On Antisemitism

This particular blog posting has not been an easy one to write. There is a network of taboos surrounding discussion of the Jewish people, though perhaps less so over the conduct of Israel.

In our political culture, the default position is that the enormity of past crimes against Jews can only result in an embarrassed silence if Israel or the Jewish community as a whole take a wrong step in making public policy.

It often seems that only Jews are permitted to comment negatively on the actions of other Jews or else a charge of anti-semitism may soon follow. This may be fine if Jewish commentators are prepared to judge their own by at least some of the standards of the wider Gentile community. If not, we have problems.

Europeans in particular, but not only Europeans, must accommodate what are perceived to be the legitimate aspirations of a people who are instinctively stereotyped as actual victims, potential victims or survivors - and the rest of us as, by definition, actual or potential oppressors or burdened with guilt.

That Germans, Slovakians, Croatians and a host of other Middle European nations might think twice because of their grim pasts is one thing but that Americans and British now do is another.

Trepidation

This is a big issue fraught with politics. Careers and businesses have been affected. At the extreme, men have been imprisoned for their opinions.

As we write, a Bishop with decidedly eccentric views is threatened with incarceration if he steps on to German soil simply because he has an unpalatable belief. There is also a nervousness abroad that, to adapt the title of one book on post-war fascism, the ‘Beast may reawaken’.

On the other hand, a reaction to the prevailing consensus is beginning to set in. This has been coming for some time amongst leftish dissidents within the Jewish community.

Some Jewish and other observers have become increasingly resentful of the Holocaust being used to promote the interests of a peculiarly right wing version of Zionism.

This version,which has increasingly dominated discourse in Israel over recent years, has fed back its peculiar ideology into the West through AIPAC, the Zionist lobbying organization within the US, and through its capture of a range of Jewish political organizations elsewhere.

Now, the assault on Gaza, with its disproportionate murder of civilians, including children, has seen an unprecedented wave of revulsion, certainly in the UK.

We have seen amost remarkable speech in the House of Commons by the avowedly Zionist Sir Gerald Kaufman and the unification of much of the nation against the BBC’s absurd denial of broadcast time for the non-political and charitable Gaza Appeal.

Fearing the Dark Side

Unfortunately, a legitimate critique of Israel appears to have opened the door to less savoury opinions. Gaza, combined with events like the Madoff scandal, have threatened to open up old wounds.

We are at the start of a major global economic downturn which is a relevant fact in any assault on minority groups. Labour MP John Cruddas has long warned about the rise of the far right BNP in those working class areas with genuine grievances about the current political elite’s conduct of affairs.

Recent debates on Facebook, for example, have seen expressions of doubt: whether any Jew can be trusted not to support Israel against any, even a humanitarian, interest; whether Jews are manipulating British foreign policy for their own interest; and whether Israel is protected by some ‘Jewish’ Wall Street.

This is creating fear and alarm amongst Jewish participants because these views would have been largely self-censored at any time before Gaza.

Yet these are perfectly reasonable questions for ordinary people to ask about the role of Jewish people in public policy so long as we never presume we have the answer to the questions in advance.

Ordinary folk see an elite system that seems to ‘bend over backwards’ to give Israel the benefit of the doubt and an America that has given Israel virtual carte blanche in regional policy. What is going on, they ask?

Should one remain silent on the emerging problem of radical Zionist influence on Western foreign policy and culture simply out of respect for the experience of the Shoah?

Or is it time to ask some tough questions about the exploitation of the dead and of the Jewish living for the political purposes of just one faction within one tradition of Judaism?

I do not know the answers to many of the questions but silencing curiosity now does democracy no good. Worse, it plays into the hands of anti-semitic extremists and does the Jewish people no good either.

The Usual Disclaimers

Because of the sensitivity of the subject, I have to do what I would not have to do if I was discussing any other subject – clarify my position before I start.

