Am Israel Chai! A reflection on the closeness of modern antisemitism

The challenge is to confront the lies about Jews, about Israel and about the history of the middle east that corrupt the search for peace in Palestine

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, talking about a property deal in Bradford, told me that he’d been “jewed” by the people selling him the property in question (who weren’t Jewish). I’m saying this, not to have a go at my friend but to observe that casual antisemitism is a lot more common than we think. My friend is from Bradford’s Pakistani community and is a lovely, caring and considerate man who wouldn’t consider himself remotely prejudiced towards Jewish people. Yet the lazy old trope about Jews being dishonest in business slipped, without thought, from his lips.

If this was an exception I would end here with what amounts to an interesting and informative anecdote, but it is not an exception. Antisemitism - negative attitudes towards Jews in general and Jews in Israel in particular - is commonplace. I remember my son talking about a conversation with another boy in his year: “your people stole Jerusalem from us”, my son was told by a Muslim born in Bradford from a family with roots in Kashmir who had, almost certainly, never visited the middle east, let alone Jerusalem. But then, my son was the nearest thing to a Jewish person available for the young Muslim to confront about the situation in Israel (his grandfather was born in an orthodox Jewish family).

I remember a fellow councillor talking to me about Israel and Jews. This councillor is, like my friend with the property deal, a kind and well-meaning man, yet the tropes and myths he presented to me in that discussion were an insight into the extent to which people growing up as Muslims are given terrible lies about Jews and Judaism. We have all watched those unpleasant videos of brainwashed Arab kids saying they want to kill Jews, that Jews are evil, and there can’t be peace so long as there are Jews. What we fail to appreciate is that these same lies are being presented as truth to Muslim children in the UK. We should, therefore, not be surprised to find that many educated young Muslims in Britain parrot the lies about Jewish power, spread misinformation about the history of Israel, and repeat the idea that Jews and Judaism don't really originate from Israel.

In my city we have seen an MP endorse the racist trope calling on Jews to be relocated to the USA, a former Lord Mayor shared material claiming that the terror group ISIS was run by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, and praising Hitler for killing ‘six million Zionists’. The latter individual was thrown out of the Labour Party but his antisemitism didn’t prevent him getting re-elected in a largely Muslim ward as an independent. I recall, in an interminable council debate about islamophobia, a councillor representing George Galloway’s Respect Party more-or-less arguing that a one-state solution was needed in Palestine and that this required the Jews to stop being Jews.

When we discuss antisemitism in Britain, we quite rightly point to far right organisations like the BNP as well as to the growing number of left-wing anti-Israel voices who have migrated from a vague, anti-imperialist dislike of the Jewish state to the sort of virulent conspiracy-driven antisemitism of ex-Bristol University sociologist, David Miller and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. When Bradford Council debated the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) guidance on antisemitism, we were treated to a masterclass in mainstream intellectual antisemitism by former Liberal Democrat MP, David Ward. In a speech responding to a motion proposed by a Jewish heritage Labour councillor, Ward went on about how he was an expert in the meaning of antisemitism, how the Jewish councillor didn’t understand and that we needed to look at who was pulling the strings here. Ward’s racist position was rejected and the motion was passed.

Looking back, however, it now strikes me that while we laid into Ward’s antisemitism, the bigger issue of embedded anti-Jew beliefs within Bradford’s Muslim community was not confronted. To have stood there and said something that might get construed as anti-Islam would be to break the delicate balance in the Labour Group - our public debate was only a couple of hours long whereas, I’m told, the internal one within Bradford Labour raged on for a lot longer. Getting the IHRA definition adopted in Bradford was a big win and it was done with some prominently empty seats on the benches opposite me.

The challenge for places like Bradford - in truth for the whole country - is to confront the lies about Jews, about Israel and about the history of the middle east that corrupt the search for peace in Palestine. This means that we need to face the challenge of countering how some young muslims are raised to blame Jews for the problems of Palestine and, in some cases, to hate Jews. Even for someone like me, an ardent advocate of free speech, it seems that if we cannot, for fear of ‘community tensions’ or ‘religious sensitivity’ confront racist speech then there is no real free speech. If people cannot point to how young muslims in Britain are being brainwashed into believing antisemitic myths and, in doing so, question the role of religious authorities, then we are not acting in the interests of those young people.

