It’s easy to knock down the arguments for making clear that diaspora Jews do not support the biogtry of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — but it’s important that we stand with their opponents
December 8, 2022 12:50
Perhaps the circles I move in are not typical, but the conversation at every Jewish table I have sat around this last month has eventually come down to one topic. It’s also been the subject of a slew of messages and phone calls, and can be reduced to a single name: Itamar Ben-Gvir.
To state the obvious, Jews in the diaspora should not be forced to account for the actions — or politicians — of the state of Israel, a country where they do not live, cannot vote and over which they have no say. And yet it’s equally obvious that many, if not most, Jews around the world — perhaps especially in Britain — feel an affinity with Israel, a sense of being bound up with the country and its people. That extends even to those Jews who condemn Israel at every turn.
By way of illustration, on David Baddiel’s much-watched Channel 4 adaptation of Jews Don’t Count, there was a fascinating exchange between him and Miriam Margolyes, who is nobody’s idea of a Zionist cheerleader. She pushed back against Baddiel’s view that Israel has nothing to do with us. It does, Margolyes insisted: she criticises Israel and Israelis in part because “I feel connected to Israel”, before offering a sentence that made her sound like an emissary for the Jewish Agency: “They are your people; they are my people.”
So this is the narrow space we live in, as diaspora Jews. We are connected to, but not responsible for, Israel. We have no power over the decisions Israelis take but we watch and worry about those decisions all the same.
Which brings us to Ben-Gvir. His Religious Zionism alliance was a big winner in last month’s election and he is expected to sit in the incoming cabinet of Binyamin Netanyahu, probably as public security minister. That’s quite a turnaround for a man with a conviction in an Israeli court for incitement to racism; whose extremism saw him barred from serving in the Israel Defence Forces; and who is a disciple of the late Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was designated a terrorist organisation by the US government.
Ben-Gvir says he has “matured” since the days when he gave pride of place in his home to a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994. He insists he is no longer the young rabble rouser who got notoriously close to Yitzhak Rabin in the weeks leading to the then-prime minister’s assassination: “We got to his car,” Ben-Gvir boasted at the time, “we’ll get to him too.”
And yet his record of thuggish racism is hardly in the distant past. At his victory party last month, Ben-Gvir went out of his way to praise the rabbi who lent theological justification to Rabin’s murder. Two weeks earlier, Ben-Gvir had arrived on the scene of a confrontation between Arab and Jewish men, in the tinderbox of East Jerusalem, brandishing a pistol. His message to armed Israeli police facing Palestinian stone-throwers? Shoot. Yet this is the man who will now be in charge of policing the one fifth of Israel’s citizens who are Arabs and who will control the border police on the occupied West Bank.
So — and this is the question I keep hearing — what, if anything, should those watching from afar do? Before the election, I did wonder if the EU might do to Israel what it did to Austria in 2000, when it suspended all co-operation with Vienna as punishment for the inclusion of the far-right Jörg Haider in its ruling coalition. I’ve heard no talk of that this time.
Meanwhile, UK Jewish communal leaders are clear that they will continue to deal with the prime minister of Israel, and its embassy in London, exactly as before. That said, if Ben-Gvir, or his equally appalling partner Bezalel Smotrich, come to Britain, I think it’s safe to predict the main Jewish representative organisations will find their diaries suddenly full.
But what about the rest of us, those who do not hold communal office? Some are itching to write a statement of denunciation — though to what end is less clear. To try to influence Israeli public opinion, comes one answer, perhaps by publishing a letter in an Israeli paper.
That suggestion gets shot down by those who reply that Israelis couldn’t care less what diaspora Jews think. Ah, but what if the letter was from a group of religious Zionists, saying, “Not in our name”? Ben-Gvir supporters would have a ready answer: what kind of religious Zionists are you, who never moved to Eretz Yisrael and remain in the exile of Hampstead Garden Suburb?
All right, an article or letter in The Times, then. That would be just as futile, insist the naysayers, easily caricatured as an ingratiating attempt by the signatories to offer themselves as good Jews, utterly unlike the bad Jews over there. A letter to the JC? That would just be talking to ourselves.
These are the arguments I’ve heard in recent weeks, each one a counsel for doing nothing.
Each has a compelling logic, but still I’m not persuaded.
First, talking to ourselves is not always pointless. What’s at stake here is a matter of our own values, what we accept and what we do not accept. That’s a conversation worth having.
Second, the issuing of declarations is not the only form of action. As one senior communal leader put it to me, what we have is “our money and our time.” So British Jews can give money or time to the myriad organisations inside Israel that are working to repel the bigotry, racism and brutality Ben-Gvir represents.
Let them know they are not alone, that they have allies, even far away — and that the darkness this man threatens will not go unanswered.
