Jewish Chronicle, 28 October 2007

The recent paper written for the Tories by the Conservative Muslim Forum is a deeply troubling document. Set up to provide a dialogue with Britain’s Muslims and advise on tackling Islamist extremism, the group merely demonstrated depressingly that it shares many of the culturally belligerent attitudes driving that extremism.

But for Jews, most alarming of all is the group’s attitude to Israel. It is not simply that it wants the Tories to stop supporting Israel’s policies. It wants them to stop supporting the Jews’ right to their own homeland at all.

It says: ‘An incoming Conservative administration must appreciate that a pro-zionist [sic] attitude will not bode well with many. Pro-zionist statements only damage relationships with Muslims nationally and internationally. Thus, statements like the one made by David Cameron on 12th June 2007 can be too easily interpreted as unbalanced and weighted towards only the zionist and Israeli positions.’

What Cameron said on that occasion was that if a Zionist was someone who believed that the Jews had a right to a homeland in Israel, then he was a Zionist. He defended the right of Israel to exist and defend itself, and declared that a deal should only be made with the Arabs if Israel really was allowed to have peace within secure borders and real guarantees about its future. Since the CMF disagrees, it follows that its members do not think Israel should exist at all and that the Jews have no right to self-determination, let alone security.

Presumably, the Tories will do nothing with this other than chuck it in the bin and then wash their hands thoroughly, having learned yet another lesson about the perils of dealing with Muslim ‘moderates’. I say ‘presumably’ because it would be nice if they had done more than issue a curt ‘this does not reflect party policy’ and then zip up their lips.

A key problem in beleaguered Britain is that politicians will not publicly engage with the Islamists on the central battleground of ideas. Noxious statements like these urgently need to be publicly refuted. It is vital to draw a very firm line in the sand and say loudly and clearly that such attitudes are simply not acceptable, and why. Failure to do so effectively cedes the intellectual victory to those laying siege to our society. It emboldens them and it weakens us.

But there is also a pressing need to refute such arguments to combat the lethal and accelerating prejudice and denial in the wider society. As it becoming increasingly clear, the belief that the Jews are usurpers in their own land reaches way beyond Muslims. It is now a mainstream view that the Jews’ claim to the land of Israel arose in the first instance as a result of the Holocaust, which finally realised the aims of Zionism which was a 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon.

They believe that, as a result, a load of European Jews were transplanted into Palestine which had been the home of Muslim Arabs since time immemorial and who were then driven out by this alien invasion. Such lamentable ignorance fuels so much of the current hatred of Israel. It would therefore be nice if the Tories used this report to set out precisely why David Cameron was correct to say the Jews had a right to the land of Israel.

It is not just because the existence of no other country (Pakistan springs to mind) is questioned in this way. It is not just because the Holocaust did indeed persuade the world that the case for creating Israel was overwhelming.

Long before the Shoah, the world decided the Jews should be returned to their ancestral homeland in Palestine — which consisted of what is currently Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza — because of their overwhelming entitlement to that land. This was not because of the biblical promise, but because it had been the Jewish nation state for hundreds of years, centuries before Islam came into being. Indeed, the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation state.

People need to be told that Zionism is merely the quest for Jewish national self-determination, and that Jewish peoplehood is an intrinsic part of religious Judaism. So many believe that Zionism and Judaism are unrelated; so many even believe that Zionism is merely a creed justifying what has happened since 1967. When they are told that the yearning to return to Zion is threaded through the liturgy and that mourning for the destruction of the Temple is an important milestone in the Jewish religious year, their mouths drop open — especially Muslim mouths.

It is not enough to teach people about the Holocaust. We have to teach them about Zionism. And for that we have to teach them Jewish history.