Howard Jacobson in the New Republic on the new anti-Semitism in England, criticism of Israel post-Gaza:
The premise of Seven Jewish Children is a fine piece of fashionable psychobabble that understands Zionism as the collective nervous breakdown of the Jewish people; instead of learning the humanizing lesson of the Holocaust–whatever that might be, and whatever the even greater obligation on non-Jews to learn it too–Jews vent their instability on the Palestinians in imitation of what the Nazis vented on them. This is a theory that assumes what it offers to prove, namely how like Nazis Israelis have become. Furthermore, it dispossesses Jews of their own history, turning the Holocaust into a sort of retrospective retribution, Jews being made to pay the price then for what Israelis are doing now. Clearly, this exists at a more extreme end of the continuum of willed forgetting than Holocaust denial itself, its ultimate object being to break the Jew-Holocaust nexus altogether. Let us no longer deny the Holocaust, let us rather redistribute the pity. If there is a victim of the Holocaust today, it is the people of Gaza.
Given how hard it is to distinguish Jew from Israeli in all this, the mantra "It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel" looks increasingly disingenuous. .. But, in the end, it is frankly immaterial how much of this is Jewhating or not. The inordinacy of English Israel-loathing–ascribing to a country the same disproportionate responsibility for the world's ills that was once ascribed to a people–is toxic enough in itself. The language of extremism has a malarious dynamic of its own, passing effortlessly from the mischievous to the unwary, and from there into the bloodstream of society. And that's what one can smell here. Infection.
Given how hard it is to distinguish Jew from Israeli in all this, the mantra "It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel" looks increasingly disingenuous. .. But, in the end, it is frankly immaterial how much of this is Jewhating or not. The inordinacy of English Israel-loathing–ascribing to a country the same disproportionate responsibility for the world's ills that was once ascribed to a people–is toxic enough in itself. The language of extremism has a malarious dynamic of its own, passing effortlessly from the mischievous to the unwary, and from there into the bloodstream of society. And that's what one can smell here. Infection.
A lot of hot angry metaphor here, including "buckets" for the blood libel of Churchill's play. I remind readers that the international community was upset over segregation in the American South too, and racist violence there. And note Jacobson's statement that non-Jews have an obligation to learn the lesson of the Holocaust. Hasn't this process taken place? And isn't one of the lessons of the Holocaust that many societies have learned to dehumanize the Other to the point where mass murder troubles no one?
(Thanks to Aaron Walker)
