Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips, interviewed by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

Anti-Zionism is a polite fiction, designed to conceal the fact that people want to hate Jews. In theory, of course, it is distinct from anti-Semitism. That is, if you take Zionism to be nothing more than a political movement that began in the 19th century. But this is simply no longer the case. Zionism is a movement for the self-determination of Jewish people in their homeland. And no other group on Earth is told, as the Jews often are, that they are not entitled to a homeland.

Self-determination for Jews in Israel is an essential component of Judaism itself. That doesn’t mean that all Jews are Zionists. That doesn’t mean that all Jews want to live in Israel. And it doesn’t mean all Jews support Israel. But it does mean that anti-Zionism, in many ways, is a dagger to the heart of Judaism. It deprives the Jews of their home.

People often respond to this by saying that a lot of Jews are anti-Zionists today and that many Jews were opposed to Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. That is absolutely correct. But there is a tremendous difference between then and now. These Jews were anti-Zionists before the Holocaust and before Israel existed. They made their case before people even began to understand that the Arab and Muslim world was determined to remove all Jews from their homeland. The context now is that anti-Zionism would entail the destruction of Israel – a state that is essential for the continuation of the Jewish people because, crucially, other countries would not take Jews in. […]

After the Second Intifada, a liberal journalist said to me that I had got the whole anti-Semitism thing completely wrong. What we were seeing was not anti-Semitism, he said, but ‘relief’ that we ‘don’t have to worry about the Jews anymore’. It was an ambiguous comment, so I asked him what he meant. He said: ‘Well, after the concentration camps, anti-Semitism was completely forbidden. We couldn’t say what we thought about the Jews. Until now.’ He was effectively saying that because Israel is defending itself against mass murder, the Jew had become the Nazi – and with one bound, anti-Semites were free.

I do think that there is something in this. The West really can’t cope with the fact that it was complicit in the greatest crime in human history. Germany was the centre of it, of course, but the Holocaust happened because people turned their faces away from the rampant anti-Semitism at the time. Making the Jew into a Nazi effectively frees the West. After all, if the Jews can become Nazis, then any of us can. And so there was nothing particularly terrible about the Nazis and nothing particularly terrible about our failure to deal with it at the time.

There is a feeling among the Jews that Westerners have had it up to here with the Jewish people. They don’t want to hear about the Jews ever again. They want the Jews out of their heads, out of their consciences and out of their world altogether. And they certainly don’t want to hear about the Jew as a victim. That’s why people ignore anti-Semitism. That’s why people ignore the rape of Israeli women. That’s why you have this attempt to turn the great crime of 7 October into a great crime by Israel.

Nothing is allowed to disturb the narrative that the Jews are responsible for bad things. They are never the victims of bad things. If that narrative is ever challenged, if the Jews were no longer the West’s scapegoat, it would have to take responsibility for its own misdeeds. It would no longer be able to avoid its own moral culpability. That cannot be allowed to happen.