In The Days

• Source: The New Republic
• News Date: 4/15/09
• Author: Howard Jacobson

Credit: Robert Neubecker

English anti-Semitism on the march.

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Anti-Semitism

“I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth;”
—Isa 43:6

“Hear the word of the LORD, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock. For the LORD hath redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he.”
—Jeremiah 31:10-11

“O Israel, trust•Strongs 982: batach, baw-takh´; a primitive root; properly, to hie for refuge (but not so precipitately as 2620); figuratively, to trust, be confident or sure:—be bold (confident, secure, sure), careless (one, woman), put confidence, (make to) hope, (put, make to) trust. thou in the LORD: he is their help and their shield.”
—Psa 115:9

England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks,” says Nathan Zuckerman on the last page of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It is not meant to be a compliment. What makes a Jew of Zuckerman is the “strong sense of difference” the English induce in him, a “latent and pervasive” anti-Semitism, rarely rampantly expressed except for a “peculiarly immoderate, un-English-like Israel-loathing.”

At the time–The Counterlife was published in England in 1987–Zuckerman’s account of Anglo-Jewish relations struck an English-born Jew like me as a mite thin-skinned. It was possible that an American Jew detected what we did not, but more likely that he detected what was not there. Whatever the truth of it, a comfortable existence was better served by assuming the latter. We all had our own tales of anti-Semitism to tell–my grandmother’s headstone, for example, had just been defaced with a swastika in a skinhead raid on a Jewish cemetery in Manchester–but mainly they were isolated, low-level acts of idle vandalism or reflexes of minor intolerance, more comic than alarming, and not personal, however you viewed them. Apart, that is, from the Israel-loathing, but then that wasn’t–was it?–to be confused with anti-Semitism.

Twenty years on, it is difficult to imagine Nathan Zuckerman lasting eight days in England, let alone eight weeks. There is something in the air here, something you can smell, but also, in a number of cases, something more immediately affronting to Jews. It is important not to exaggerate. Most English Jews walk safely through their streets, express themselves freely, enjoy the friendship of non-Jews, and feel no less confidently a part of English life than they ever have. Organizations monitoring anti-Jewish incidents in England have reported a dramatic increase after Gaza: the daubing of slogans such as “kill the jews” on walls and bus shelters in Jewish neighborhoods, abuse of Jewish children on school playgrounds, arson attacks on synagogues, physical assaults on Jews conspicuous by their yarmulkes or shtreimels. But, while these incidents ought not to be treated blithely, they are still exceptional occurrences.

And yet, in the tone of the debate, in the spirit of the national conversation about Israel, in the slow seepage of familiar anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation–there, it seems to me, one can find growing reason for English Jews to be concerned. Mindless acts of vandalism come and go; but what takes root in the intellectual life of a nation is harder to identify and remove. Was it anti-Semitic of the Labour politician Tam Dalyell to talk of Jewish advisers excessively influencing Tony Blair’s foreign policy? Was it anti-Semitic of the Liberal Democrat Baroness Tonge to refer to the “financial grips” that the pro-Israel lobby exerts on the world? Such allusions to a pro-Israel conspiracy of influence and wealth, usually accompanied by protestations of innocence in regard to Jews themselves–”I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism,” Baroness Tonge has said, “when what I am doing is criticizing Israel”–have become the commonplaces of anti-Israel discourse in the years since Philip Roth wrote The Counterlife. And, whatever their intention, their gradual effect has been to normalize, under cover of criticism of Israel, assumptions that 50 years ago would have been exclusively the property of overt Jew-haters. The peculiarly immoderate Israel-loathing that Roth remarked upon in 1987 is now a deranged revulsion, intemperate and unconcealed, which nothing Israel itself has done could justify or explain were it ten times the barbaric apartheid state it figures as in the English imagination.

Demonstrators against Israel’s operation in Gaza carried placards demanding an end to the “massacre” and the “slaughter.” There was no contesting this rhetoric of wanton destruction versus helpless innocence. Hamas rockets counted for nothing, Hamas’s record of endangering its own civilian population counted for nothing, Amnesty reports were cited when they incriminated Israel but ignored when they incriminated others. Whatever was not massacre was not news, nor was it germane. The distinguished British film director Ken Loach dismissed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe as designed merely to “distract attention” from Israel’s military crimes. An increase in anti-Semitism is “perfectly understandable,” Loach said, “because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism.” Scrupulously refusing the Holocaust-Gaza analogy, Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent a few weeks ago, nonetheless argued that “a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz”–at a stroke reinstating the analogy while implying that Jews need to be reminded that not only Jewish lives are precious. And a columnist for the populist newspaper The Daily Mirror has taken this imputation of callousness a stage further, writing of the “1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sat[ing] Tel Aviv’s bloodlust.”