Labour’s national student organisation is
launching an inquiry but the “the problem with Jews” on the left is not
going away. In January a meeting of the Kings College London Israel
Society, gathered to hear from Ami Ayalon, a former head of Shin Bet,
the Israeli domestic intelligence service, who now champions a
two-state solution, was violently interrupted by a chair-hurling, window-smashing crowd.
Last summer the Guardian columnist Owen Jones made
a courageous plea for
the left to confront this demon head on. Since then, however, criticism
of Israeli government policies has mutated into a rejection of Israel’s
right to exist; the Fatah position replaced by Hamas and Hizbollah
eliminationism. More darkly, support in the diaspora for Israel’s right
to survive is seen by the likes of Labour’s Gerald Kaufman, who accused
the government of being influenced in its Middle Eastern policy by “
Jewish money”, as some sort of Jewish conspiracy.
The charge that anti-Zionism is morphing into
anti-Semitism is met with the retort that the former is being
disingenuously conflated with the latter. But when George Galloway (in
August 2014 during the last Gaza war) declared Bradford “an Israel-free
zone”; when
French Jews
are unable to wear a yarmulke in public lest that invite assault, when
Holocaust Memorial day posters are defaced, it is evident that what we
are dealing with is, in Professor Alan Johnson’s accurate coinage, “
anti-semitic anti-Zionism”.
The fact is that the terrorists who slaughtered customers at the
kosher supermarket in Paris did not ask their victims whether they were
Israelis, much less supporters of Israeli government policies. They were
murdered as Jews because in the attackers’ poisoned minds all Jews are
indivisibly incriminated as persecutors of the Palestinians and thus
fair game for murder.
When the international
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement singles
out Israel as the perpetrator of the world’s worst iniquities,
notwithstanding its right of self defence, it is legitimate to ask why
the left’s wrath does not extend, for example, to Russia which rains
down destruction on civilian populations in Syria?
With the retreat of Marxist socialism, militant energies have needed somewhere to go
Growing up in London in the shadow of world war two my pals and I
talked about who might be the bad guys, should evil come our way. We
agreed the Jew-haters would not wear brown shirts and jackboots but
would probably be like people on the bus. It is not the golf club
nose-holders we have to worry about now; it is those who, in their
indignation at the sufferings visited on the Palestinians, and their
indifference to almost-daily stabbings in the streets of Israel, have
discovered the excitement of saying the unspeakable, making hay with
history, so Israel is the new reich, and a military attack on Gaza
indistinguishable from the industrially processed incineration of
millions.
Enter the historian. And history says this: anti-Semitism has not
been caused by Zionism; it is precisely the other way round. Israel was
caused by the centuries-long dehumanisation of the Jews. The blood libel
which accused Jews of murdering Christian children in order to drain
their blood for the baking of Passover matzo began in medieval England
but never went away, reviving in 16th century Italy, 18th century
Poland, 19th century Syria and Bohemia, and 20th century Russia.
In 1980s Syria, Mustafa Tlass, Hafez al-Assad’s minister of defence, made
his contribution with
The Matzo of Zion, and last year the Israeli-Palestinian Islamist
Raed Salah,
once invited to parliament by Jeremy Corbyn as an “honoured citizen”,
declared that Jews used blood for the dough of their “bread”.
In the 19th century virtual vampirism was added to the antisemitic
canon. And the left made its contribution to this refreshment of old
poison. Demonstrating that you do not have to be gentile to be an
anti-Semite, Karl Marx characterised Judaism as nothing more than the
cult of Mammon, and declared that the world needed emancipating from the
Jews. Others on the left — the social philosophers Bruno Bauer, Charles
Fourier and Pierre Prudhon and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin — echoed
the message: blood sucking, whether the physical or the economic kind,
was what Jews did.
For the Jews, the modern world turned out to be a lose-lose
proposition. Once reviled for obstinate traditionalism; their insistence
on keeping walled off from the rest (notwithstanding that it had been
Christians who had done the walling) they were now attacked for
integrating too well, speaking, dressing and working no differently but
always with the aim of global domination.
What was a Jew to do? The communist Moses Hess, who had been Marx’s
editor and friend, became persuaded, all too presciently, that the
socialist revolution would do nothing to normalise Jewish existence, not
least because so many socialists declared that emancipating the Jews
had been a terrible mistake. Hess concluded that only self-determination
could protect the Jews from the phobias of right and left alike. He
became the first socialist Zionist.
But that was to inflict an entirely colonial and alien enterprise
upon a Palestinian population, so the hostile narrative goes, who were
penalised for the sins of Europe. That the Palestinians did become
tragic casualties of a Judeo-Arab civil war over the country is
indisputable, just as the 700,000 Jews who were violently uprooted from
their homes in the Islamic world is equally undeniable. But to
characterise the country in which the language, the religion and the
cultural identity of the Jews was formed as purely a colonial anomaly is
the product of the kind of historical innocence which is oblivious of,
say, Jewish kabbalistic communities in Galilee in the 16th century or
the substantial native Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the late 19th
century.
None of this unbroken history of Jews and Judaism in Palestine is
likely to do much to cool the heat of the anti-colonial narrative of the
alien intruder, especially on the left. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the retreat of Marxist socialism around the world, militant
energies have needed somewhere to go.
The battle against inequalities under liberal capitalism has
mobilised some of that passion, but postcolonial guilt has fired up the
war against its prize whipping boy, Zionism, like no other cause. Every
such crusade needs a villain along with its banners and I wonder who
that could possibly be?
The writer is an FT contributing editor. He will be taking part in a debate on February 27 during Jewish Book Week.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d6a75c3c-d6f3-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html#axzz40qmhRI5Z
