Important and timely article by Emanuele Ottolenghi in Commentary rightly highlights the very disturbing contribution being made to western anti-Jewish feeling by Jewish intellectuals pursuing the delegitimisation of Israel. As Ottolenghi says, these Jews perceive Zionism as a disease and call upon other Jews to renounce Israel’s very existence in order to save the Jewish soul. This is calling upon them to renounce a core component of their identity, their sense of Jewish peoplehood as expressed through their attachment and commitment to the democratic state of Israel and to the Zionist enterprise. So much, so vile. But what Ottolenghi also brings out is the subtle echo of another, earlier age of barbarism when Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity and then demonstrated their reliability to their persecutors by converting other Jews. He points out the Christological vocabulary being used by the Jew-hating Jews of today – ‘grace,’ ‘purity,’ ‘original sin’, ‘immaculate conception’, ‘the thirty pieces of silver’ and ‘crown of thorns’:

For Israel, in this analysis, entrance into a new life of grace is contingent on shedding its identity as the Jewish national state. Instead, it must agree to a unitary, binational arrangement with the Palestinians. Only thus might the state of the Jews yet wash away the stain of its original sin. The signatories of the 2002 letter in the Guardian were explicit on this point. No mere condemnation of Israel’s allegedly brutal behavior would satisfy the demands of their Jewish conscience. What was necessary was the dissolution of Israel itself, its place to be taken by a new entity that would no longer be ruled by Jews but in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs would at last live together peacefully as equals.

Of course, this is absurd -- a fancy-dress re-wording of longstanding Arab propaganda about the illegitimacy of Israel’s national existence. It is also hypocritical: Europeans who expend such vast quantities of energy lecturing Israel on its supposed hypernationalist instincts give no thought whatsoever to ridding the Arabs of their own, rather more vivid, forms of nationalist sentiment. But for those European Jews who embrace the modish conviction that nationalism is not just a sin but the root of all modern evil, the fantasy of Israel’s de-nationalization serves another purpose. It ensures their own conformity with the latest European thinking on the best way for human beings to organize themselves in society—namely, as good Europeans...

Today, as yesterday, Jewish 'particularism,' then religious, now national, remains a thorn in Europe’s side. Today, as yesterday, removing the thorn involves a renunciation of particularism followed by an espousal of the regnant form of universal salvation—then Christianity, now the tenets of humanistic liberalism. This is not 1930’s-style anti-Semitism; in that narrow sense, anti-Israel Europeans are correct in protesting that they are not anti-Semites. Nevertheless, it is an age-old form of anti-Semitism, and one that has always called forth a typical pattern of response on the part of the Jews under scrutiny. For most, the choices are to lie low in hopes that the trouble will pass, to pick up and seek life elsewhere, or to resist and oppose to the extent they can. We have seen all three responses in European Jewish society over the last years, each bearing its cost. Some, however, take a different route, finding favor and reward by exerting every effort to assimilate themselves to whatever is required of them, including to the point of publicly dissociating themselves from their people’s history and fate.

As I have said before, these Jews – whose desire for Jewish self-negation was well analysed in Kenneth Levin’s Book The Oslo Syndrome (see earlier posts) – are endangering the Jewish people by lending support, respectability and an alibi to those in the west who want to see the Jewish state wiped off the map. To a Europe which has turned against Israel, they are the good Jews. Those who defend Israel against the calumnies, distortions and libels that are designed to pave the way to ethnic cleansing or genocide are the bad Jews. In the Middle Ages, the bad Jews were those who defended their faith and had to be erased; the good Jews were those who eagerly assisted in their conversion. The line between the two, as Ottolenghi shows, is as straight as it is deadly.