemitism’ to distort and silence the fully justified criticism of Israel and its human rights abuses. The word ‘criticism’ in this context is misplaced. It is a euphemism or license for the demonization of Israel . And that in turn is a major form of antisemitism in our time.”

(Prof. Robert Solomon Wistrich, the Neuberger Chair for Modern European and Jewish History and the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , is the editor of its journal Antisemitism International.
He was interviewed by Manfred Gerstenfeld.)

[david barrett]

Brilliant piece by Howard Jacobson on anti-Israel activity in the UK



Howard Jacobson - 18/02/2009
(Independent)

"The language of protesters 'determines the issue before it can be discussed.'


I was once in Melbourne when bush fires were raging 20 or 30 miles north of the city. Even from that distance you could smell the burning. Fine fragments of ash, like slivers of charcoal confetti, covered the pavements. The very air was charred. It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don't mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.
A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here - the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, "criticism" of Israel, pure and simple. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians this country has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. Deviate a fraction of a moral millimetre from the prevailing othodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question. I don't say that self-pityingly. As always with dictatorships of the mind, the worst harmed are not the ones not listened to, but the ones not listening. So leave them to it, has essentially been my philosophy. A life spent singing anti-Zionist carols in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway is its own punishment.
But responses to the fighting in Gaza have been such as to drive even the most quiescent of English Jews - whether quiescent because we have learnt to expect nothing else, or because we are desperate to avoid trouble, or because we have our own frustrations with Israel to deal with - out of our usual stoical reserve. Some things cannot any longer go unchallenged.
My first challenge is implicit in the phrase "the fighting in Gaza", which more justly describes the event than the words "Massacre" and "Slaughter" which anti-Israel demonstrators carry on their placards. This is not a linguistic ploy on my part to play down the horror of Gaza or to minimise the loss of life. In an article in this newspaper last week, Robert Fisk argued that "a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz". I am not sure who he was arguing with, but it certainly isn't me.
I do not differentiate between the worth of lives and no more wish to harm or see harmed the hair of a single Palestinian than do those who make cause, here in safe cosy old easy-come easy-go England, with Hamas. Indeed, given Hamas's record of violence to its own people - read the latest report from Amnesty if you doubt it - it's possible I wish to harm the hair of a single Palestinian less. But that might be rhetoric in which case I apologise for it.
Rhetoric is precisely what has warped report and analysis these past months, and in the process made life fraught for most English Jews who, like me, do not differentiate between the worth of Jewish and Palestinian lives, though the imputation - loud and clear in a new hate-fuelled little chamber-piece by Caryl Churchill - is that Jews do. "Massacre" and "Slaughter" are rhetorical terms. They determine the issue before it can begin to be discussed. Are you for massacre or are you not? When did you stop slaughtering your wife?
I watched demonstrators approach members of the public with their petitions. "Do you want an end to the slaughter in Gaza?" What were those approached expected to reply? - "No, I want it to continue unabated." If "Massacre" presumes indiscriminate, "Slaughter" presumes innocence. There is no dodging the second of those. In Gaza the innocent have suffered unbearably. But it is in the nature of modern war, where soldiers no longer toss grenades at one another from their trenches, that the innocent pay.
Live television pictures of civilian fatalities rightly distress and anger us. Similar pictures of the damage this country did to the innocent of Berlin would have distressed and angered us no less. The outrage we feel does credit to our humanity, but says nothing about the justice of a particular war. Insist that all wars are too cruel ever to be called just, argue that any discharge of weapons in the vicinity of the innocent is murderous, and you will meet no resistance from me; but you will have in the same breath to implicate Hamas who make a virtue of endangering their own civilian population, and who, as everyone knows but many choose to discount, have been firing rockets into Israeli towns for years.
The inefficiency of those rockets, landing God knows where and upon God knows whom, is often cited to minimise the offence. As though murderous intention can be mitigated by the obsolescence of the weaponry. In fact the inefficiency only exacerbates the crime. How much more indiscriminate can you be than to lob unstable rockets into civilian areas and hope for a hit? Massacre manquי, we might call it - slaughter in all but a good aim. And this not from some disaffected group we might liken to the IRA, but the legitimately elected government of Gaza.
If it is a war crime for one government to fire on civilians, it is a war crime for another. But when a protester joined a demonstration at Sheffield University recently, calling on both sides to desist, her placard was seized and trampled underfoot, while the young in their liberation scarves and embryo compassion looked on and said not one word.