I am not in the least anti-semitic. I have worked for and with Jewish business interests. I served on the Advisory Board of the Three Faiths Forum for many years.

One of the most formative experiences of my life was the discovery in my early teens of the Holocaust. Years of study persuade me fully that it happened, was deliberate and was a crime of the first magnitude.

However, I have also worked closely with Arab and Muslim interests. I am now equally persuaded that the history of the Jewish people and of Israel are not, despite the claims of Zionists, the same thing - and that the conduct of Israel has been one of increasing oppression of the Palestinians over time.

This has been beyond what might reasonably be regarded as protective of an economically secure minor nuclear state fully protected by US guarantees. And I am willing to be questioned directly on any aspect of my position on these matters.

Nevertheless, already disturbed by the disproportionate and brutal use of force in Lebanon in 2006, the assault on Gaza has been a turning point for me and for others.

I too have had to ask profound questions about the conduct of Israel and its disproportionate influence on Western foreign policy. It has also forced me to ask further questions about the use of claims of anti-semitism.

So, at the risk of attracting opprobrium to the highest degree, I present a series of observations designed to challenge our view of Jewish identity in the world.

This may upset those who are fully Zionist but I hope that discussion will help remove the basis for the rise of a new anti-semitism in the first half of the next economic cycle

Jews must be treated as wholly equal, perhaps for the first time, by placing them under the same scrutiny that we would place ourselves – not as enemies but as a vibrant part of a self-critical civil society.

In short, the politics of Gentile-Jewish relations should not be based on the solipsistic conduct of just one sovereign part of a very much broader Jewish culture, a culture that is represented by Chagall’s memories of Vitebsk as much as by the hard man image of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Reflection 1 – Over-Sensitivity to Righteous Anger

This reflection was in part triggered by the private circulation (from a pro-Israeli friend) of anecdotal ‘evidence’ of growing anti-semitism apparently emerging in the UK based on overheard conversations. Similar ‘overheard conversations’ can be found on Facebook.

Each conversation (except from identifiable radical right anti-Zionists whose anti-semitism is pretty clear) could have been interpreted in two ways. One way makes most of us anti-semites. The other leaves anti-semitism as the sport of a few political eccentrics.

The first interpretation, the one apparently favoured by the most vocal Jewish observers and sympathisers, is an immediate and almost paranoid assumption that any speaker making a comment of complaint about Jewish conduct harbours profoundly anti-Jewish sentiments.

By implication, such a person would be as ready as a German of the 1930s to turn a blind eye to cultural ‘apartheid’ and expulsion - and worse.

It is all or nothing. This is not just the extreme position that anyone critical of Israeli policy is anti-semitic and needs to be fought and silenced because their thoughts and spoken words might lead somewhere dark. Sensible British Jews know that this is nonsense.

It is the assumption that an inarticulate outburst on the train or in a queue in frustration at events in Gaza must have some deeper cultural meaning that drags up folk memories of the Black Hundreds and cattle trucks.

Does this not remind you of the assertion by some feminists that ‘all men are rapists’? Or the equally extreme position of black activists that ‘all white people are racist’? Well, I deny both those propositions.

The proposition that anti-semitism lurks deep within British culture waiting to come out at the first opportunity is not merely unproven, it is absurd.

There is not only no evidence of this proposition, the attempt to imply it is the last refuge of scoundrels who would deny, by implication, that Jews can be as British as any Gentile.

Rhetorical use of anecdote, when expressed ‘on the hoof’ by persons with legitimate frustration at their own impotence, is a technique widely used by radical liberal intellectuals to suggest some deeper underlying prejudice as if ‘ordinary people’ were, like themselves, imbued with ideological ‘idees fixes’.

Some have the habit of trying to halt all debate by referring to some single statement that returns to cultural stereotype in order to demonstrate that anti-semitism (or male misogyny or racism) is endemic.

