Many Muslims are outraged by the tendency, now so prevalent in the Western media, to assume that Muslims form a single homogenous group and speak with a single voice. They are perhaps especially outraged when Jews make this assumption. Yet Muslims are capable of making a similarly facile assumption about Jews, imagining that they are all Zionists with a blind loyalty to the State of Israel and an implacable hatred of Islam.
The Zionist establishment does not seem to mind if simplistic views of Jewish opinion are held by Muslims, or indeed by the world at large. There are, however, not a few Jews in Britain and elsewhere who are appalled at the thought of being thus stereotyped. It is out of deepening unease about the way the Zionist establishment has sought to monopolize representation of Jewish opinion that a group of prominent British Jews has founded an organization called Independent Jewish Voices. The aim of the new body, which was launched in London last week with full-page advertisements in the Guardian, the Times and the Jewish Chronicle, is to offer a counterweight to the official Zionist line propagated by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. More than 100 well-known Jews have signed the group's founding declaration, the central message of which is: "Those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain consistently put the support for an occupying power above the human rights of the occupied people." The dissenters include such intellectual and artistic luminaries as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, the playwrights Harold Pinter and Mike Leigh, the actress Zoe Wanamaker and the comedian Stephen Fry.
In an article for the Guardian, one of the group's founders, the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug, deplored the present unhealthy atmosphere in which many Jews appear uncertain about speaking out on Israel and Zionism and are anxious about contravening an unwritten law about what can and cannot be discussed. He and his fellow-signatories believe that nobody has a right to speak for the Jewish people, who have after all prided themselves on their disputatiousness. They were particularly dismayed by the Israel solidarity rally which was organized by the Board of Deputies in London last summer and which gave the impression that British Jewry was united in support of Israel's military intervention in Lebanon. For the truth is that British Jews were deeply divided over Israeli campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza. If there were those who cheered when, in an address to the rally, Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, cried "Israel, you make us proud", other Jews experienced the opposite emotion. Klug insists that many of the latter believe that the Board of Deputies ought to concern itself first and foremost with the welfare of British Jews and that it has no business to be striking blatantly partisan postures on behalf of a foreign government.
Paralleling the emergence of similar groups in Australia and the US, the formation of Independent Jewish Voices is a remarkable development. It can only help to underline the widening gulf between public opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict and British government policy. Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain has been a staunch, not to say uncritical, friend of Israel and will almost certainly remain so under his anticipated successor Gordon Brown; nor is there likely to be any change on this score under a Conservative government led by David Cameron, a British politician whose ties to Zionists are if anything even closer than Blair's (and who is currently giving every indication that he intends to target Muslims as being willfully separatist). Nevertheless, the new body may contribute to the marginalizing of hard-line Zionist opinion in Britain and put pressure on the British government to take a less indulgent attitude toward Israel's intransigence over the Palestine question. It may also lend strength to the embryonic resistance that dissenting American Jews are mounting to what remains the greatest barrier to progress toward a settlement of the Middle East conflict: The immensely influential US Israel lobby.
Meanwhile, Britain is witnessing a struggle for the conscience, if not the soul, of the nation's Jewry. In a BBC radio interview, Brian Klug reported that the response to the launching of Independent Jewish Voices has been extremely positive, though, predictably enough, the group has also been attacked by Zionists who believe that its proponents are adopting a posture of "moral inequivalency" vis-a-vis the Palestinians which ignores Arab sins and fudges historical facts. It is a standard Zionist objection to Jews who question Israel's behavior that they are not just betraying Israel but repudiating their birthright, their very identity, as Jews. However, Klug believes that when Jews like him condemn Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon or discrimination against Palestinians, far from turning against their Jewish identity, they are in fact reaffirming it. In his Guardian article, he spoke up for Jews who are mindful that nearly 40 years have passed since Israel's occupation began - the length of time that Israelites wandered in the wilderness and which culminated with Moses' sonorous exhortation: "Justice, justice shall you pursue".
If Jews have stood for justice, they have also exemplified victimization. It's a feature of the present time that, in the face of dawn arrests and widespread deionization, some are calling Muslims the "new Jews". Comparison between Muslims in contemporary Britain and Jews in Nazi Germany may be hyperbolic, but there are, as it happens, striking parallels between what is happening to British Muslims at the present and the predicament of Jews in Britain in the early part of the 20th century, especially following the Russian Revolution. Just as Muslims are now under suspicion for possible links with Islamic terrorism, British Jews, many of whom had fled persecution in Russia and Poland, were identified at that time as Bolshevik firebrands, and a few of them were. The whole Jewish community was under pressure from the British authorities to denounce Bolshevism, just as Muslims are now under pressure to denounce terrorism. If they failed to do so, they run the risk of being accused of covert sympathy with the revolutionism; if on the other hand they did condemn it, they were likely to be suspected of protesting too much, of desperately trying to conceal their true subversive intent. Like Muslims today, Jews found themselves in an impossible situation.
Much of this history has been conveniently forgotten. Indeed, among a section of British Jewry there is a tendency to portray the history of British Jews in cosmetic terms. In the opinion of London Evening Standard columnist Norman Lebrecht, himself a Jew, the problem with Britain's Muslims is precisely that they are not the "new Jews", since if they were, they would be showing signs of becoming similarly well integrated. But this is a view that signally fails to take into account what a tormented affair the relationship between Jews and British society at large has often been. It was especially tormented at the time of the creation of Israel when, in the name of world Jewry, Zionist terrorists in Palestine blew up British military personnel and even hanged British soldiers, evoking horror among the British public. It remains tormented still, with a sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks reported in the aftermath of the Lebanon war and a fresh sense that the old question of possible dual loyalties among British Jews has yet to be laid to rest.
What is least needed at the present time is any parading of moral superiority. What is most needed is a dialogue between Jews and Muslims and the wider society that transcends reductive stereotyping and upholds the common cause of justice and humanity. The launching of Independent Jewish Voices is a hugely welcome step in that direction.