And Israel? Well, speaking on BBC television at the height of the fighting, Richard Kemp, former commander of British Troops in Afghanistan and a senior military adviser to the British government, said the following: "I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare where any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of civilians than the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) is doing today in Gaza." A judgement I can no more corroborate than those who think very differently can disprove.
Right or wrong, it was a contribution to the argument from someone who is more informed on military matters than most of us, but did it make a blind bit of difference to the tone of popular execration? It did not. When it comes to Israel we hear no good, see no good, speak no good. We turn our backsides to what we do not want to know about and bury it in distaste, like our own ordure. We did it and go on doing it with all official contestation of the mortality figures provided by Hamas. We do it with Hamas's own private executions and their policy of deploying human shields. We do it with the sotto voce admission by the UN that "a clerical error" caused it to mis-describe the bombing of that UN school which at the time was all the proof we needed of Israel's savagery. It now turns out that Israel did not bomb the school at all. But there's no emotional mileage in a correction. The libel sticks, the retraction goes unnoticed.
But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is criticism of Israel, pure and simple.
A laughably benign locution, "criticism", for what is in fact - what has in recent years become - a desire to word a country not just out of the commonwealth of nations but out of physical existence altogether. Richard Ingrams daydreams of the time when Israel will no longer be, an after-dinner sleep which is more than an old man's idle prophesying. It is for him a consummation devoutly to be wished. This week Bruce Anderson also looked to such a time, but in his case with profound regret. Israel has missed and goes on missing chances to be magnanimous, he argued, as no victor has ever been before. That's a high expectation, but I am in sympathy with it, and it is an expectation in line with what Israel's greatest writers and peace campaigners - Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman - have been saying for years. Though it is interesting that not a one of those believed such magnanimity included allowing Hamas's rockets to go on falling unhindered into Israel.
Was not the original withdrawal from Gaza and the dismantling of the rightly detested settlements a sufficient signal of peaceful intent, and a sufficient opportunity for it to be reciprocated? Magnanimity is by definition unilateral, but it takes two for it to be more than a suicidal gesture. And the question has to be asked whether a Jewish state, however magnanimous and conciliatory, will ever be accepted in the Middle East.
But my argument is not with the Palestinians or even with Hamas. People in the thick of it pursue their own agenda as best they can. But what's our agenda? What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak?
In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps, and when the Ghetto rose up it was liquidated, the last 50,000 residents being either shot on the spot or sent to be murdered more hygienically in Treblinka. Don't mistake me: every Palestinian killed in Gaza is a Palestinian too many, but there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed - even in the most grossly mis-reported deed - between Gaza and Warsaw.
Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those - it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.
Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn't happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.
Anti-Semitism? Absolutely not. It is "criticism" of Israel, pure and simple. A number of variations on the above sophistical nastiness have been fermenting in the more febrile of our campuses for some time. One particularly popular version, pseudo-scientific in tone, understands Zionism as a political form given to a psychological condition - Jews visiting upon others the traumas suffered by themselves, with Israel figuring as the torture room in which they do it.
This is is pretty well the thesis of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, an audacious 10-minute encapsulation of Israel's moral collapse - the audacity residing in its ignorance or its dishonesty - currently playing at the Royal Court. The play is conceived in the form of a family roundelay, with different voices chiming in with suggestions as to the best way to bring up, protect, inform, and ultimately inflame into animality an unseen child in each of the chosen seven periods of contemporary Jewish history. It begins with the Holocaust, partly to establish the playwright's sympathetic bona fides ("Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting"), partly to explain what has befallen Palestine, because no sooner are the Jews out of the hell of Hitler's Europe than they are constructing a parallel hell for Palestinians.
Anyone with scant knowledge of the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations - that is to say, judging from what they chant, the majority of anti-Israel demonstrators - would assume from this that Jews descended on the country as from a clear blue sky; that they had no prior association with the land other than in religious fantasy and through some scarce remembered genealogical affiliation: "Tell her it's the land God gave us/... Tell her her great great great great lots of greats grandad lived there" - the latter line garnering much knowing laughter in the theatre the night I was there, by virtue of the predatiousness lurking behind the childlike vagueness.
