It’s been many years since a woman with a ridiculous name entered my Facebook page to school me on the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. She was no antisemite, she offered, and never could be: she had seen Schindler’s List. She merely had grave objections to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East and no plan whatsoever as to what should happen to the Jews of Israel when Palestine is “free”.
This small detail was hardly her problem, as she was a watercolourist and busy. Then she left, and I pondered a tangential, if eternal question: what is it about racists and watercolours?
Anti-Zionism has been the defence for a few years now. This is not about Jews, they tell us, as they march with Stars of David and pictures of babies soaked in blood and call for an Israel without Jews. We love Jews. (We have seen Schindler’s List!) The real intellectuals have seen The Zone of Interest, too. Nazis are human! Who knew? We just detest Zionist Jews, they say, which, I say back, is most Jews. They say: there are Jews in our movement! (That is true. I recently interviewed a Jewish anti-Zionist before a “pro-Palestine” march. He was entirely on his own).
That Israel is close to being the most detested country in the world is mere coincidence, they say. This has nothing to do with Jews. Jews are great. They speak Yiddish and make fish balls. They are quaint. We love them. (It’s you who hates them, with your murderous desire to identify Jews with the Jewish state, harbouring Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab lands. We want to go to a Klezmer silent disco.) We just wish they didn’t have a country from which to declare war on the whole world. Etc.
I now sense, with very complex feelings – as if a phoney war is ending in the diaspora, and a real one coming – that this period of hiding behind anti-Zionism is coming to an end. I have two pieces of evidence: a protest in London, and a rebuke of left-wing, non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews.
The protest was at the JW3 community centre on the Finchley Road last week. JW3’s offence was to host a conference sponsored by Haaretz, the left-wing Israeli newspaper that reliably covers Palestinian despair in Gaza and the West Bank. It was convened to discuss the future of the region, including the questions: How do allies committed to liberal democracy relate to a hard-right Israeli government? Who are the Palestinian partners for building a common future?
The insinuation of these question is that a hard-right Israeli government is to be feared and there is, potentially, a common future for Israelis and Palestinians. Delegates included Rula Hardal, a Palestinian and CEO of A Land For All, a Palestinian-Israeli NGO dedicated to a two-state solution; and Ayman Odeh, an Arab-Israeli member of the Knesset.
But answering these questions did not tempt the protesters who gathered outside the gates. These questions, it seemed, should not be answered. They should not even be asked. Instead, again, slogans – we should have learnt to fear slogans – and laughter. The laughter troubles me particularly: for people apparently agonised by war, they seem to be enjoying themselves.
“You look like pigs,” said one to the assembled Jews. “No one likes you. You lot reek.” “We are protesting against the Zionist entity which is well-known to be prolifically based in London,” said another, “and this is one of the venues that likes to host the Zionist entity and those who are complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians by the Israeli settler-colonial state.” “There is only one solution,” sang the rest. “Intifada revolution.” (The police stood by, but that is for another column.)
The second thing was a rebuke offered by David Miller, notorious on these pages, to non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in a series of posts on his X/Twitter page. It was designed, perhaps unconsciously, to mimic a trial.
“Exhibit C,” he typed, “on the problematic status of some of the progressive Jewish milieu.” He named, for instance, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky.
Surely these are immaculate comrades? Chomsky, who considered Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank “much worse than apartheid?” Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry?
But in 2012, Miller reminds us, Finkelstein wrote this, on the two-state solution: “The flaw in the BDS movement is that it selectively upholds only Palestinian rights, and ignores Palestinian obligations. Under international law, Israel is a state. If you want to appeal to public opinion on the basis of international law, you can’t suddenly become an agnostic on the law when it comes to Israel.”
It seems that even non-Zionist Jews will be soon be required to leave the community of the good. The warnings from history are piling up.