Following the horrendous attacks by Hamas terrorists, places like Bradford and Calderdale felt unable to show the sort of respect for the loss of innocent Jewish lives that they showed to other innocent victims of terrorism. This wasn’t done as a deliberate act of disrespect but rather out of fear that some within ‘our communities’ might not wish to show that respect to murdered Jews. This, I’m afraid, represents a terrible kind of antisemitism - our city cannot honour fallen Jews as they would honour fallen Americans or fallen French because to do so might upset some antisemites living in our communities. Islam is not an antisemitic faith but there is no doubt that some modern, popular Islam is too often very (and unpleasantly) antisemitic. The place to start is with authorities standing up to their fear of community responses and to normalise the way in which we talk about Israel.

Having started by being brave enough to recognise Jewish and Israeli history, authorities need then to confront those communities that attack - often literally - those who refuse to condemn Israel simply for being Jewish. And to shine a bright light on the antisemitic cesspool that is the ideology of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Here’s Tim Marshall describing that cesspool:

“Last Saturday, young Palestinian men raped Jewish women, slit the throats of Jewish babies, shot elderly Jewish people, beheaded Jewish men, and kidnapped Jewish men, women, and children because they were Jewish. 

How could they? Because since they were children, these young Palestinian men had been spoon-fed poison. They had been told that Jews are subhuman. That Jews are ‘filthy’, that Jews are ‘pigs and apes’.  That if a Jew hides behind a tree or a rock the “the rocks and the tree will call”; “oh Muslim, oh servant of God! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him” which is one of the hadiths of the Prophet Mohammed. They would never be told of any context in which such a thing might have been said. Only that Jews do not deserve to live and that God hates them.”

Young muslims in Bradford aren’t exposed to quite such a torrent of poison but they do grow up in a community riddled with anti-Jew sentiment where Israel and those Jews are portrayed as the enemies of Israel. We know that, while some aspects of contemporary antisemitism (Jews having more loyalty to Israel than the UK, for example) are widely held among the UK population, these negative tropes and myths are far more prevalent among Muslim Briton’s than they are in the wider population. There is some awareness of this challenge - it is noted in the report by Lord Mann (pdf), the UK Government’s Independent Advisor on Antisemitism - but antisemitism has not received the same attention within education and the public sphere as other forms of prejudice. Too often criticising Jews and Israel is perceived almost as a high-status opinion with them portrayed as powerful, domineering and, as the comedians say, “the baddies”.

The young man at a grammar school in Bradford who told my son that the Jews stole Jerusalem merely echoed these widespread beliefs - the idea that Jews are colonialists, that Muslims are prevented from attending the Dome of the Rock of the al-Aqsa mosque, and that the liberation of Palestine means ‘from the river to the sea’ suggesting - demanding even - that the seven million or so Jews in Israel be removed. As Tim Marshall observed, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad don’t even pretend that they don’t hate Jews, there’s no equivocation and the leaders of these groups repeatedly call for the literal elimination of Jews, and not just from Israel:

“I say to the Arab and Islamic world: the Quran does not belong to the Palestinians alone. The Jews are not the enemies of the Palestinians alone – they are the enemies of humanity as a whole…”

This message - here from Palestine Islamic Scholars Association member Hussein Qasem in June 2023 - is filtered down to Muslims everywhere and mixed with a righteous anger over perceived affronts to Islam in Jerusalem and elsewhere creating the ground in which contemporary antisemitism grows. Some of that antisemitism presents as a sort of apologia for the actions of Hamas or Hezbollah often wrapped up in a faux-concern for the residents of Gaza or the West Bank or in excusing terrorism on the grounds that the fact of Israel’s existence somehow legitimises violence. But an altogether nastier part of modern antisemitism lies with the view that Jews are like their caricature in Nazi and Soviet propaganda - evil, exploitative, secretive and manipulative others, puppet-masters pulling the strings of politics and business across the world.

In the end though antisemitism doesn’t die until my friend, when he talks about a lousy property deal, doesn’t use the term ‘jewed’. If a left-wing Jewish academic tells you that maybe what you are defending is antisemitism, maybe you should accept he is right rather than claim you, a non-Jew, know better. Antisemitism doesn’t die until people accept the words of Jewish reporters when they say children have been murdered, some beheaded. And antisemitism doesn’t die until people accept that the actions of the IDF is Gaza - seeking out those who ordered the terrorist rape and murder - is done regretfully and with a genuine desire to minimise the suffering of innocent Gazan residents.

Am Israel Chai