You cannot of course tell the whole story of anywhere in 10 minutes, but then why would you want to unless you conceive it to be simple and one-sided? The staccato form of the piece - every line beginning "Tell her" or "Don't tell her" - is skilfully contrived to suggest a people not just forever fraught and frightened but forever covert and deceitful. Nothing is true. Boasts are denials and denials are boasts. Everything is mediated through the desire to put the best face, first on fear, then on devious appropriation, and finally on evil.
That being the case, it is hard to be certain what the playwright knows and what she doesn't, what she, in her turn, means deliberately to twist or just unthinkingly helps herself to from the poor box of leftist propaganda. The overall impression, nonetheless, is of a narrative slavishly in line with the familiar rhetoric, making little or nothing of the Jews' unbroken connection with the country going back to the Arab conquest more than a thousand years before, the piety felt for the land, the respect for its non-Jewish inhabitants (their rights must "be guarded and honoured punctiliously," Ben Gurion wrote in 1918), the waves of idealistic immigration which long predated the post-Holocaust influx with its twisted psychology, and the hopes of peaceful co-existence, for the tragic dashing of which Arab countries in their own obduracy and intolerance bear no less responsibility.
Quite simply, in this wantonly inflammatory piece, the Jews drop in on somewhere they have no right to be, despise, conquer, and at last revel in the spilling of Palestinian blood. There is a one-line equivocal mention of a suicide bomber, and ditto of rockets, both compromised by the "Tell her" device, otherwise no Arab lifts a finger against a Jew. "Tell her about Jerusalem," but no one tells her, for example, that the Jewish population of East Jersusalem was expelled at about the time our survivors turn up, that it was cleansed from the city and its sacred places desecrated or destroyed. Only in the crazed brains of Israelis can the motives for any of their subsequent actions be found.
Thus lie follows lie, omission follows omission, until, in the tenth and final minute, we have a stage populated by monsters who kill babies by design - "Tell her we killed the babies by mistake," one says, meaning don't tell her what we really did - who laugh when they see a dead Palestinian policeman ("Tell her they're animals... Tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out"), who consider themselves the "chosen people", and who admit to feeling happy when they see Palestinian "children covered in blood".
Anti-Semitic? No, no. Just criticism of Israel.
Only imagine this as Seven Muslim Children and we know that the Royal Court would never have had the courage or the foolhardiness to stage it. I say that with no malice towards Muslims. I do not approve of censorship but I admire their unwillingness to be traduced. It would seem that we Jews, however, for all our ingrained brutality - we English Jews at least - are considered a soft touch. You can say what you like about us, safe in the knowledge that while we slaughter babies and laugh at murdered policemen ("Tell her we're the iron fist now") we will squeak no louder than a mouse when we are abused.
Caryl Churchill will argue that her play is about Israelis not Jews, but once you venture on to "chosen people" territory - feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase - once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple - Jew-hating which the haters don't even recognise in themselves, so acculturated is it - the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation. So for that we are grateful. At last that mystery is solved and that lie finally nailed. No, you don't have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.
If one could simply leave them to it one would. It's a hell of its own making, hating Jews for a living. Only think of the company you must keep. But these things are catching.
Take Michael Billington's somnolent review of the play in the Guardian. I would imagine that any accusation of anti-Semitism would horrify Michael Billington. And I certainly don't make it. But if you wanted an example of how language itself can sleepwalk the most innocent towards racism, then here it is. "Churchill shows us," he writes, "how Jewish children are bred to believe in the ‘otherness' of Palestinians..."
It is not just the adopted elision of Israeli children into Jewish children that is alarming, or the unquestioning acceptance of Caryl Churchill's offered insider knowledge of Israeli child-rearing, what's most chilling is that lazy use of the word "bred", so rich in eugenic and bestial connotations, but inadvertently slipped back into the conversation now, as truth.
Fact: Jews breed children in order to deny Palestinians their humanity. Watching another play in the same week, Billington complains about its manipulation of racial stereotypes. He doesn't, you see, even notice the inconsistency.
And so it happens. Without one's being aware of it, it happens. A gradual habituation to the language of loathing. Passed from the culpable to the unwary and back again. And soon, before you know it...
Not here, though. Not in cosy old lazy old easy-come easy-go England."

[david barrett]

The best comment I heard in the media about this was a seemingly accidental one on the newspaper review on BBC news 24 last night.
The presenter said it wasn't an anti-semitic play and the reviewer said, "Why wasn't it called seven Israeli children then ?"