On Aug. 11, Britain’s Guardian newspaper horrified great numbers of its liberal readers by publishing a full page Zionist advertisement with the heading: “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.”
It was an astonishing development, especially considering that the Times newspaper, which has long mirrored the fervently pro-Israel views of its owner Rupert Murdoch, declined to carry the ad. It came moreover at a time when people all over the world are experiencing revulsion at images of Palestinian children maimed and killed in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Gaza blitzkrieg, Europe’s Jews are facing perhaps their worst crisis in living memory. In France, against the background of attacks on Jews and synagogues, many Jews are reported to be fleeing to Israel. Some evidently fear that Jewish people are about to re-live the nightmare of the systematic, annihilatory anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany.
That Europe is witnessing an alarming upsurge of hostility toward Jews is not in doubt. At the same time, there are claims in the UK that the Zionist establishment is intimidating Jews repelled by Israel’s actions into silence. It is also all too palpably the case that the pro-Israel lobby is trying harder than ever to discredit criticism of Israel by doing everything possible to make evidence of resurgent anti-Semitism the central issue. The Zionist message is that to sympathize with the victims of Israel’s Gaza offensive is to declare yourself an anti-Semite, an endorser of Hamas’ stated aim of destroying the Jewish state.
In the PR war that has raged in parallel to the actual war in Gaza, Zionism may be said to have made short-term gains, as indeed it always does during periods of heightened tension. For whenever Israel goes to war and dominates the Western news agenda, the fundamental unresolved injustices that underlie the Palestine-Israel conflict vanish completely from view. With the Israeli perspective looming large, media debate becomes heavily slanted toward the issue of Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
Yet in the longer term intensified Zionist efforts to manipulate Western public opinion, as epitomized by the Guardian advertisement, can only strengthen the perception that the Jewish state that claims to hold itself to a higher ethical standard is either deceitful or delusional. Indeed, they may be awakening the very anti-Semitic feelings they are ostensibly meant to pre-empt. No small factor in the current outbreak of anti-Semitism is almost certainly the deference of Western governments to the Zionist narrative, the abject failure of elected politicians to deplore actions by Israel that would evoke unequivocal condemnation if carried out by any other state. It was not just fellow British Muslims who last week applauded the decision by Britain’s first Muslim minister, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to resign from the British government in protest at its reluctance to recognize that Israel’s actions are “morally indefensible.”
More than anything else perhaps, what incites anti-Semitism when debate about the Palestine-Israel conflict grows unusually inflamed is the vaunted seamless identity between the state of Israel and Jews everywhere. After all, Israel formally constituted itself as the Jewish State, claiming to exist in the name of all Jews. By the same token, many Jews, even if they have never lived there, are quick to take any censure of Israel personally, while often appearing unable to comprehend why others get so exercised about what they see as Israel’s merciless oppression of the Palestinian people.
The Guardian’s American Jewish columnist, Hadley Freeman, has detected anti-Semitism in the refusal of a north London arts venue, following events in Gaza, to host a Jewish Film Festival funded in part by the Israel state. Jews, she asserted, are not Israel, apparently heedless of the proprietary ethnic definition that underpins the Jewish state’s very existence and that fills millions of her fellow Jews with intense chauvinistic pride.
It was unease about Israel’s presumption to speak for all Jewish people that led dissenting British Jews to establish the campaigning group, Jews for Justice for Palestinians. In an era of mounting world-wide outrage at Israel’s conduct, the relationship between Israel and Jewish identity is turning inescapably into a hyper-toxic issue.
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