ByDavid Herman, David Herman
6 min read
Tuesday March 8 was a busy day for Colonel Richard Kemp. At 4.30 in the afternoon, he used the social media platform Twitter to post this message: ''UPDATED Israel today: - 3 Israelis wounded - Jerusalem shooting - P/Tikva Stabbing - 6 more Israelis stabbed Jaffa -3 Pal terrorists killed''. Three hours later, he attacked a misleading headline: ''This headline is a disgrace. Israel: Three Palestinians shot dead as US vice-president Joe Biden arrives for talks". At 9.30pm, he tweeted the news that the UCL Union had just voted for BDS. Kemp's message was: ''We need to stand up against this antisemitism.''
A few minutes later, someone sent him a tweet: ''@COLRICHARDKEMP I remember memebers [sic] of my battalion being hung from the St Davids Hotel by zionists, Your best friends I believe?''
Kemp replied: "I'm not aware of anyone being 'hung' from it. Confused & delusional."
These were just a few tweets in one day but they give a flavour of the ''debate'' about Israel and the Middle East on social media: terrorist attacks, deeply misleading headlines, anti-Zionism on our campuses, abusive personal attacks on people who defend Israel.
There is something new and nasty about the way people talk about Israel in Britain today. The best summary of this situation comes in a recent piece by Professor Alan Johnson (no relation to the Labour politician), editor of Fathom, in a recent essay, The Left and the Jews: Time for a Rethink.
Israel matters to these writers because of its past and present
Johnson's essay is about something new in the way the left talks about Jews. He calls it "Antisemitic anti-Zionism." Not just anti-Zionism, talking about Israel in a language full of "the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism. In short, that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is: uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on."
According to Johnson, antisemitic anti-Zionism has three distinctive features. It has a political programme: the abolition of the Jewish homeland, "Palestine instead of Israel." Second, there is a demonising discourse: "Zionism is racist''; Israel is a ''settler-colonialist state'' which ''ethnically cleansed'' the ''indigenous'' people, went on to build an ''apartheid state'' and is now engaged in an ''incremental genocide'' against the Palestinians.
Finally, through the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, it calls for the exclusion of "one state - and only one state - from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity: the little Jewish one."
There is something striking about Kemp and Johnson which deserves attention. They are not Jewish. Indeed, many of the best writers about Israel and antisemitism today are not Jewish. These writers are what I call the righteous gentiles and also include Daniel Johnson, the founding editor of Standpoint, Douglas Murray, a journalist and commentator who writes regularly for Standpoint and the Spectator (I occasionally write for Standpoint), Tim Montgomerie at The Times, Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, and Andrew Neil, broadcaster and chairman of the Press Holdings group, which owns the Spectator. There are many more.
These writers and commentators fight on a number of fronts: in measured, newspaper columns but also the vicious world of Twitter and social media. They defend Israel, both in terms of specific policies and its right to exist, but they also end up attacking Islamic fundamentalism and worrying about what is becoming of the west.
For example, in the current issue of Standpoint, Daniel Johnson has an essay called Western Civilisation in Crisis, based on a lecture he gave in Jerusalem last November. At one point, he criticises the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif for an article she wrote in the Guardian: ''Her fantasy about Israelis demolishing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to build a Third Temple fits into an antisemitic and anti-Western narrative that conveniently ignores the reality that Islamists in Syria and Iraq are systematically demolishing the ruins of entire ancient cities once inhabited by non-Muslims.
"There have been protests in the West, notably about the destruction of Palmyra, but from the Muslim world - a suffocating silence. It was the same story when the Taliban destroyed the statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan… There is no parallel to Islam's industrial-scale iconoclasm in modern Judaism, but the false claim that Israel secretly threatens the Muslim holy places on Temple Mount has acquired a mythology that, not unlike the claim that Israel deliberately engineered 9/11, continually resurfaces.''
Johnson sees this article by a Western-educated Egyptian, published in a leading liberal British newspaper, as symptomatic of a much larger problem, the West's loss of confidence in itself:
''The West is losing faith in itself, in its values and its virtues. Under the relentless assault of their own intellectual elites, Western nations are losing confidence in the justice of their own cause.''
Commentators like Douglas Murray defend Israel but also see Islam as a great danger. In August 2014, he wrote a piece for the Daily Express called: Stop blaming Israel and wake up: The back flag of Jihad is the REAL threat to the world. He said:
''The decision by the Israeli government to respond to Hamas rocket-fire from Gaza is the response any government would choose if rockets were fired at its citizens. The Israeli government has the right - as does any government - to stop the bombarding of its people. However, in recent weeks it has become plain that much of the world expects a different response from Israel. They expect Israel not to fight for the safety, security and survival of their people, but to lie down in front of the Islamic extremist enemy.
He then broadened his attack:
''Behind the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah which have flown at anti-Israel demonstrations in recent weeks is another flag. The black flag of jihad - the black flag most recently being waved in Iraq and Syria by ISIS. The black flag is not about Jewish people.
"Today in Iraq and Syria it is about Christians who ISIS is forcing to convert to Islam at gunpoint or face beheading. Many Christians are being killed by ISIS for refusing to renounce their faith. On some occasions, Christians have tried to save their lives by "converting" at gunpoint and ISIS have killed them anyway. And this is not only about Christians. It is also about other minority faiths in Islamist dominated countries. In Iraq it is also about the Yazidis, the Mandeans and other ancient beliefs which predate Islam."
For Murray, the debate about Israel, though important in its own right, is part of a larger battle over Islam. In 2010, he argued against the motion in an Intelligence Squared debate entitled "Is Islam a Religion of Peace?" He has spoken of "Islamic fascism" and dismissed the term "Islamophobia" as a "nonsense term", as "there are a considerable number of reasons to be fearful of some - though certainly not all - aspects and versions of Islam" (Standpoint, August 2008).
Colonel Kemp, former Commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, is another eloquent champion of Israel. Writing in the JC last December, he criticised the UN Human Rights Council, human rights groups and the majority of western media, for maintaining that Israel used disproportionate force and committed war crimes in the 2014 conflict. They all say "Israel is the neighbourhood bully and Hamas are the hapless representatives of a bullied, down-trodden population. And they analyse the situation based on human rights law, not the laws of armed conflict." Like Murray, Colonel Kemp sees Israel as part of a larger conflict:
''It is no coincidence that Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Hamas all intend to bring down the apostate regimes in the Middle East, to establish a global Islamic caliphate and to destroy the state of Israel. It is no coincidence that all carry out mass executions and use human shields to protect their fighters. By all means criticise Israel, but don't do so on the basis of this carefully orchestrated, systematic hate campaign, which is intended to discredit the Jewish state and bring it down.''
These writers defend Israel, attacking headlines, tweets and articles that they see as misrepresenting Israeli policies and strategies. But, crucially, they see the battle over Israel as part of a much larger conflict concerning Islam, violence in the Middle East, and, beyond that, the state of western civilisation. This is why Israel matters for them. They see it as a key part of the west, past and present.