Are we Jews only wanted in Israel? Sadly, it’s beginning to feel rather like it
When the culture wars started, I was frequently irritated and amazed by those who insisted it was all just Right-wing media provocation. It was blazingly obvious everywhere, from mandatory workplace unconscious bias training to increasingly illiberal student campaigns, to the deranged stunts carried out with increasing regularity by Greta Thunberg’s acolytes that it was anything but “just” that.
Even so, one could hide and take a break. One could go on a trip somewhere away from it all, leave London or student towns, turn off the news, change the subject.
That luxury is now gone. The spread of the toxin that binds so many evil ideas together is in such full flow that if sensible, decent people could formally holiday on an island of sanity, they now have an ever-diminishing patch of sand on which to crouch.
This is especially the case for Jews for whom the post-October 7 ordeal has just gone on and on. And on. For us, there is almost no dry sand left: not in the UK, not in Europe, and especially not in America, the place I grew up and which I regarded as respite from the anti-Israel bile and the Islamist Jew-hatred that has long been old hat across the pond.
We knew, as soon as news broke of Hamas’s attempted second Holocaust in Israel, that Israel would be blamed, sooner or later. It was sooner. And it wasn’t just the mob, though they have done their bit in their tens of thousands on British streets. It was the great and the good: governments from Biden’s to Macron’s; veteran, award-winning war correspondents; pundits of great prestige and top statesmen.
But did we think it would go on and on, spreading and spreading, across culture low and high? We had our suspicions, and yet we hoped. We hoped the tide would turn. We hoped the anti-Israel bile, which bubbles every time Israel is forced to conduct a military campaign against Palestinian terrorist armies, would die down, not catch light. But it has caught, and caught.
In a sickening departure from my childhood years, it’s young Americans that are the most committed to the poisonous campaign of Israel hate. Having paused for the summer break, the vile campus Gaza protests have started up again, even more determined and ambitious.
At the University of Michigan last week, police were attacked and shouted at when they arrived to break up protests – four were arrested. But it goes deeper than that: the university’s student government won on an anti-Israel ticket and says it won’t distribute its $1.3 million annual budget unless the university divests from Israel. No frisbee. No rugby. Because … the Jewish state persists in refusing to be annihilated.
Or take the Brooklyn bookstore that at the last minute refused to host an event between the Jewish writer Joshua Leifer (a critic of Israel) and a “Zionist” rabbi called Andy Bachman. “I’m still thinking about what it means that in a Jewish town like New York in a Jewish borough like Brooklyn and in a bookstore, a place that is a touchstone of culture for Jews, a talk between two Jews can get cancelled because one of them – yours truly! – is a Zionist,” wrote Bachman.
Indeed. But this is the climate. Just when you think things can’t get worse or more perverse, they do. The vehemence of the anti-Israel sentiment, and the rawness of the anti-Semitism it spawns, is just so diffuse now.
A few weekends ago, anti-Israel protesters berated the largely Jewish Fiddler on the Roof audience members having coffee before the show in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Four months ago I wrote a light-hearted article about Netflix’s Bridgerton, and the implausibility of the fat friend – played by the roly-poly actress Nicola Coughlan – winning the aristocratic Colin’s heart. The barrage of abuse I am still receiving from deranged fat-rights activists with too much time on their hands is infused with their adoration of Saint Nicola’s trans activism and especially her fundraising for Gaza. In fact, the abuse has become as much about my pro-Israel stance as about my daring to describe a proudly and clearly fat celebrity as fat. What’s my point?
Only this: that things that ought to have nothing to do with the Jewish state are made to have everything to do with it. That’s how zealotry, and obsession, works.
What does it all mean really? Well, the extraordinary pressure being applied by the anti-Israel lobby in the West has already resulted in high-level appointments in UK and US governments of people willing to peddle or endorse lies about Israel, and thus to curb assistance and support, to appease their constituencies.
Israel, however, will find a way through and the geopolitical heat is already moving away from Gaza. Indeed, while Israel wraps things up militarily in the Hamas-run enclave, applying maximum pressure to get the hostages back, the focus is increasingly turning to Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
But to the banshees of the West, and particularly to Gen-Z, right across the political spectrum, from woke to alt-Right, nothing is moving on. Israel is an evil they are committed more and more to destroying in any way they can. They chant “globalise the intifada” and engage in “electronic intifada” – bullying, threatening and harassing supporters of Israel through enormous online campaigns.
For those of us with no political power, or levers to pull, what this means is adjusting to life with a parade of shocking malignity and spiteful bullying that gets more brazen, and more diverse, every day.
The result? Hunkering down on the slip of sand left to us, the support for Israel from Jews like me is only growing stronger.