Parsing Prejudices

People seem to find it quite hard to distinguish between criticism of the actions of the state of Israel and antisemitic comment. I don’t think it’s that difficult. As examples, someone I don’t know directly, but a friend-of-a-friend, not long ago shared two images which I am not going to pass on here, but which illustrate the matter well. The first was a United States flag with the stars replaced by a menorah. The political relationship between the US and Israel and the violence both are willing to engage in is a legitimate issue of concern, certainly if you are an American or an Israeli. But the menorah is a religious symbol; it is a symbol not of Israel the secular state, but of the faith of the Jewish people. The message of that image is not ‘the alliance of the United States and Israel is an unhealthy one with deleterious effects for the world’, but ‘Jews control America’. Antisemitic tick. The second image showed an anonymous figure labelled ‘Jews’ watering a plant, a plant which grows to form a gallows bearing the title ‘Israel’; a noose hangs from the gallows around the figure’s neck. As the gallows-plant grows, the figure will be throttled. Here the intended message is that it’s unwise for Jewish people to connect their sense of self and wellbeing with the political entity that is the state of Israel. That may be debatable, but the image does it by showing a Jew with a noose around his neck. The only way it could be worse would be to present a figure with stereotypical Jewish features rather than something that looks like Morph. Second antisemitic tick. Of course the people who compose and promote these images don’t think they are antisemites; they think they are antiZionists. They think they are people of high principle. They are uncomprehending and angry at any suggestion that these images and the ways of thinking they embody might be questionable.

The ways of thinking they embody. It is not unreasonable to debate the morality of what the state of Israel does, but anyone doing so ought to recognise that, sadly, what it does is not unique. In the Chechen Wars the Russians carpet-bombed Grozny, killed 12,000 people, and replaced them with Russians in the city they built in its place. It’s on a smaller scale than Gaza, but it’s the same thing (the Israelis haven't got to that final stage yet). In terms of sheer numbers, vastly more souls have perished in genocides committed in Africa over the last thirty years, but we largely ignore them because they involve faraway places of which we know little. The only unique aspect to the conflict in what we call the Holy Land – theology aside – is that one party is an ally of this country; that’s a matter for proper criticism, perhaps, but the event is, unfortunately, far from an unprecedented instance of human evildoing. As for comment about what Jews should or should not think about it, or whether they are in some way betraying their own past by support for Israel now – that may be a matter for the Jewish community to debate themselves, but it has zero relevance to anyone else. You have to question why anyone who isn’t a Jew is so very fascinated with what Jews think.

And if, in any way, you are tempted to use an international political situation to ‘contextualise’ the attempted, or actual, murder of British citizens, well, you can’t see what’s in front of you. Context is not required: such an act is wrong, and if your first response to it is ‘Yes, that’s bad, but’, no matter what the ‘but’ is, please think it through again.