At times like these it’s natural to seek friends wherever we can find them. Given the anxiety that currently pervades the British Jewish community, much of it built up over the past four years and tied to the seemingly unending saga of Labour antisemitism, it’s only human for Jews to seize on every apparently warm gesture towards us, without examining too closely its origin or its motive. In a situation like ours, we can’t afford to be choosy, right?
Wrong, but we’ll get to that. A prime example of just such an apparently friendly hand extended in our direction came in last weekend’s Sunday Times magazine, from the pen of Rod Liddle.
He had been despatched to Israel to meet British Jews who had made aliyah. The piece was gentle and sympathetic towards those who had made new lives in Tel Aviv or Zichron Ya’akov, infused with melancholy that loyal British citizens no longer felt safe in the land of their birth and so had moved thousands of miles away to the Middle East.
In one passage, Liddle confesses his surprise that Ben and Sarit Nessi, who once lived in West Sussex, have now made their home in a place that “is about 30 miles from Lebanon, maybe 40 from Syria and only 10 miles from the Palestinian-run West Bank. Hell, West Sussex must be pretty bloody lively these days for people to feel safer here, in one of the most shelled countries on the planet.”
In the same paragraph, there’s a pivot away from empathetic curiosity to something else. He writes of Sarit, “She watched with misgiving the rise to prominence of Jeremy Corbyn, his antisemitic acolytes and the rapidly growing UK Muslim population. You’re a lot closer to really, really angry Muslim people here in Israel than you were in West Sussex, I suggest to her.”
Note the implication that a “rapidly growing UK Muslim population” is in itself a cause for alarm, on a par with the anti-Jewish racism of the left. Note too that it is Liddle, not Nessi, who talks of “really, really angry Muslim people.”
If they’d come from someone else, perhaps these lines would not have leapt out. But Liddle is a proud Islamophobe. He once described Islamophobia as “an entirely rational response to an illiberal, vindictive and frankly fascistic creed”, writing of his aspiration to be anointed as “Islamophobe of the Year” before declaring that “there is no such thing as Islamophobia, of course. There are people who dislike Islam and… they dislike it for perfectly good, rational, reasons.”
Again, note that he is speaking here not of violent jihadism or Islamist extremism but Islam itself, the religion of millions, including many of our fellow citizens.
We should not, by now, need to do the obvious thought experiment, which is to put ourselves in the shoes of those citizens, and imagine our reaction if a mainstream British public figure, with a hefty platform, spoke that way not about this or that group of Jewish extremists, but about Judaism itself.
This throws a different light on the sympathy Liddle showed toward the Nessis and those others who’d moved to Israel. It suggests his prime purpose was to co-opt Jews into his own anti-Muslim agenda. (And, no, I don’t buy his defence that one can be Islamophobic without being anti-Muslim, just as one can’t be anti-Judaism without being hostile to Jews.)
Nor, of course, is Liddle a one-off. JC readers will have seen this paper’s excoriating report last month of a mainly Jewish meeting addressed by Katie Hopkins, who has notoriously described refugees as “cockroaches” and demanded a “final solution” after the Isis-inspired attack at the Manchester Arena in 2017.
Hopkins, too, recently spent time in Israel, seeing that country as an admirable line of resistance against what she sees as the global Muslim menace.
I can see why Jews who defend Israel might be grateful for any support, but this is support that’s not worth having. The motivation for this friendliness is bigotry, and a bigot can only ever be a temporary friend for Jews.
We should look instead at those who defend Jews not because they hate Muslims but because they hate racism. In recent days, Aleesha, a young, Muslim, left-wing woman, previously active on social media, was hounded off Twitter by former comrades of the supposedly anti-racist, hard left after she had denounced antisemitism within Labour.
She had suffered anti-Muslim abuse for years— she once made a video, recalling how she had been called a bitch, a slut, a whore, a Paki and a jihadi — but the bile she received for taking a stand in defence of Jews proved too much, even for someone as tough and brave as her.
If you ask me, it’s the likes of Aleesha— not Hopkins or Liddle and friends— who are our natural allies. This week’s mass shootings in the US have reminded us that a murderous white supremacist far right is on the rise and — as we know from Pittsburgh and Christchurch — it has both Jews and Muslims in its sights. Our best course is to stand together and fight it together — and not be seduced by those who only like one of us because they hate the other.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
