LONDON, 3 March 2003 — By background an East African Asian, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a trenchant voice in mainstream British journalism. With a weekly platform in The Independent, she writes from the point of view of a “progressive” Muslim who believes in the virtue of dialogue, in the need to find common ground between conflicting faiths and ideologies.
Last week, Alibhai-Brown explained to her readers that she has for some years belonged to a discussion group comprising not just practicing Muslims, Jews, Asians and Afro-Caribbeans but also a proportion of non-believers (Arab News, Feb. 25). Hoping to achieve better mutual understanding, the group’s members meet regularly to discuss issues that divide them. Two Jewish members of the group, it seems, even went to the length of funding and taking part in a project designed to highlight the upsurge of Islamophobia in Britain. How many Muslims, wonders Alibhai-Brown, have made similar efforts to counter anti-Semitism?
Now, however, under pressure from the looming conflict in the Middle East, she fears that this “remarkable” group is in danger of disintegrating: The “political is pounding the personal” as never before. She writes of alliances that have been “painfully stitched together” but which are now “at breaking point’. It is relations between Alibhai-Brown and her Jewish colleagues that are evidently under most strain. She is, she confesses, not at all sure that her Jewish friends grasp the depth of her feelings over “what the West is threatening to do to Iraq and what we tolerate in Israel.”
There must be many relationships in Britain and elsewhere which, in one way or another, are being jeopardized by the present crisis. The prospect of a Western invasion of Iraq is polarizing public and private attitudes to a degree not witnessed for many decades. And this polarization is as much bound up with feelings about Israel as it is with feelings about Iraq.
Just how polarized attitudes are becoming was thrown into sharp relief by the anti-war demonstrations on Feb. 15. Taking part in those demonstrations were thousands who are not just opposed to war but who are also demanding “Justice for Palestine.” But it was precisely because of the conflation of these two issues that Jews among the protesters were conspicuous by their absence. The common Jewish conviction is that to associate the anti-war campaign with justice for Palestine is to demonize Israel — to insinuate that it is the source of the Middle East’s ills.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s fellow Independent columnist, the Jewish writer and broadcaster Howard Jacobson, was appalled by the suggestion that the objectives proclaimed by the slogans “Justice for Palestine” and “Don’t attack Iraq” are — in the words of Stop the War coalition Chairman Andrew Murray — “inextricably linked.” To Jacobson — who declines to address the question of Palestinian grievances — Saddam Hussein’s links to the fate of Iraq are decidedly more apparent than those of Ariel Sharon.
Skeptical about the claim that a Western war against Iraq is bound to be seen by Muslims as an attack on Islam itself, Jacobson worries that the writings of journalists like Alibhai-Brown could trigger irrational reactions. He argues that anti-war protesters who call for peace with Iraq on the one hand and the destruction of Israel on the other are guilty of stirring up the very anti-Western prejudices they claim to wish to allay. If anybody is going to profit from turning antipathy toward him into a war over Israel, observes Jacobson, it is Saddam Hussein.
Among Jewish writers and intellectuals, there is a new defensiveness on the subject of Israel, a suspicion that those who criticize it are challenging the very right of Jews to exist. There are, admittedly, opponents of Israel who are perhaps only too ready to encourage this belief. Howard Jacobson is justifiably outraged by a grossly provocative article which the right-wing British writer A.N. Wilson recently published in the London Evening Standard. Winding up a column detailing Israeli breaches of UN resolutions, Wilson drew attention to a book about Israel that turned out to be the work of a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust-denier. Jacobson professes to have been resistant to the idea that those who hate Israel must also hate Jews but — faced with such outbursts — this sardonic Jewish commentator has begun to wonder if the two things may not after all be “inextricably linked.”
Notice, however, with what readiness he writes not of those who criticize Israel but of those who “hate” the place: Jacobson’s language betrays his assumption that if you object to what Israel does you are by definition its enemy — in short, you are either for Israel or against it; balanced attitudes toward it are inadmissible. In putting it this way, Jacobson is, to be sure, simply voicing sentiments that are now widespread among Jews.
Indeed, despite Sharon’s mounting oppression of Palestinians, Jews at large appear less and less willing to acknowledge that criticism of Israel can spring from anything other than bad faith. Jacobson confesses that for the first time he himself is experiencing “reminders of ancient pertubations.” It is anxiety about the possibility of a new Holocaust — not the terrible injustices that continue to be visited by Israel on Palestinians — which these days seem to preoccupy even liberal-minded Jews.
Alibhai-Brown fears that her Jewish colleagues do not understand the depth of her current feelings, and there must be vast numbers of Jews who believe that people like her do not begin to comprehend the depth of theirs. Dialogue about the Middle East crisis is far from dead: It was furiously alive in the columns of The Independent last week. But this is a matter about which exchanges of opinion are more than ever apt to give way to the blunt, not to say menacing, question: Whose side are you on?
