Varieties of Anti-Semitic Experience

When I was at University the Labour Club put before the Student Union a motion calling for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (this was in the 1980s when such a position was considered dangerously radical). The Jewish Society took exception to this and spent the run up distributing photocopies of an article by Elie Wiesel which gave a potted history of anti-semitism from the Macabbean revolt to Yasser Arafat and which more or less finished off by saying “don’t criticise Israel if you don’t want to be in this company”. Fast forward fifteen years ago. My wife was invited to the marriage of a colleague at the local synagogue. As we milled around in the porch afterwards I took a cursory look at the noticeboard. Along with details of the womens fellowship and the coffee rota and the other bits and bobs - the sort of thing you find in the porch of any country church - there was a notice explaining he drill in the event of a suspected letter bomb.

From these disparate incidents I think we can deduce three things. Firstly we ought not to underestimate the amount of anti-semitism in modern British society. Secondly it is ancient and protean – what else connects Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Tacitus, St John Chrysostom, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Adolf Hitler and Mohammed Ahmadinejad? Thirdly, where Israel is concerned the subject does get milked rather shamelessly.

This complicates discussion of anti-Semitism somewhat. So I was intrigued to pick up ‘The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism’ by Walter Laqueur in my local library. It comes with an imprimatur by Abraham ‘Armenian genocide, what Armenian genocide?’ Foxman, which was slightly worrying and the book, without notes or index is obviously written for a popular audience with an obvious ideological purpose. But Laqueur writes well and is generally fair minded. So we get an interesting overview of the issues and a canter through the lowlights of anti-semitic history, beginning with the Hellenistic era and finishing off with the present day.

It is Laqueur’s political judgements that raise eyebrows. After remarking that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic he goes on to argue that “Israel does not border on Holland and Switzerland” (the country which does is Germany which is an interesting choice of comparison) and therefore ought not to be held to Western European standards. He then goes on to point out that Russia and China are rich and powerful and, therefore, exempt from criticism whereas Israel is neither. The first is special pleading, unless Iran’s human rights violations, say, or those of Hamas are to be considered in a local context as much as Israel’s. In the second instance Israel undoubtedly gets flack because it is considered an American client state (a view which strangely is compatible with belief in an all powerful Israel lobby bending America to its will) but if the price of the hostility of Libya or the Socialist Workers Party is support from the US, then Israel has probably got the better of the deal.

Laqueur certainly overstates the resistance of post-war immigrants to Europe to integration with the host cultures. The gastarbeiter scheme in Germany was virtually set up in order to keep immigrant communities at arms length from the host culture. Racist attitudes were hardly unknown among the European population during this period. (One of the reasons there are so many black churches in the UK is because West Indian immigrants in the 1950s who innocently turned up at St. Agatha’s-By-The-Gasworks were promptly told “we don’t want your sort here”.) Terrorism by Muslim groups in Europe is later than racism by decades and so cannot function as an explanation of it. I would hazard a guess that “New York” and “East Coast” are not used as euphemisms for Jews in France and Germany and when told that radical feminists dislike Jews because they invented patriarchy or that neo-conservative is a euphemism for Jews, I am sceptical. I would at least have liked citations. One can doubt the thesis that the holocaust is unique without doubting that it was evil, and one can hold that the holocaust is exploited for political ends whilst holding that it is imperative to remember it.

All that said, Laqueur makes some interesting points. He is right that Israel should have taken Palestinian national aspirations more seriously than it actually did, he is right that relentless anti-semitic propaganda in the Arab world is used to distract attention from other popular grievances and he is right that a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment will not be slow to find politicians to exploit it. To that end Laqueur cites the Labour party’s depiction of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as pigs. I thought this was rather splendid. For one thing if the political party in power starts doing this sort of thing, it is rather more important than the activities of minor Trotskyist sects which are so important in the phony war between “Stoppers” and “Decents”. For another thing the “anti-Semitism on the left” campaigners are rather apt to grant free passes to like minded souls. Hence the free pass allotted to Oona King, despite comparing the occupied territories to the Warsaw Ghetto and announcing her boycott of Israel in the same article or the comparative silence about the depiction of Michael Howard as a pig or as Svengali. (Actually, whilst I am on the subject I can’t be the only person who is uncomfortable about the whole “something of the night” bit, can I? Howard has always struck me as being comparatively decent on a personal level and prone to nasty right-wing dog-whistle politics on a political level. Don’t tell me that Widdecombe objected to the latter.)

In any event, there is undoubtedly a problem. It is necessary to oppose anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Anti-Semitism is exploited by defenders of Israel to get it off the hook. At least to some extent opposition to Israel is anti-Semitic. Laqueur wisely declines to come to any conclusions. How does one hold things in balance? Here the child killed by the IDF. There the victim of anti-Semitic violence. There is no equivalence, no economy of evil whereby these things can be weighed and one function as an apologetic for another. The occupation does not excuse the Hamas charter. The holocaust does not excuse the occupation.. The subject is a matter for Aeschlyus. The death of Agamennon is not justified, neither is the murder of Clytemnestra. What Minerva will turn the vengeful furies into the Eumenides.

The Left: Is It All Bad?

In 1793, inspired by Georges Danton, the French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins began a newspaper called the Vieux Cordelier - the Old Cordelier. The title was suggestive. The Cordeliers were one of the clubs of revolutionaries that had been a feature of the Parisian scene in the early 1790s - the most famous was the Jacobin club, and the Old Cordelier was a reference to the likes of Danton, who had been supporters of the Revolution from the outset and who stood for the traditional values of the left - The Rights of Man, Internationalism, Dodgy Historical Analogies (Issue three purported to be a translation of Tacitus' account of the reigns of Nero and Caligula with unsubtle modern parallels, well, it makes a change from the Third Reich or Vietnam) against indecent leftists like Robespierre who stood for monotheism, head-chopping and the new puritanism. So, sort of like Democratiya, only with more readers. The Parisians, who were well ticked off with the Terror, picked it off the news stands with alacrity. Robespierre who was, to put it politely, a bit on the sensitive side took umbrage with this, among other things and Desmoulins and Danton ended up under the national chopper, although not before assuring themselves of immortality. Show my head to the people it is worth seeing, said Danton and indeed it was.

This demonstrates, I think, that the crisis on the left is as old as the left. The left is not perfect. The left has often supported dodgy regimes. The left has often been guilty of naivety and has always been divided against itself. This is not, of course, of itself a vindication of the left - not being as bad as the days of the Jacobin Terror is hardly a glowing encomium. Still, the notion that the left went bad in 2003 when Noam Chomsky and George Galloway signed up is, perhaps, a tad unhistorical.*

So, the charge sheet against the left. Firstly the left has made common cause with fascism.

This is set out by Nick Cohen in 'What's Left':

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery […] On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent’s first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.

(Via: it seems to have vanished from the Observer website)

I think most of the other items on the charge sheet are rather more substantive. I thought I would get this one out of the way as it is trivial and dishonest. Imagine a court case where the police essentially cook up the evidence against someone who they have good reason, but no solid evidence, to believe is a criminal. The judge throws it out. Is the judge a defender of criminality or, possibly, might it be the case that the ends do not justify the means, particularly if the ends are uncertain (the police might be wrong). In the same way one could deplore Saddam's regime without being convinced of the case for the Iraq war. Used universally Cohen's worst case style could be cast in other directions. It can be quite accurately claimed that in September 1939 the British government went to war in defence of an anti-Semitic dictatorship which had gladly acquiesced in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia but it would be misleading to do so.

Next up (when I get round to it): Is the left anti-Semitic?