I avoid certain topics on this Blog – ones I feel
are too important or ones where anyone who ventures into them risks ( sometimes wilful)
misunderstanding. Or both. Anti-semitism is one of those topics.
But there comes a point … I am tired of the untruth, endlessly recycled by people who seem
to be paid not to think, that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-semitism or even
anti-semitism itself. It isn’t. Full stop. Go back to your PR drawing board.
Your current strategy sounds like the last refuge of scoundrels.
It’s true that anti-semites are generally
anti-Zionists, though not always: in the past there were anti-semites who
thought it a jolly good idea that all the Jews should take themselves off to
Israel and hopefully get lost in the desert. Indeed, in the early days some
Zionists tried to drum up support for the Zionist project from serious
anti-semites. Every little helps. The Zionist Avram Stern (of Stern Gang fame)
even put in an approach to Hitler. After all, they both had a common enemy,
Great Britain, which had been awarded a League of Nations Mandate to run
Palestine in 1918. Stern was very happy to make life uncomfortable for the
British in Palestine and that, in the context of World War Two, was his
gambling chip with Hitler. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Endorsement of the Zionist project initially came
from conservative and nationalist gentile politicians, like the Conservative
British politician A J Balfour, whose famous 1917 declaration in favour of a
Jewish homeland had at least something to do with the background thought that
Zionism meant that the Jews would go elsewhere: they would stop coming from
Eastern Europe (and its pogroms) to London and Dublin, where of course they
encountered some anti-semitism but less intense than in the bloodlands of eastern Europe.
But even if it
didn’t matter very much to the British that the newcomers were Jews, it did
matter that they were migrants - and, well, as we all know, you can only take
in so many migrants. If a big migrant group tell you they would rather go
elsewhere, why discourage them? Why not give a bit of help?
In short, you could argue that sympathy for the
Zionist project among Gentile politicians allowed a little anti-semitism and a
lot of anti-migrant sentiment to be expressed in a nice way. This viewpoint is
probably not a majority one: historians generally see the Balfour Declaration very much as
a move designed to increase American and Russian enthusiasm for the Allied
cause in World War One.
The United Nations decision (that is, the decision
of the victorious Allies) to create a Jewish homeland after World War Two also
had less reputable motivations. That old anti-semite, Stalin, liked the idea
and the Soviet Union hurried to be first to recognise the state of Israel. The
other allies were keen too, though the British arguably had in mind a fairer
solution than the one eventually arrived at by force and, as the history books
tell us, tried to restrict Jewish migration to Palestine, more or less to the
end of the Mandate.
I think it’s true that one reason that the Allies settled
for the idea of Israel is that it
promised a partial solution to the Jewish Problem - the problem that mainland
Europe at the end of World War Two was home to a large displaced population of
traumatised Jews, many or most of whom did not want to return home or had no
home to go to. Most of them wanted to get out of mainland Europe with first
preference destinations in Great Britain and the United States and Latin
America, with some happy to go to South Africa ( a popular destination earlier
in the century) or Australia. Anywhere – understandably – except mainland
Europe.
(Anne Frank’s
Diary is instructive: to begin with,
exiled from Germany, she dreams of making her new home, after the war, in The
Netherlands. She’s a fan of the Dutch. Towards the end she wavers as it becomes
clear that the Dutch are losing their courage).
The Zionist project offered a destination which had
the unique advantage that Jews might become a majority in the population. That
was attractive to many Jews, even if they weren't Zionists. And it was a solution which promised to reduce the financial
and administrative burden on the Allies of traumatised people in displaced
persons camps, hospitals and so on.
The burden was shifted to Palestine, where there
was, of course, already a large Jewish population willing to support new
arrivals. And there was a Zionist movement willing to force the Arab population
to make room for them. When it came to ethnic cleansing, the Zionists showed in
the 1940s that they could do it too.
For a long time, into the 1990s, I suppose I
thought that things might work out well in the end.
Lots of Jews in Israel held
progressive – liberal, socialist – political beliefs. Many of them were cuddly
kibbutzniks. In the end, they would come to some kind of acceptable deal with
the indigenous Arab population, Muslim and Christian by religion, mostly semitic
by race. Social solidarity would win out over ethnic or religious or cultural
divisions. Zionism, with its inherent racism, would become a bit of an
embarrassment. It would become History.
Nope. It didn’t happen. And things went from bad to
worse, let’s say after the assassination (by a Jewish religious extremist) of
Yitzhak Rabin.
Cuddly kibbutzniks have been consigned to the
dustbin of history. Now we have aggressive religious fundamentalist settlers.
In the cities, we have mafia with the upper hand rather than liberal
intellectuals. We have fairly typical second and third generation nationalism. The
majority of new migrants since the 1990s are not refugees fleeing persecution. They
are often just unpleasant people no different from very pushy people anywhere,
who see Israel as a land of golden opportunity for pushing and shoving.
Not to like these people is not about being
anti-semitic. It’s about not liking religious fundamentalism (what is there to
like about any religious fundamentalism?). It’s about not liking settlers and
colonists who force indigenous populations off their land. It’s about not
liking rule by mafias. It’s about suspicion of narrow Nationalism which
is doing well not only in Israel but all over mainland Europe (Poland, Russia, Ukraine …) and always ends up with
some group (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Muslims, Arabs … ) the victim of some kind
of persecution.
I read the books about the history of the Jews in 20th
century Europe (and review them on my book Blog www.readingthisbook.com),
I read the books by the Jewish critics of Israel.
I have absolutely no enthusiasm for Judaism or Islam or Christianity or racism or persecution or firing missiles at poor people’s homes from a safe distance. My toes curl when – in the course of my work - I hear someone make an anti-semitic remark (as people still do).
I have absolutely no enthusiasm for Judaism or Islam or Christianity or racism or persecution or firing missiles at poor people’s homes from a safe distance. My toes curl when – in the course of my work - I hear someone make an anti-semitic remark (as people still do).
I’ve more or less had it with Israel and certainly with this propaganda blast which paints me as an anti-semite because I don't think Benjamin Netanyahu the greatest show on earth and also don't think that a very long time God marked some wretched part of the earth's surface as a Jewish homeland and then more or less forgot about it until fairly recently reminded.