We politicians can be too quick to reach for superlatives. We sometimes proclaim ourselves “shocked” and “outraged” over tiny verbal slips by opponents. So when something truly staggering happens, our vocabulary can seem inadequate.
The revival of anti-Semitism in Britain’s Labour Party has left many commentators groping for words. It began when Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford, posted a Facebook image suggesting that Israel be “transported” to the United States. In an attempt to defend her, Labour’s former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, argued that hating Jews in Israel wasn’t the same as hating Jews in London, and that Adolf Hitler himself had been a Zionist “before he went mad.”
Over the next few days, one after another, various Labour councilors, often Muslims, were suspended for statements that crossed the line between criticism of Israel and straightforward anti-Semitism. Labour says 50 members have been kicked out, and Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has expressed his alarm about the “poisonous invective” that has become routine in parts of the Left.
Most Labour MPs, to be fair, recoiled in horror at what they heard. But a few trotted out the classic defenses of racism: “Witch hunt,” “taken out of context,” “no problem with Jews, only with Zionists.”
I can’t believe that this needs saying, but it evidently does. Israel, like every other country, sometimes deserves criticism. Parties of the Left have every right to campaign for the removal of settlements, the end of the Gaza blockade, a return to the 1948 border or whatever. They can demand sanctions, in the same way that they might demand sanctions against, say, Burma. But when do you ever hear them calling for Burma to be dismantled as a state?
Burma, like Israel, became independent in 1948. Plenty of countries — Slovakia, Eritrea, Montenegro — are far younger. But no one seriously argues that any action by their governments might invalidate their right to exist. It’s true, of course, that many Israelis have grandparents born elsewhere. So do many Americans. So, indeed, do almost all the British Muslims recently suspended by Labour.
In general, Labour activists are the first to point out that we’re all migrants, and that humanity began in Africa. Yet to some of them, it’s acceptable to talk of Israelis going “home” — by which, if you think about it, they might mean Iran, Iraq, Yemen, etc.
The Left’s normal rules don’t apply here. People who say that it’s for women to define sexism, for ethnic minorities to define racism, for gay people to define homophobia, happily tell Jews where the border lies between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
That border is now alarmingly blurred. Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, refuses to share a platform with David Cameron to back the EU (which both men mystifyingly support), but is happy to share one with Sheikh Raed Saleh, who has repeated the blood libel, and has called Jews “monkeys” and “bacteria.” Is it any wonder, with such an example at the top, that members of the Labor Club at Oxford University reportedly refer to Jewish students as “Zios”?
We’re seeing an ugly alliance between Islamist radicals and parts of the Left, based on a curious my-enemy’s-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-enemy logic. If your starting point is that the Western powers are responsible for the ills of the world, you can easily find yourself in a mesalliance with movements which, while they might be anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-secularist, are at least satisfyingly anti-American.
The more time you spend with these groups, the more you start sympathizing with their world-view. And Jews generally don’t occupy a positive place in the jihadi world-view.
Nor, come to that, in the world-view of those who insist on seeing hierarchies of victimhood everywhere. Many Leftists instinctively want to support whomever they think of as the most downtrodden. While it was easy enough to see Jews in such a light when they faced legal and institutional discrimination in Europe, it is harder to do so these days. Indeed, the state of Israel exists precisely because Jews had had enough of playing such a role.
Israel’s success against the odds is one of the wonders of our age. In a region where autocracy is normal form, Israel has remained a democracy — a gloriously cussed and disputatious democracy. In a strip of land without natural resources, it has created wealth from the greatest resource of all: human ingenuity. Its very success scrambles all those patronizing impulses that makes Leftists want to raise up the defined victims. No wonder they don’t like it.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
