The left’s problem with Jews has a long and miserable history. By Simon Schama. Financial Times, February 19, 2016.
Schama:
Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of
morphing into anti-Semitism, writes Simon Schama.
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?
