Jewish Chronicle, 6 April 2007

Last week, Jonathan Freedland devoted his entire column to an attack on me. At the risk of trying even further the patience of those readers who will have looked askance at the space this newspaper gave one columnist to denounce another, I’m afraid I have no alternative but to reply.

Jonathan makes three charges against me. The first is that, because I headlined an item about ‘Independent Jewish Voices’ on my website ‘Jews for genocide’, I have accused them of supporting genocide and being ‘eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people’.

As Jonathan knows perfectly well, I suggested no such thing. We know he knows that, because he promptly contradicted himself by saying I meant that ‘by criticising Israel, IJV align themselves with a radical Islamism that wants Israel wiped off the map’.

That is indeed what I meant and — more to the point — what I actually wrote. Israel is currently menaced by a pincer movement composed of an Islamic enemy in Iran and Hamas bent openly upon genocide, and a western world that is softening resistance by delegitimising Israel through libellous demonisation. By publicly fuelling this delegitimisation, IJV is helping pave the way for the second potential Holocaust that is threatened.

This does not mean that IJV themselves want such a holocaust to happen any more than, say, those British left-wingers who supported Stalin actually wanted thousands of people to die in labour camps. It simply means that, whether through ideology, ignorance or personal pathology, they are incapable of joining up the dots between the fate of Israel — which many of them believe should not exist — and the fate of the Jewish people.

Jonathan’s attempt to turn me into a genocide denier is therefore as incoherent as it is reprehensible.

The second charge is that, in writing that the Palestinian cause ‘amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project’ I am outrageously denying Palestinian self-determination. But if all the Palestinians truly wanted was their own state, there would never have been a Middle East conflict.

Ever since 1936, they have repeatedly been offered the opportunity for self-determination but have always refused it and tried to destroy Israel instead.

It is not just the Hamas charter calling for the annihilation of Israel and every Jew. It is not just Mahmoud Abbas’s doctoral thesis denying the Holocaust. It is not just the Palestine Authority’s maps and insignia which show a state of Palestine not — as Jonathan would have it — in the disputed territories but replacing the whole of Israel as well.

To wipe out the Jewish state, the Palestinian cause seeks to erase the Jews from their unique history of peoplehood and victimisation, and replace them by Palestinians playing those roles.

That is why every single feature of the Jews’ return to Israel — their experience of genocide, the right of return that sprang from their persecution, their ancient claim to their own original nation state — have been claimed entirely falsely by the Palestinians as their own history, in the process turning Palestinians into Jews and Jews into Nazis.

The third charge is that I have somehow single-handedly convinced millions of American Jews that London is the Warsaw ghetto and Europe is heading for another Holocaust. It is beyond perverse to blame me for such exaggerated fears. I have never spoken or written in such terms.

American Jews have formed their views from seeing for themselves what is going on here — from the Parliamentary Committee on Antisemitism, for example, which said British Jews are now more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any time for a generation or longer.

Yes, I say that a vicious mood towards Jews and Israel has developed in Britain. Yes, I say there is a rise in Islamist fanaticism which gravely threatens us. If Jonathan is saying that any of this is untrue, let’s hear his evidence.

And yes, I do think there are many echoes here of the 1930s, when there was a similar state of denial — not least among the leaders of British Jewry — which blinded people to the looming catastrophe abroad.

American Jewish leaders are aghast that their British Jewish counterparts are once again so supine. It is presumably those British Jews who have been thus taken to task who have been moaning to Jonathan that I’ve been whipping up America into hysteria. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that he has seen fit to promulgate such self-serving jibes.

Jonathan justifies his attack by claiming that I have massive influence. Would that it were so! I remain, alas, merely one journalist trying to tell the truth as I see it. Jonathan can breathe easily again.