The ‘motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’

DAVID SAKS

For a long time it was possible to conceal deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiment behind the fig leaf of legitimate opposition to a national-political entity (Israel) and solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians, but that mask is rapidly slipping now to reveal the ugly face behind it all.

This year, there have been a slew of news stories about anti-Semitic remarks by Labour Party members, some holding representative positions within the party. There was the Labour MP Vicki Kirby who insinuated that sinister Zionist machinations were behind the failure of ISIS to attack “the real oppressors” (Israel).

She commented that Adolf Hitler could be regarded as a “Zionist God” and, for good measure, observed that Jews had big noses.

Other offenders include Gerry Downing, also an MP, who stated that it was quite legitimate to reopen “the Jewish Question” as a subject for debate. Then there’s former Bradford mayor, Khaddim Hussain, who condemned Holocaust education and accused Israel of arming ISIS and Luton councillor Aysegul Gurbuz referred to Hitler “as the greatest man in history” while also hoping that a nuclear Iran “would wipe Israel off the map”.

What is happening in the UK is reflected in political discourse throughout Europe, even – indeed especially in those countries considered to be the most democratic.

By contrast, in the American political realm – for now, at least – it is rare to see such blatant anti-Jewish slurs surfacing. It is another story in the academic sphere, where the paranoid political correctness against saying anything potentially offensive to blacks, Muslims, women and the LBGT lobby, is conspicuous by its absence when it comes to offending Jewish sensibilities.     

Is this “coming out” into the open of left-wing Judeopathy (as Alan Dershowitz calls it) a good thing? Certainly, it serves to expose the fundamentally fraudulent nature of radical anti-Zionism, which up until recently has been able to disguise its true nature behind a veneer of human rights activism.

On the other hand, the fact that people now feel increasingly comfortable about expressing openly anti-Semitic views in public, demonstrates how the taboo against such discourse is rapidly falling away.     

Jews have been fixated for too long on fighting yesterday’s battles. An inordinate amount of attention has been devoted to reacting to far right-wing manifestations of anti-Semitism in the classic Nazi mode, despite this constituency having long been an impotent fringe element in our own country as well as in all other Diaspora countries where there is a sizeable Jewish presence.

Only gradually has it been realised how the epicentre of anti-Semitism has shifted from the far right to the left – and not necessarily even the hard left – of the cultural-political spectrum.

As every basically neutral observer can now clearly see, the increasingly unhinged antipathy towards Israel on the Left has little to do with genuine concern for Palestinian rights and wellbeing.

It is further becoming obvious even to those with antennae less sensitively tuned to anti-Semitic nuances that the term “Zionist”, whatever it might technically mean, now more or less openly refers to Jews in general (excluding, obviously, those few “good Jews” who have seen the light and joined in the fight against the illegitimate Zionist entity).

The discourse around the supposed malignant, behind-the-scenes control exercised by Jews throughout the world is the same – only, for “Jews”, the term “Zionist” has been substituted.  

Without willy-nilly labelling, all harsh criticism of Israel as being anti-Semitically motivated frequently – and perhaps most of the time – it is clearly not, even when it is based on incorrect premises; it is now very obvious that much of what passes for anti-Israel (or pro-Palestinian) rhetoric is just that.

Advocates for Israel, and world Jewry, have to identify when the line has been crossed and react accordingly.

Aside from that, one can only wonder as to how, and why, the ostensibly anti-racist, human rights-focused Left has come to be infiltrated by such noxious notions.

What is it, at the end of the day, that generates with leftwing circles not mere antipathy, but all too often raw, unbridled hatred against Israel, and increasingly, against Jews who support it: most of them?

That hatred is self-evidently irrational, based as it is on absurd double standards, selective morality, distorted or fabricated facts, grossly exaggerated representations of Israel’s faults and comparisons – such as with apartheid South Africa and now, regularly, even with Nazism – that are as viciously offensive as they are demonstratively false.

Why is it, in fact, that when it comes to the world’s only Jewish majority state, so many Left-liberal academics, journalists, politicians and civil society advocates (including LBGT and feminist groupings, whom one would expect to be the last to align themselves with the Arab-Islamist vendetta against the Middle East’s only democracy) are unable to be true to the democratic, human rights ideals that they publicly espouse?

The answer to that lies in the greater mystery of what lies at the root of anti-Semitism itself, in which all professed reasons for hating Jews are ultimately no more than (in the critic Bradley’s characterisation of Iago), the “motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity”.