We have to show we’re better than them and win.”
And win the Israeli women’s basketball team did. After their Irish rivals refused to shake hands with them at the European Championship qualifier last week, the Israelis went on to smash them 87-57.
It was the sweetest of victories. In the lead-up to the game, the Emerald Isle’s anti-Israel mob had called for the team to boycott their fixtures against the Jewish state for, you know, having the audacity to wage a defensive war against Hamas in Gaza instead of just sucking up October 7.
Basketball Ireland did not, let’s say, exactly discourage the protesters and, equally disappointing, some of the sportswomen capitulated to the boycotters’ pressure by announcing they wouldn’t take part in the match. All of which prompted one Israeli player to say of the Irish team: “They are quite antisemitic. We talk about it amongst ourselves. We know they don’t love us.”
Having been beaten by the Jews, and spectacularly humiliated for their unsporting conduct, I imagine the Irish team now love Israelis even less than they did.
Would they feel less antipathy towards the Jewish state, a country I’ll bet you my last Tayto crisp they have never visited, had Ireland won last week’s match in Riga? Possibly. For there is no doubt that envy is a key plank of antisemitism, and also no doubt that over the past 2,000 years we have inspired rather a lot of it. In 1983, the author Roald Dahl said in an interview with the New Statesman: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason
He accused us of a lack of generosity, but what Dahl was actually doing was expressing an inferiority complex that I wager he wouldn’t have been aware of in any part of his antisemitic brain. People pick on us because they can’t stomach Jewish success.
They simply can’t stomach that a minnow people of some 15 million, comprising around 0.2 per cent of the world’s population, is so insanely overrepresented in science, mathematics, art, music, literature, chess, law, economics, business, entertainment, journalism and almost any other intellectual pursuit or area of public life you care to list. (I was going to add except sport, but last week’s basketball win rather shows that we can excel on the pitch too).
They can’t stomach that 22 per cent of the Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish. Or, put another way, that Jewish Nobel laureates number 11,250 per cent above average.
When, in the middle of a heated discussion about Eastern European antisemitism, my Polish-Jewish mother shared these startling stats with her Polish non-Jewish step sister, the latter replied: “Maybe that’s because Nobel Prize judges are Jewish.” If you told her that in 1939, the year they were both born, 50 per cent of doctors in Poland and Hungary were Jewish, and that even though antisemitism in both countries was rampant, people still favoured Jewish physicians because they were considered better, she’d probably come up with an equally extraordinary explanation.
Anyway, out of necessity, the Jews also now have a first-class army. This is a relatively recent addition to the list of Jewish talents for we have only had a country to defend since 1948 but, boy, have we made up for lost time. Over 76 years, the IDF has won the respect of the world, parts of which are very happy to privately make use of its intelligence agencies’ data while publicly criticizing its boots on the ground.
In fact, the way the world views the IDF could be described as a grudging respect that strays into envy. I mean, what exactly is it about those Jews that makes them so good at whatever they turn their minds to, huh? How has this country, a sliver of land no bigger than Wales, with a population than is smaller than London’s, become a powerhouse of education, intellectualism and technological innovation, while fighting non-stop hot and cold wars?
Another uncomfortable question: would the world’s 49 Muslim-majority countries feel quite the same antipathy to the world’s only Jewish one, if Israel was a failed state, or just an ordinary one? Answer: I suspect not.
If envy is part of human nature, then it is difficult to imagine a world in which antisemitism will ever go away. So the next time someone asks you what the Jews can do about rising antisemitism, I have one word for you: fail.
Sorry, Ireland. We prefer winning.
