Who is to blame for attacks on Jews? Why, the Jews themselves, of course. That dynamic has sat at the heart of antisemitism since time immemorial. And now it is back.
“The great leap in ‘antisemitism’ took place in late 2023 and thus was not, or mostly not, antisemitism at all,” wrote Sir Tony Brenton, former British ambassador to Russia, in a letter to The Times this week.
Instead, he claimed, it was “widespread popular rage at the Israeli overreaction to the Hamas atrocities”. Then came the usual backside-covering.
“This of course does not excuse the anti-Jewish outrages that have taken place since,” Brenton added, “but does suggest that the UK Jewish community could help to damp down the likelihood of such outrages by making it clear that it is as appalled by the brutality of Israeli policy as almost everyone else is.”
Apart from the fact that his letter recalled the wisdom of Jon Snow in Season Seven, Episode One of Game of Thrones – “everything before the word ‘but’ is horses**t’” – it seemed both evidence that a fair amount of bigotry is alive and well in Britain, and also that there is quite a lot of it at the Foreign Office.
Let’s take this point by point. To start with, the “great leap in ‘antisemitism’”, which Brenton so charmingly placed in scare quotes, began on October 8, weeks before Israel had even embarked upon its “overreaction” to the depravity of the previous day.
Secondly, he assumes that because “almost everyone” believes that the Israelis “overreacted” to October 7, that must be the truth; by implication, the fact that the Jewish community had not “made it clear” that it was equally “as appalled” amounts to tacit approval of Israeli “brutality”.
The subtext was unmistakable, and it veered dangerously close to justifying the acts of “antisemitism” – his scare quotes, not mine – that we have seen in Britain, most recently the Golders Green stabbings. Oh, wait, he pointed out that his argument did not “excuse the anti-Jewish outrages”. So that’s all right then.
Slippery, these diplomats, aren’t they? But let me get back to my point. One of the perennial characteristics of antisemites in general is that they always believe that they are on the side of the angels and the Jews are the evil ones.
After all, if a group of people killed Jesus Christ; or kills babies for use in their rituals; or dominates international media and banking; or poisons the water system; or carries out ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, settler colonialism and apartheid, then it is only moral to marginalise, oppress and exterminate them for the good of the world.
This applied very vividly to the Nazis. In her masterpiece – or one of them – Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt reported how the SS were encouraged to develop “ruthless toughness” in order to quash the voice of their consciences. This was achieved by drumming into them that although murdering the Jews was an unpleasant and dirty job, it was necessary for the good of mankind, making them heroes.
As a result, a cultural moral inversion took place, in which it became the norm to tamp down the desire to do good, rather than the desire to do evil. In a magnificent passage that I still remember reading for the first time many years ago, she wrote: “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognise it – that of temptation. Many Germans and Nazis, probably most of them, must have been tempted not to murder, rob, or let their neighbours go off to their doom (even though they may have been ignorant of the gruesome details of how this was achieved), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they learned how to resist temptation.”
Blaming Jews for their own suffering is deeply related to this. Let’s bring it up to date. First comes the exaggeration: Israel’s war in Gaza was unquestionably evil (a smear enabled by relentless propaganda). Then it is racialised: all Jews must prove themselves free of such supposed evil by condemning it. Then the tacit conclusion, which Brenton is careful to disavow explicitly while nudging towards it implicitly: if the Jews have not condemned it, they deserve everything they get.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how it has always been the same? Those most loudly advertising their own virtue are the ones with the greatest antipathy towards the Jews. They outsource their own darkness, I suppose, project it upon the Other and make themselves feel better by hating it.
But let’s not psychoanalyse this too much. The mechanisms are all too familiar and, despite millennia of bloodshed culminating in the Holocaust, are still disturbingly widespread. Which brings us back to the Foreign Office.
“The old Arabist ‘Camel Corps’ of the British Foreign Office in full cry,” wrote the broadcaster Andrew Neil on X in response to Brenton’s letter. “Nothing changes. T’was always thus. Attacks on Jews are the fault of Jews for not being sufficiently robust in criticising Israel. Hamas gets a pass. Even antisemitism is in quotes as if it’s not really a thing.”
Quite. Seven months before October 7, when I was editing this newspaper, we revealed that Britain’s Deputy Consul General in Jerusalem led a UK team at a “Palestine Marathon” event, held to protest the “apartheid wall” that has stopped countless suicide bombers from entering Israel from the West Bank.
Held “in defiance of the Israeli foreign occupation”, the event featured T-shirts which showed a map which, campaigners claimed, “erases Israel”. The then-second-in-command at the British Consulate General, Alison McEwen, was pictured proudly wearing the shirt.
T’was always thus indeed.
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