It’s all around us and though even well-meaning Jews still on occasion make excuses for it, most of us know antisemitism when we see it. But it is not yet understood correctly. It is almost always rationalised as “an ideology” or a “hatred” or something learned in culture or because a country is poor and needs a scapegoat.
But according to the indispensable idea posited by the physicist David Deutsch as “The Pattern theory of antisemitism”, the real mechanism at work is a kernel of moral derangement, a predisposition that is already sitting in its hosts by the time the visible effects occur.
Like a virus, once caught, it causes people of the most disparate backgrounds, cultures and landmasses to conform to its precepts, and display bizarre, obsessive, irrational or lethal behaviour. Often the clearest sign that the Pattern is at work are arguments and actions that make absolutely no sense.
Let us look at the case of Sally Rooney. She says she is not antisemitic, and her actions target the Israeli government rather than Jewish people. However, her commitment to the anti-Israel cause, and the consequences and response to that commitment, do seem to provide a classic example. Having pledged to give her book proceeds to the proscribed terror group Palestine Action, her UK publisher Faber, clearly wishing to avoid a legal nightmare, has withdrawn her books from market.
Normally very clever people responded with a stupidity and dishonesty that would, in any other domain, beggar belief. They pretend that in essence, that there was no possible reason other than the Zionist lobby for her books to have been “suppressed” or “censored”.
Then, in what must be the millionth open letter against that same darned Zionist lobby and its myriad (in their eyes) stitch-ups on British soil, a fulsome list of famous and wealthy novelists and other culture stars declared in The New Statesman last week that the withdrawal of Ms Rooney’s books is “an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country”. An accompanying piece by The New Statesman’s Tanjil Rashid compares her to Salman Rushdie. Britain, it implies, has put her, for all intents and purposes, under a fatwa. It is hard to think of a more offensively preposterous interpretation than this. As for Palestine Action, which sabotaged British ministry assets and is rightly proscribed as a terror group, its members might as well be a bunch of cuddly grannies for this lot.
In keeping with the Pattern, which is, after all, a kind of moral derangement, the Rooney story just keeps madder and more embarrassing. Now other writers are donating royalties from their works to Rooney herself (who has surely accumulated considerable wealth as one of the best-selling authors of her generation). I’d have thought if you were that sold on the Palestinian cause, you’d be sending your money straight to the poorest people over there (and good luck to you getting it anywhere other than into Hamas’s hands), not to one of the richest celebrities in your country.
Perhaps the only funny thing about the whole mad affair is how the consensus among the fuss-makers has instantly formed that Rooney is such a great talent, her words so vital to the cultural fabric of the English-speaking world, that to curtail our access to those words is in itself a crime worthy of a totalitarian dictatorship. Maybe it’s just me but I have to say: if only Rooney novels were the new samizdat. Having read her acclaimed debut Conversations with Friends and the even more critically lauded follow-up Normal People, I would dearly like to see the authorities identify the style alone as very likely constituting a criminal offence. Admittedly, the flat, humourless prose, the oppressively inward-facing point of view and the oh-so-unerotic bedroom scenes do aggregate into a weirdly almost addictive whole. But did I relate to the high jinks of her grumpy, thin protagonists with sex coming out of their ears? No. Did I find anything of moral note, or lasting impact? Certainly not.
In truth, my most vivid memory of the novels is Rooney’s irritating refusal to deploy any punctuation marks beyond commas and full stops. That, and the snooty sex. Really, Rooney writes like AI – no wonder she’s the novelist of the age.
Those bleating about her effectively self-imposed sales ban as if it were a free speech issue simply don’t have reason on their side. Those championing the availability of her work as cultural stakes of the highest order have been suckered in by the literary embodiment of the emperor’s new clothes.
Would I feel differently about an author in the same position who was actually terrific and important? A modern-day Dickens or Gissing or Eliot? I might regret the need to find their work elsewhere, but if they were keen on Palestine Action, then I’d probably save my tears.
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