The boycott of Israeli culture shows how dangerous the morally bankrupt West has become
Are we really here again? We are indeed.
It has been a week now since thousands of writers and artists, including the bestselling Irish author Sally Rooney, plus sundry Nobel, Pulitzer and Booker prize winners including Arundati Roy and Booker nominee Rachel Kushner, signed an open letter calling for a cultural boycott – the largest in history – of Israeli arts.
In response, a counter-letter signed by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Simon Schama, Booker-winner Howard Jacobson, Jack Reacher thriller writer Lee Child, Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller and Ozzy Osbourne (bless him) and hundreds of others appeared, condemning the boycotters as an illiberal travesty, a dark miscarriage of the arts.
I doubt it’ll do much good. Things are too far gone. The letter targeted Israeli writers, publishers, literary agencies, festivals and events connected to them. “Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades,” the signatories wrote. Wow. Just wow.
“Often working directly with the state”? Like how most of our writers and artists work “directly with the state”, seeking funding from the Arts and Research Council so that they can work and eat too?
“Artwashing”? As opposed to just… doing art? Like everyone else in the whole world who can? Must there be a crafty, malign agenda to that too? When it comes to the Jewish state, the answer is, as history might have predicted, a no-brainer. Of course there is.
Israeli authors, dancers, DJs, visual artists: all accused here, in the most respectable light of plain day, of using their artistic calling to advance “the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians.”
So yes. We are really here again. Mainstream and respectable groups are, with increasing regularity, mobilising to explicitly target, isolate and ghettoise people associated with a Jewish entity. They are so eager to do it that all it takes is the word of a few loony fringe groups like Palestine Literature Festival and Fossil Fuel Books, the group that caused the writers’ boycott of literary festivals earlier this year for alleged connections with the Israeli arms trade.
The temptation for Jews like me – whose family was and is (will always be) indelibly marked by what happened in 1930s Europe – is to be alert to repetition of that trauma. And we don’t forget the longer history in which that trauma took place: the thousands of years of persecution following a handful of clear forms, of which the pogrom – made famous in 19th and early 20th century Eastern Europe – is the most famously crazed.
I don’t think it will happen in the way it did then, and I think we have to tread very carefully with those comparisons. Crucially, we still have laws that curtail some implications of such boycotts and their architects. UK Lawyers for Israel have warned that the boycott is “plainly discriminatory against Israelis” and contrary to section 29 (1) of the Equality Act 2010.
And yet, to fully understand the long, multi-millennia history of persecution of Jewish people – either the genteel hands-off type (refusing to condemn, quietly aiding because everyone is doing it…) or the type with extreme violence and ultimately ending in genocide – one can’t ignore the patterns. Or indeed The Pattern, the theory of anti-Semitism developed by the quantum physicist David Deutsch and the historian of Medieval millenarianism Richard Landes that describes the urge to “legitimise the hurting of Jews”.
And for the first time ever, thanks to the growing intensity of events, of which the cultural boycott is just one of many that prompt parallels with early 20th century actions against Jewish-linked entities, I worry that there could be other policies that harm those of us who believe in the need for a secure Jewish homeland. Crowds gather near my flat, formerly a fairly Jewish area, to praise Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist groups animated by the dream of obliterating the Jews. Young women and men stomp around wearing huge keffiyehs and Palestinian iconography.
Last week also saw an angry crowd of anti-Semites gather outside JW3, London’s largest Jewish centre, because taking place inside was an event comprised of…Jews. Which was enough to sound the “Zionist/ war crime/ genocide/ apartheid” bells – even though the Jews in question were pro-Palestine peaceniks.
With the net closing in on people just for being either Israeli or Jewish (presumed to be “Zionists”), it might not be long until people find themselves out of a job unless they first denounce the Jewish state just like DEI demands we all own up to “white privilege” and “systemic racism”. We might be tainted by association. It might become acceptable to discriminate or boycott if you suspect someone has family in Israel. If belonging to an Israeli publisher is bad enough, why not this?
One of the saddest things about the cultural boycott letter is that it includes the signatures of Israelis and this will appear to legitimise it to those who rely on: “but this or that Jewish person agrees with me!” That some prominent arty Israelis wish to be “saved from ourselves” does not change the sad truth. Self-hating Jews – whose knowledge of what is right is turned in on itself by the sheer demented pressure of malicious ideas – are nothing new.
In the end, the only hope in the current madness is robust lawfare. UK lawyers for Israel has its work cut out for it, as will a growing number of people willing to press the Rooneys of the world on the legality of their anti-Israel passion.