It is the sloppy thinking of the Generation of ’68 that replaces a consideration of life as it is really lived, messily, with a world in which the particular is far too easily extrapolated into the universal. It is the culture that has brought us the liberal totalitarianism of ‘political correctness’.

And yet there is another interpretation of apparently anti-semitic statements. Such sentiments could just express a deep emotional frustration without in any way suggesting that, in a more considered light, a person would act on these emotions in an irrational or racist way.

We have to ask instead why people are reduced to such impotent rage that they will assert an irrationality.

A systematic denial of the right to raise legitimate questions about undue influence in national public policy or about matters of allegiance, or to criticize the sovereign state who shares the allegiance of a particular cultural group, raises the stakes when the sovereign state does bad things.

There is often no recourse other than the ‘outburst’ for those horrified and angered by what is done. This is part of a much wider and endemic crisis in the West where the population at large feels disenfranchised by elites which appear to have failed to deliver what their near-monopoly of power had promised.

Rage as fear and anxiety emerge is not necessarily anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim or anti-black, it is rage about failure. If any group behaves badly (from bankers through to celebrities), patience will soon wear thin. Israel has behaved badly by the moral standards of the average fair-play Briton. Patience has worn thin.

Reflection 2 – The A-Historicism of Outrage

We can go further. This may upset some Jews but if those Jews (in general rather than in particular) support a country that decapitates children with bombs and kills 100 Palestinians to every dead Israeli in a war they started, then, to many people, it is a case of ‘sod political correctness’.

They want the anger to be noted and felt by those on the other side. If the Israel-supporting Jewish person or sympathizer ever wants to hide behind historic victimhood, well, the message becomes – ‘don’t push it, we can only take so much emotional blackmail.’

A reference to the ‘annihilation of Israel’ in a railway station (which emerged in the anecdotal evidence) may have been the considered view of a particularly nasty fascist (and that is possible).

But it is far more likely not to be a wish for a second Holocaust (as paranoia might suggest) but merely ferocious anger at an injustice over which this particular person had no redress.

It means – 'I wish someone would bring this country to heel' (a very different and, in my opinion, perfectly legitimate proposition)

Jewish lobbying likes to make a thought into an act because of its (arguable) interpretation of how the Holocaust happened. There is a mythic sense that the entire horror of the Second World War that led to the Shoah was only about the Jews because it gave the horror meaning.

Sadly, it was about so much more than one ethnic community. The struggle over empire and resources and against Bolshevism, as economic resources were depleted in recession, created the dreadful conditions for scapegoating and murder.

Currently, it is not Jews who have to fear the next recession but European Muslims and American Hispanics.

The atrocious ‘norm’ for much of the WASP and Catholic middle classes was anti-semitism in the 1920s, based often on an association of Jews with communism (based on some salient facts about communist leadership cadres).

Now, we have an equally moronic ‘norm’ emerging: the Jewish people and their State cannot be criticized because the class hatred of one era is falsely presumed to live on today. Many are legitimately fed up with the actual conduct of Israel and its fellow-travellers.

Hiding behind its own narrative and the support of a hegemon, it has, first, identified (wrongly) all Jews with itself and, secondly, has created a cult of national defence that might have been appropriate up until 1967 or even 1974 but is now well past its sell-by date.

The surrounding Palestinians are weak and pauperized. The Arab states are in no position and have no will to act on their behalf. In short, amongst probable victims of atrocity, Jews are now well down the list and will rise now because of their own actions against others.

Reflection 3 – The Use of the Holocaust

In the last thirty or so years, Israel has had the opportunity to follow a different path of magnanimity and negotiation but it has behaved like the worst sort of regional thug. The rest of the world can see in Israel a street bully backed by the local gang boss (more so after the conduct of the last US Administration).

It is legitimate, if you are not a Zionist, to ask why this State was allowed to be intruded on the region in this way and, indeed, why the real causes of Jewish pain – the Central Europeans – were never truly brought to account.

