I had had it coming, the Big Jew Thing; ever since as a nine-year-old girl in a working-class West Country Stalinist family, I learnt about the Shoah and the Six-Day War at the same time. It must have been that collision, that schism; death, life, struggle, NEVER AGAIN! — how could I ever not believe? Then I learnt the word for what I was; philo-Semite. That so few people have heard of philo-Semitism, whereas everyone has heard of anti-Semitism, says it all, really.
And the puzzle comes back to this — why do these people, above all others, inspire such ludicrous, ceaseless, surreal loathing? Why is it that one of my sweetest, youngest, most educated friends said to me one night, not even drunk: “Come on babe, admit it — don’t you ever EVER think that if the Jews had never existed how much easier life would be?”
Over the years I have pursued the Jewish Enigma and, it must be said, often got it wrong. My marriage to a non-observing Jew in the 1980s ended after a decade, most of which was spent either having very good sex (yay!) or rowing about the Palestinian question (oy!), with the shiksa on the side of the Jews and the Jew having a good old kvetch on behalf of the Palestinians. It was during such rows with my Jewish husband and his Jewish family, for the first time, that I wondered whether it was actually the Jews I really liked most . . . or the Israelis, those SuperJews, on whose behalf I seemed increasingly to be going into battle.
It didn’t take a genius to see that the more Jews stood up for themselves, the less the world liked it, whereas other races were cheered on and drooled over as “freedom fighters”, no matter how bloody their hands got, I reflected. Could it be that anti-Semitism in England in particular was based on the fact that we had gone in the opposite direction to the Jews — from powerful to powerless — and felt great resentment about this fact? After all, they’d had a good deal more than loss of empire to deal with in the 20th century — the loss of one third of world Jewry, for instance.
And Israel is a country the size of Wales, which within the first 25 years of its re-establishment (remember, the Jews were in the countries of the Middle East some seven centuries before the Muslims even existed) — from the Declaration of Independence in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 — single-handedly fought off murderous attacks from such neighbouring dictatorships as Egypt, Jordan and Syria. (The US, surprisingly, did not begin to aid Israel in any major way until the mid-1970s; the country was founded with arms from the Communist bloc, and the first Government comprised a coalition of the majority Socialist Mapai Party with the Stalinist Mapam Party to the Left and religious and liberal groups to the Right. Beat that for pluralism!)
During the same period, it’s worth noting, the might of the British Armed Forces couldn’t even keep the oddballs and bishop-bashers of the IRA under control, so tied were the hands of our soldiers. It became common in working-class English households during the Seventies to hear Dad, never a great fan of the Jews (“sneaky”, “arrogant”, “cliquey”), say grimly as the latest atrocity from Ulster made itself felt through the medium of the Six O’Clock News: “The Israelis would have that lot sorted out in no time!” In 30 years, the image of the archetype Jew had gone from that of a frail, bullied scholar walking meekly to his doom to that of a big blond brute in a tank bulldozing across the desert, scattering tyrannies before him, STANDING UP FOR HIMSELF!
If the English working class were seeing the Jews in a new and favourable light due to Israel’s military triumphs — small and scrappy, innee, yer Israeli? Bit like us! — it’s fair to say that both the right-wing ruling class and the liberal middle class were shocked senseless by developments. You could see the bafflement on the faces of the most well-meaning of liberals as the mild-mannered, ever-scapegoated People Of The Book morphed into the creators of the Uzi machine gun and the proud owners of a nuclear capacity. (Interestingly, when the Jews put their scientific brilliance to the service of the European powers, no one ever complained, as I remembered. No one ever said: “Ooo, Albert Einstein, don’t do that!”)
What the Jews had done, unique of all the oppressed races of the world, was to come back better than ever.
This was a country founded on socialist principles, by idealists and intellectuals, which could shape-shift at the merest whiff of cordite into a lean, mean, fighting machine that did not allow soldiers to salute their “superiors” yet was deadly effective. It was the only Jewish country in the world, yet surrounded as it was by hate-filled theocracies who had wan-ted Hitler to kill the lot of them, it held secularism to be the most precious cornerstone of its democracy; only in Israel do you find that the most religious Jews, the Haredim, are the most opposed to the existence of the Jewish state — the most extreme of these, the Neturei Karta, even supported the PLO’s charter calling for its destruction. Ultra-religious Jews are not generally drafted into the Israeli Army, and those who are end up in the “Rabbinical Corps”, checking that the kitchens are kosher.
Secular Israel regards them with its characteristic, ceaseless tolerance; but for their part, the men in their side-curls and suits walk alongside young Israeli hotties wearing less on the street than other girls wear on the beach with never a sneer or slur, let alone a stoning. Surrounded on all sides by countries where religion and politics are one, to the point that democracy is considered ungodly, and where the chosen religion spends so much time acting as a tireless curtain-twitching Mrs Grundy, determined above all to curtail the freedom of women, that it has no time to tackle the subjugation and impoverishment of its faithful by their filthy rich rulers, Israel’s cool, clear-eyed take on matters of faith and secularism is a lesson to all of us. Imagine — a country in which the MOST religious are the LEAST nationalistic!
Anti-semitism can be as in-your-face as smashing up synagogues. But it can also be sly, sneaky, subtle and sometimes surreal. It must, in my opinion, go some way to explaining why Israeli human rights issues are so obsessively concentrated on, while many Arab and African countries are allowed to treat their citizens with as much subhuman sadism as they wish — the pregnant, raped women so frequently sentenced to death by stoning under Islamic regimes come immediately to mind, but the list is never-ending.
In having one human rights rule for democratic Israel — which can be summed up as “Be perfect or we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks” — and another for the dictatorships which surround it — “Do what you like to your people, it’s your culture!” — Whitey displays an interestingly sly bit of anti-Semitism which is also rather insulting to the said dictatorships and the people they lord it over. The Jews are seen to be the one ethnic group who “pass” as white; their insistence on making their state a democracy is also seen as a sign of their stubborn refusal to act the savage to Whitey’s civilising influence. In short, the Lord forbid that any ethnic group should ignore the all-important world dominance hierarchy and dare to turn from victim into victor — and that is Israel’s ultimate crime. So why did it never occur to me to actually go to Israel before? After all, since I broke my self-imposed travel embargo a decade ago (didn’t want to have sex with my various husbands, if you’re interested) I’ve been a veritable globetrotter, nipping off to places as far away as the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean at the drop of a luggage tab. Why I would choose to make 12-hour flights to places I had absolutely no interest in while Israel is a mere four hours away, has a climate which makes the Bahamas look like Bradford and everything about it fascinates me, is a mystery to me, but a lot of it probably has to do with inertia, fear and a long-held belief that one should never meet one’s heroes. This was the first time a whole country had been my hero — millions of the f******, all ready to let me down! — so naturally I held back.
