First published in the Hadassah magazine, August/September 2003.


These are not good times to be British and an Israel sympathiser.

I first realised that public opinion had turned nasty in December 2001, when I appeared on a flagship BBC TV current affairs show. An Israeli in the audience asked why Israel was being condemned for taking similar action against terrorists to the moves America was making in its own war against terror.

My fellow panellists, including a Labour and a Conservative MP, deplored Israel’s brutality and the ‘terrorism on both sides’. The audience was even more hostile. When it was my turn, I said there definitely was a double standard; I wondered why people were sympathetic when Israelis died, but not sympathetic when they tried to prevent themselves from dying; and said that the Palestinian Authority was a sponsor of terror and incited violence daily against Israelis and Jews across the world.

The audience responded by hissing me. Even worse, when I said that Israel was a democracy, they laughed derisively. A fellow panellist then accused me of having ‘double loyalties’ because I was a Jew.

For me, this was a defining moment. I realised that this was not a rogue event but reflected a substantial swathe – maybe the majority – of British public opinion. Since then, my suspicions have been more than confirmed. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in Britain at present, it is open season on both Israel and the Jews.

Prior to this, I had felt quite comfortable as a British Jew. Although I was sympathetic to Israel as the Jewish homeland, I had not paid it any particular interest. Indeed, I had never visited the country until a month before the current intifada started. But everything has changed. I have now visited Israel on a number of occasions and, despite the obvious dangers, have actually felt more comfortable there than I now do in Britain. This is a terrible shock. I no longer feel comfortable in my own country because of the poison that has welled up toward Israel and the Jews.

In Britain, media coverage of the Middle East is systematically twisted to paint Israel in the worst possible light. There is an eagerness to believe that all Israel’s actions are malign, even where the facts clearly refute such assumptions.

The BBC is a particularly egregious offender. It usually treats Palestinians to soft and respectful interviewing, while Israelis are treated roughly and constantly interrupted. Its questioning reflects a general assumption that Israel is the cause of the Middle East tragedy and it is Israel, not the Arabs, upon whom pressure has to be applied. Some of its current affairs shows, moreover, are breathtakingly malign. The BBC recently aired a documentary which recycled unsubstantiated claims that Israel had used nerve gas on the Palestinians. Worse still, in a radio discussion that served as a trail for her TV show, the reporter repeated Arab claims that in 1947 the Jews had poisoned the water in Egypt’s wells’. She was clearly unaware that she was further recycling one of the most grotesque of the medieval libels against the Jews.

The BBC merely reflects a commonplace view amongst the British intelligentsia. Israel’s attempts to defend itself are routinely represented as a desire for conquest, vengeance or punishment. Its behaviour is constantly subjected to double standards. And increasingly, people are saying that it should not have been created at all.

Nor does this stop at the demonisation of Israel. It morphs into open antisemitism, in ways which would have been simply unthinkable even a few years ago. Even in the most respectable media outlets, the language being used constantly elides Israel and the Jews and -- consciously or unconsciously -- draws on ancient antisemitic tropes to do so.

The New Statesman printed an ‘investigation’ into the power of the ‘Zionist’ lobby in Britain, which it dubbed the ‘kosher conspiracy’ and illustrated by a cover depicting the Star of David piercing the union flag. The Independent, a national newspaper, illustrated an article on the Israel lobby in Washington with a picture of an American flag on which the stars were replaced by gold Stars of David. Prospect magazine published a cover article asking whether the Israel lobby in America was distorting American interests -- and concluding that it was.

Even Parliament now plays host to such attitudes. Tam Dalyell, a Labour MP, claimed that both Tony Blair and George Bush were influenced by a ‘cabal’ of powerful Jews – and he even included on his list people who were not Jews at all, but merely had some Jewish ancestry. His remarks were brushed aside indulgently as an embarrassing outburst by a venerable eccentric. The following day, a BBC TV current affairs show devoted a substantial item to asking whether Mr Dalyell’s claims were true – an item which left the impression that there was indeed a group of tightly knit Jews in America who wielded far too much power. And in the House of Lords, one peer told a Jewish colleague: ‘Well, we’ve finished off Saddam. Now your lot are next’.

Shortly before the war on Iraq I took part in another BBC programme, this time on radio, which was broadcast in front of an audience in Wokingham, Berkshire, the very heartland of Conservative Britain. One of my fellow panellists this time was the veteran revolutionary socialist Tariq Ali. He delivered the speech he has made for years – that America was the fount of all evil, that President Bush was more of a threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein, and that if there was a rogue state equipped with nuclear weapons which should be dealt with, it was Israel. To my astonishment, the audience cheered and clapped – particularly when he made the crack about Israel. When it was my turn to speak, I said the opposite; for which I was, once again, hissed.

Something very strange indeed has happened when middle-aged and elderly Conservative Britain now applauds the anti-American, anti-Israel sentiments of someone who a few years ago they would have thought was a dangerous revolutionary. So why does Middle Britain now think Israel and America, rather than al Q’aeda, Saddam Hussein and the ‘axis of evil’, are the root cause of world terror?

The answer is complex, but no less terrifying. The first factor is the influence of the political left which has simply captured the establishment: media, politics, civil service, legal profession, the churches. As a result, its world-view has increasingly become the received wisdom of the general public. And it is the political left which now openly promulgates the opinions that Israel should not exist, that it is a Nazi state and that the Jews control America.

Why does the left take this position? The most obvious explanation is that it demonises America and western capitalism, and lionises the third world and all liberation movements. At a deeper level, its embrace of victim-culture means that it now confuses truth with lies. People are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behaviour. So there is a tendency to equate and then invert the role of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims, so that self-defence is misrepresented as aggression while the original violence is viewed sympathetically as understandable and even justified. The human bomb is therefore a hero, while his victim had it coming.

The left has identified itself with the cause of the Palestinians as the latest oppressed victims of the west. But one outcome is that it has thereby embraced the Arab propaganda of hatred, directed not merely at Israel but at the Jews. Uncritical acceptance of the former has legitimised the latter.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the banner of anti-racism and human rights; and in which, moreover, a strategic nexus has been forged between Europe and the Arabs. Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, the Europeans have eagerly embraced a narrative that depicts the Jews as Nazis.

The result is that antisemitism, underground since the Holocaust, has now re-emerged under the guise of anti-Israelism. The old antisemitism wanted to destroy the Jews; the new antisemitism wants to destroy the Jewish state. So Israel is demonised and delegitimised. Many in Britain now believe that Israel is as illegitimate as was apartheid South Africa, with which they draw a direct comparison.

The astounding ignorance among ordinary Britons of the history of the Middle East has created an open goal for Arab and leftist propaganda. And despite Prime Minister Tony Blair’s image as a supporter of Israel, he has made this worse. Not only has he failed to draw attention to and condemn the Islamist libels against Israel and the Jews, but he has endorsed the pernicious doctrine of moral equivalence through his promotion of the ‘road map’.

The British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed after the Iraq war that there was a need to ‘even up’ Israel and Iraq, implying an equivalence between a country that is terrorised and a regime that was a sponsor of terror.

A culture that no longer believes in objective truths but thinks everything is a matter of opinion has become gullible and credulous towards lies and propaganda, which it is unable to distinguish from facts and logic. The result is the re-emergence in Britain of the oldest hatred, and a refusal to grasp the true nature of the peril facing the west.

Posted by tom at September 1, 2003