3 min read
By Norman Lebrecht, norman lebrecht
Isaac Herzog would get on famously with Boris, Prince Charles and Sir Keir, writes Norman Lebrecht
June 18, 2020 09:46There has not been much to make me laugh in pandemic times, but one news item in the JC drew a little chuckle. It was a proclamation by the Jewish Agency chairman Isaac Herzog that Covid-19 would prompt “a big wave of aliyah” to Israel.
Well, in Mandy Rice-Davies’s immortal phrase (didn’t she become Mindy on conversion?) “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”. The Jewish Agency exists for the mass importation of Jews to Israel. Give that man a big wave? More like a raspberry ripple.
The Jewish Agency was set up as a skeleton government for a future Jewish nation. Once the state was declared in May 1948, nobody knew what do to with the Agency so they just left it on a prime dunam of Jerusalem real estate, upwind from the Chief Rabbinate, and have used it ever since as a kind of care home for members of the elite who failed at national politics.
The Agency’s present role is minute, to say the least. It is supposed to assist immigration and integration, but there is a government department to do that. It also purports to “connect young Jews to Israel”, but independent orgs from Chabad to Yakar do it so much better. The fact is, the Jewish Agency exists in order to exist. Like the Duchy of Lancaster. Or second novels. Or second day Yomtov.
Except that second day Yomtov is important for diaspora Jews, drawing a line between their religion and Israel’s. The Jewish Agency would like to abolish the diaspora because its survival is a finger in Herzl’s eye. But if it succeeded in packing all the Jews off to Israel there would be nothing left for the Agency chairman to do except draw his salary and drink lemon tea. Which is why the Jewish Agency survives. As a never-ending Jewish joke.
Chairman Herzog qualified for the job by leading the mighty Labour Party into electoral oblivion. The Herzogs, too, were once a power in the land. The chairman’s grandfather, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, was chief rabbi successively of Ireland, Palestine and Israel, donning a Victorian top hat to conduct weddings in the desert between kibbutz couples who had long been living in sin. As further proof that the Almighty has a Jewish sense of humour, Chief Rabbi Isaac vociferously supported both the IRA and the JNF. There ought to be a statue to him somewhere, or a forest, or a pub.
Chief Rabbi Isaac had two sons. The younger, Jacob, was a civil servant who ran the prime minister’s office for Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, always leaving work on Friday before the Sabbath. The older, Vivian (known locally as Chaim), went into the Israeli army and served with distinction as its blarneying mouthpiece during two wars of survival, with a rhetoric that fell midway between W B Yeats and Brendan Behan. Vivian, who was brother-in-law of the foreign minister Aubrey Eban, known globally as Abba, went on to be elected two-term President of Israel.
Vivian’s son, the present Jewish Agency wallah, was born with a Zionist-socialist silver spoon between his gums. Isaac junior grew up (and still lives) in the military enclave of Tsahala, serving as a Labour minister for housing, tourism, welfare, the diaspora and (I kid you not) the fight against antisemitism, until his party gave up the will to live and he joined the queue for the next public sinecure. This is job sharing, Israeli-style. You employ my dropout, I’ll employ yours.
This national wheel of nepotism is now whirling again as Knesset discards vie for the post of Ambassador to the Court of St James, which comes with a Harrods gold card. The two frontrunners are Bibi jobsworths. One speaks no English. The other, a maximalist, seems to believe that Kabul is within reach of prospective Jewish settlement.
No matter who gets sent over, Anglo-Jewry’s finest sycophants will turn out with blue and white ribbons to garland Caligula’s niece’s pony.
But aren’t they missing a trick? The last two ambassadors acquitted themselves well both with the community and with British politics. It would be a shame to squander those gains on a monoglot or a troglodyte when there’s an eminently qualified person of ancestral eloquence and social skills who represents the kind of dynasty the British establishment best understands.
True, his grandfarther was a chief rabbi, not an earl, but he went to the right schools and had a good war. Isaac Herzog would get on famously with Boris, Prince Charles and Sir Keir. And sending him to London would be a perfect excuse for scrapping the Jewish Agency and starting a dialogue — an adult conversation, at last — between Israel and the disaffected Jews of the United Kingdom. It’s a win-win, so it won’t happen.
(PS: The trog got it.)
@NLebrecht