Jews can be highly sensitized to their own demonization but they are not alone. Indeed, they can create resentment for claiming that they are alone in their victim status.

There is even international bargaining going on in ‘historical memories’, with Jewish lobby groups in the US supporting or inhibiting Armenian claims in proportion to the importance of an informal understanding with Turkey on regional politics.

This sort of politics should be regarded as morally debased – dead people as cynical bargaining chips for national security. Many Jews are horrified.

A change in attitude started with Rwanda and Srebenica when we were reminded that the human race can be rather repellent by its very nature.

Taking into account, say, the Mongol invasions and the many depredations of tyrants (including the Communists), genocidal mania is far more common than we like to think.

We are rather dim animal predators in many ways and it takes real effort and some prosperity, combined with the rule of law, to stop us being so. God help any aliens we may meet when we reach the stars.

The Holocaust was different because of its method and because it took place in a self-styled civilized culture. A moment’s thought, however. would remind us that this was merely bringing into the heartland what imperial powers (from the Americas through Congo to Manchuria) might do as a matter of course.

Imperial crimes against humanity were done safe from the eyes of their oh-so-tender middle classes. Worse, Jews were not the only victims of that horrific war and yet millions of peasants, conscripted soldiers, ‘a-socials’ and gypsies are somehow less sanctified in their deaths.

Of course, the Jewish position is that the Shoah was unique because it was specifically targeted at Jews as Jews.

History suggests that Jewish uniqueness is not quite so clear cut if we consider the slaughter of men, women and children because of their class (as happened under various Communist regimes). And think of all those slaughtered as an ethnic community because they were in the way of modernization.

The Western public has accepted the Holocaust narrative as a legitimate mark of respect but it has begun to look askance as the abused becomes the abuser with a very dark attitude to proportionality in war, involving collective punishment, civilian containment and revenge.

Such an approach has to be compared with the instinctive attitudes of the Central European monsters who abused them in the first place. Sir Gerald Kaufman has expressed the feelings of many Jews who will not accept the myth of Israel right or wrong in this context.

Reflection 4 – Israel As Modern State

Is Israel a malevolent society sui generis? Of course not – but it is not a beneficent one either. It can no longer expect special treatment based on a narrative that just one faction of historical Judaism (and a late one at that) has imposed on the rest of the world.

It is one of the last bastions (by a paradox) of late nineteenth century petty nationalism based on ethnicity. In that sense, it still has far more in common with Bismarckian Germany than it does with the US, the UK or even contemporary Russia. Take by way of comparison, Scotland.

Scotland is developing a late twentieth century petty nationalism in which the concept of a Scot of Italian Catholic descent or of Somali Muslim descent is not absurd. The Scot is defined in Scotland by place of residence and acceptance of accumulated shared tradition in law and administration.

A Scot is not defined by religion or race even if many Scots see themselves as indigenes. It is certainly not a country based exclusively on being a Calvinist Celt. If it was, Glasgow would soon be in flames.

Israel has removed a place of residence from others and then has imposed a law and an administrative system exclusive to its primary settler class, encouraging ever more settlement to fix that Jewish culture more firmly in place, diminishing the indigenous Arab culture in the process.

Arabs can become Arab-Israelis but on imposed terms. Ghaddafi may not be the greatest of political philosophers but he has a point that a more healthy state would have permitted equal rights to all residents and risked the allegedly higher Palestinian birth rate.

The current two state solution is a compromise of considerable magnitude in favour of Israel designed to ensure the maintenance of this constitutional primitivism only by allowing a similar primitivism to the Palestinians – yet even this concession in their favour is not acceptable.

Israel will take no risks at all in order to give respect and dignity to those it has displaced. Its attitude is that of the Protestant settlers in the West of America faced with the Sioux or Navaho. They continue to build settlements defiantly to ensure their regional dominance.

