Howard Jacobson in the Telegraph yesterday – written no doubt before the latest Green outrage, which gives it even more resonance. I am obsessed with the ignorance of the Jew-haters:
The obsession I need a hobby to take my mind off today is Jew-hating. Its omnipresence. Its implacability. Its inexplicable rage, as though it’s the Jew-hater rather than the Jew-hated who has reason to be aggrieved. Above all what obsesses me is the paradox of its uncouth ignorance appealing most to the educated.
Not in the wild or in a zoo do Jew-haters find a home but on the campuses of our best universities, where they might be expected to have read a little history or know the meaning of simple words. Could it be that the ultimate aim of education is anti-Semitism?…
I begin by filling in the blanks in their knowledge. Tell them Jesus was a Jew and would certainly have been a Zionist had he been alive when the Jews were being killed in their tens of thousands in pogroms throughout eastern Europe. I tell them what a pogrom was.
I explain that Zionism was a movement of liberation and self-realization of the sort they support when it’s for Palestinians. Zionists didn’t turn up out of the blue in tanks firing Kalashnikovs. They came carrying shovels and works of philosophy. Some were idealists and dreamers, poets and utopists, others, no doubt, would have been opportunists.
There wasn’t just one kind of Zionist. An early supporter of Zionism, for example, was George Eliot. The name rings no bells, though in my dream at least, a sizeable proportion of the Jew-haters are reading English literature at university. Not the kind of English literature I studied. Not Keats and negative capability. More Edward Said and settler-colonialism.
“She wrote Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda,” I explain. The “she” throws them. Didn’t I say George Eliot? The possibility that this early proponent of Zionism might have been trans causes a brief perplexity. It would be a good idea for me to wake up at this moment. Count their confusion a victory. But my obsession forces me to continue throwing words and ideas into the unresponsive blackness.
I move on to genocide. The genocide, they invariably call it. The definite article is not accidental. We are talking about a genocide like no other. “This is not just genocide, this is IDF genocide.”
Seldom can that little word “the” have been sent on so deadly an errand. Not only does its definiteness brook no question as to the genocide’s existence, it reduces in significance and atrocity, indeed it replaces, any other genocide we might have heard about. Out you go, Jews. We have new, more deserving victims.
I set the grammar to one side and contest the definition. I know about genocides. They were once another of my obsessions. Most Jews of my acquaintance are the same. We know that a genocide is not determined by the numbers of people killed in a cruel war.
Until you understand the history and moral atmospherics of genocide, until you’ve been hounded out of every country, herded on to death trains, seen your civilisation defamed, your every thought ground to nothing, the very principle of your existence eradicated, wiped forever (had the genocide succeeded) from the slate of history – and I would not wish that experience upon a single Palestinian – until then, you who march and demonstrate against Israel have no business with the word.
Could there be such a phenomenon as Shoah-envy? Could it be that Jews are begrudged the Holocaust for the pity it earned them? Why else this attempt to render them unworthy of their history? Why else want it expunged? And now consider this: even as you march to denounce the genocide, you are wishing that very eventuality upon the Jews. I have seen posters calling on someone to finish the job. Not just from the river to the sea, but wherever and whenever Jews have been respected, you want them gone….
Only a few months after Keir Starmer stepped down, the Labour Party is already a different beast. In the rush to apologise to party members for not listening to them earlier, Ed Miliband leads the pack. Sorry about Gaza, he says; we should have listened. Ask “Listen to whom exactly?” and the answer would seem to be, those calling for a ceasefire even before Hamas had finished dragging the last hostages over the border and those who want not to mention Hamas at all.
With regard to his own failure to hear these voices, Mr Miliband drips contrition. He has even brushed up on the vocabulary beloved of those he wants to please. Ethnic cleansing – tick. Settler terrorism – tick. Apartheid – tick. Illegal occupation – tick, tick, tick.
Quite how a country founded on such illegality was able to offer his traumatised grandmother the shelter and sanctuary he often talks about, he doesn’t say. But when he starts to enter my dreams I will remind him of what Israel has existed against all the odds to do. You say you are grateful, Foreign Secretary, but gratitude should be more than a word. You should feel it in that part of yourself you describe as “proudly Jewish”.
No one asks you to lie, prevaricate or whitewash. I agree that a true friend of Israel will not flinch from being critical. But the word critical has many meanings, and a true friend of Israel will not embrace the propaganda of its enemies. Seek the approval of the baying mob if you must, Mr Miliband – that’s a question for your conscience – but don’t mistake its words for “just criticism”.
Truth is a precious commodity. You won’t find it paying lickspittle to the Left of your party, many of whom, had they been around, would have smothered in its cradle the Israel that helped your grandmother. You allude to the Hamas massacre but can only scrape together a perfunctory sentence about it.
You stand emphatically, you say with weak emphasis, against those who seek Israel’s destruction, but you call Israel’s response to that barbaric massacre “a stain on the conscience of the world”. And the precipitating massacre itself? Do you not consider such barbarity a stain on the conscience of those who encouraged and then applauded it?
But if you can’t bring yourself to go that far, for fear of incurring the wrath of backbenchers who don’t accept the concept of a terrorist, tell me how exactly you intend to help keep Israel safe for future grandmothers fleeing Jew-hatred. Or do you think Hamas will take care of them?
I bat the questions into the night but there are no answers. Somewhere in the darkness is a gooey-eyed, self-pronouncing proud Jew who can’t find a good word for the Jewish state and so must borrow all the bad ones from Jew-haters of every stripe, from armed jihadis to elderly suburban anti-Semites who can’t wait to be arrested for sitting on the grass in support of Palestine Action.
What say you, Mr Miliband? While we’re talking stains on consciences, how clean is yours?
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