Mick Hartley

An interesting interview with Jeremy Havardi at Fathom. Havardi is Director of the B’nai B’rith UK’s Bureau of International Affairs. He talks of the Four things I learned talking to the world’s diplomats about Israel.

Including their limited understanding of antisemitism:

Surveys from the Anti-Defamation League, an NGO founded by B’nai B’rith in 1913, show that a significant percentage of modern Europeans believe one or more of the following: that Jews have too much control of the banking system; that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own countries or that Jews exploit the Holocaust for their own ends. Some diplomats have questioned whether these are antisemitic attitudes or have disparaged the evidence. In one case, a European ambassador suggested that Jews should regard the widespread belief in Jewish banking control as a compliment, given that it showcased the Jewish community’s tremendous professional success. (The idea that antisemitic attitudes might then feed into antisemitic assaults and violence was lost on him).

Another European diplomat asked if members of the B’nai B’rith team in front of him were ‘British or Jewish,’ echoing the canard that Jews must have a separate nationality from that of the country they were living in. Another Ambassador suggested that the prevalence of antisemitic attitudes in his country stemmed from the ‘aggression’ of Israeli policy in Gaza, shifting the focus of blame from the perpetrators of antisemitism to its victims.

In Europe, the influence of Islamism and Salafism in stirring anti-Jewish hate is hard to miss. Recent surveys have found that many attacks on Jews in Europe have been carried out by people of Arab and Muslim background as well as by the far right. Yet one senior European diplomat, tasked by the EU to monitor antisemitism, admitted to me that explanations invoking ‘the Islamist element’ could not be released into the public domain for fear of the domestic repercussions.

And attitudes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

At the end of a meeting in Geneva with one of Europe’s Francophone nations, we were given an official statement offering an overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was much criticism of settlement policy and the ongoing occupation, as well as Israel’s Gaza policy. After asking if there was even one sentence criticising the conduct of Hamas and Fatah, an extended blank stare was followed by a simple ‘no.’ One of the Nordic embassies we visited tried to justify a longstanding ban on Jewish animal slaughter on the grounds of welfare concerns. When we pointed out that its countrymen had the freedom to simultaneously engage in whale hunting, this was dismissed with a shrug.