In that sense only, Israel is relatively barbaric and racist (in a paler version of nastier nineteenth century norms) to the degree that it reflects the cultural norms of the period in which it pushed for the Balfour Declaration.

Israel has accepted the past use of terrorism as legitimate to force an imperial power to grant its demands at the expense of the indigenes. This giving in to the Jewish Nationalist Right was a major mistake in an era of major mistakes from a Western ruling class of consummate cynics.

Nevertheless, it was done. Israel exists. There were (and are) very good and humane people amongst Zionists who saw Israel as a beacon of liberal and social democracy.

There was a period, from the late 1940s until the early 1980s when it might be reasonable to consider Israel a secular state that was much better than its neighbours. Families innocent of anything except the desire to live a good life have invested their emotional and material resources in Israel.

Israel is a fact on the ground. Peace and stability require not only its acceptance but its security. Now, the best that we may hope for is that it becomes a state in which the rights of all are respected, it remains within agreed borders and becomes part of a Levantine community of nations that can trade in peace.

Until it does this, we have the right to criticize it without being termed anti-semitic for doing so.

An Existential Weariness About the Question of Israel

Yes, we are weary of Israel and, yes, we may at times wish it had never appeared but never that harm should come to the Jews there or here. From that perspective, it is reasonable for Washington to offer an ultimate security guarantee – of the people rather than of a rogue state in the making.

The history was written by fools but we are where we are.

British street frustration derives from the fact that the narcissistic paranoia of right-wing Zionism still refuses to let Israel act like a proper 21st century state where you give something in order to get, where human rights do not belong solely to your own tribe and where not everyone is your enemy.

Yes, the conduct of Israel is a major cause of Islamic extremism (which is not by any means the ‘norm’ within the Muslim community) alongside more prosaic economic and political causes.

And, yes, it is a threat to peace and stability if only because its campaign to permit the bombing of Iran is calculated to inflame a whole region in which it, by comparison, will be relatively protected by its own ruthlessness and its clear preparedness to use both nuclear and air power.

In short, Israel has still not made the full transition to contemporary civilization, perhaps any more than many of its Arab neighbours. But more, much more, was expected of a power with European origins that had seen global war and its effects at very close quarters.

It is time to ‘bring it to heel’ for the sake of the Jewish people itself, albeit with international guarantees for its security, and its final recognition across the region, in return for a basic respect for the peoples it has displaced and is still displacing. This is, after all, the essence of the Saudi Peace Plan.

As for the Jewish people elsewhere, I propose a pact between the rest of us and them of historic importance. I propose that we end this constant vigilance for anti-semitic tendencies in legitimate criticism of Israel and indeed in national life in general.

I propose that we get on with the job of co-operating to maintain the sort of democratic secular states in which Judaism can most flourish - as a great tradition with a history bigger than Zionism – and that we jointly resist the blandishments of the nationalist Right during the coming recession.

Jewish history is marked by the Holocaust but it is not reducible to the Holocaust. A new generation of Jews needs to remember that no-one and no culture is a permanent victim and that no-one and no state is not a potential perpetrator of crimes against humanity.

This does not mean that the vicious crimes of the 1940s should be forgotten by any means but it does suggest that they should be seen as part of a common human experience whenever greed, political gangsters and ideology converge.

Jewish-Gentile collaboration to challenge all three at home and abroad is where we should be heading now.

Recent Client Notes [Subscription Only]

Global

22.01.09 - What Obama Means
23.01.09 - Global Economic Update
23.01.09 - The Oil Price and Last Comments on the Russo-Ukrainian Gas Dispute
23.01.09 - The Peace Process: Shifts in US and Saudi Policy
25.01.09 - Obama & The Peace Process
25.01.09 - Obama Prepares for the Afghan Surge
27.01.09 - Global Economic Update

Domestic

24.01.09 - Final Illusions Shattered on the UK Economy
27.01.09 - UK Economic Update

www.tppr.co.uk