Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of morphing into anti-Semitism by Simon Schama
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d6a75c3c-d6f3-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html
Much of the student left has “some kind of problem with Jews”, said
the bravely decent Alex Chalmers last week in his resignation
statement as co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club following a
vote in favour of Israeli Apartheid Week.
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?
Why is it somehow proper to boycott Israeli academics and cultural
institutions, many of which are critical of government policy, but to
remain passive in the face of Saudi Arabia’s brutal punishment of
anyone whose exercise of freedom of conscience can be judged
sacrilegious? Why is the rage so conspicuously selective? Or, to put
it another way, why is it so much easier to hate the Jews?
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?
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