Antisemitism
Language and history
* Editorial
* The Guardian, Saturday 7 February 2009
Distinguishing between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has become a growth
industry for every university department of cultural criticism. It is time the
debate came out into the open, away from the classrooms and the academic
journals. On average, there is an antisemitic attack of some kind every single
day in the UK: graffiti, vandalism, arson and occasionally actual physical
assault. Jewish schools have been granted extra protection. The Community
Security Trust, which monitors incidents, issues frequent advice and warnings.
According to the Trust the number of such incidents has risen again since
Christmas, and the assault on Gaza. The government acknowledges that there is a
growing problem. Responding to a two-year investigation by an all-party
committee, it was decided that from this April, every police force will be
required to keep a record of antisemitic offences.
This is not because - as some extremists on the right and possibly the left
might claim - the government is in the pocket of a "Jewish lobby". There is no
"Jewish lobby" in the conspiratorial sense that the slur implies, and to assert
that there is can only be the result of the kind of racism that has scarred
Europe from tsarist Russia to the fascists and Stalinists of the 1930s through
to the jihadists now. To present all Jewish people as conterminous with Israel
and its supporters is a mistake with potentially terrible consequences. It
aligns ethnicity with a political perspective, and it is simply racist.
The government has also recognised that there are "specific indications that,
unlike other forms of racism, antisemitism is being accepted within parts of
society instead of being condemned." The left fought a long and honourable
battle for racial equality, but some within its ranks now risk sloppily
allowing their horror of Israeli actions to blind them to antisemitism. There
is an ill-considered tendency to reach for the language of Nazism in order to
excoriate Israel, regardless of its impact on the climate of tolerance. Last
month, a rally in defence of the people of Gaza that included verbal attacks on
the so-called "Nazi tendencies" of Israel was followed by actual attacks on
Jewish targets in north London. That is not, of course, to say we should not
criticise Israel and judge it by the same criteria as any other state.
It is chilling to see "kill Arabs" graffitied on homes in Gaza. But the style
in which that is condemned must not create the climate that allows scrawling
"kill Jews" on synagogues in Manchester. For that is what is at stake: what
might merely be insensitivity can, cumulatively, erode the conditions that
foster racial tolerance. For they depend not only on the laws, but on a respect
for all people's sensitivities.
