Melanie Phillips
In the wake of the festival of Shavuot, when Jews have been celebrating the
giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai from where he presented
them to the Jewish people camped at its foot, I have been brooding over the fact
that Zionism has become a dirty word in Britain and the west.
For many in these societies, Zionism has now become equated with racism. This
group libel, once regarded with revulsion by decent people when the Soviet-Arab
axis got the UN to endorse it in 1975, has now become the prism through which
the BBC, academia, the artistic and theatrical world and much of the rest of the
cultural establishment now frame all references to Israel.
This helps explain the attempted boycott of the Israeli theatre company
Habima, playing Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at London’s Globe
theatre this evening in conditions of the tightest security (apparently the
expected interruptions by bigots have so far been relatively minor). The
profound malice and ignorance behind such reflexive demonisation of Israel are
rendered all the more hallucinatory by the sanctimonious and unchallenged
assumption of the moral high ground which these idiots believe they occupy.
This is as grotesque as it is terrifying. Zionism is no more nor less than
the self-determination of the Jewish people -- as a people, and not
just as adherents of the Jewish religion. Jews are in fact the only
people – as a people -- for whom Israel (ancient Judea and
Samaria) was ever their national homeland. Those who deny Zionism thus deny
Jewish peoplehood and the fundamental right of Jews to live as a people in their
own ancestral homeland, Israel.
Unique in the world, Jews are both a people and adherents of a religion.
Intrinsic to and inseparable from the religion of Judaism is the land of Israel;
more specifically, the centrality of and longing for Jerusalem and its Temple.
Deny that centrality and you rip the heart and soul out of Judaism. Those who
deny the right of the Jews to Israel and Jerusalem deny the right of the Jews to
their own religion.
Judaism is like a stool supported on three legs – the nation, the religion
and the land. Saw off any of these legs and the stool collapses. Does this mean
that all Jews are Zionists? Of course not, no more than it means that all Jews
are religious. But just as the hatred of Jews on theological grounds has always
threatened the lives and safety of all Jews including those who are not
religious, so the anti-Zionist hatred of Jewish self-determination is a form of
bigotry which threatens the lives and safety of all Jews, whether or
not they are Zionists. And the fact that there are some anti-Zionist Jews who
themselves hate the expression of Jewish self-determination in the form of the
State of Israel is a manifestation of that same self-same bigotry no less for
being such a tragically twisted example.
The anti-Zionist madness of our time is thus far more pernicious even than
hatred of Israel, pathologically obsessive and malevolent as that is in itself.
Bad enough that for so many people in Britain and the west, Israel has been
successfully demonised as a pariah state on the basis of a unique systematic
campaign of falsehoods, distortions and libels about its history and behaviour,
untruths which have nevertheless become the unchallenged basis for public
discussion.
But far worse even than this is the assumption underlying this lazy
defamation, that Zionism is a creed that is itself a particularly aggressive
kind of racism or colonialism. This vicious prejudice has turned truth, reason
and decency inside out. The right of the Jews to their own historic national
homeland has been recast, entirely falsely, as a usurpation of the ‘right’ to
that land of ‘Palestinians’ – who never actually existed as a discrete
people in the first place. Those Jews who are Zionists now find themselves as a
result cast as racists and social pariahs – merely for asserting the right of
the Jewish people to self-determination in their own historic homeland.
Those who are driven by a vicious and bigoted hatred have thus been allowed
to cast the victims of their hatred as themselves hateful people. Zionist Jews
are thus defamed and victimised many times over – and by those who have the gall
to claim the moral high ground in doing so, from luvvies Emma Thompson and Ken
Loach to the boycotters and thugs who harass and bully Zionist Jews on
campus.
This is a truly chilling situation, reminiscent of the mass brainwashing and
hijacking of thought that took place in the Soviet Union – not surprising when
you consider the Soviet-Arab axis that back in the seventies set out to destroy
Israel by capturing and subverting the western mind. In practical terms, it
means that by definition it is not possible to persuade people what has actually
occurred and what the true facts are, since such propositions will be dismissed
out of hand -- on the basis that everyone knows that the lies about Israel are
actually the unchallengeable truth.
But just as in the former Soviet Union, there are plenty of decent, rational
people who do understand very well what is happening here, and its broader and
lethal implications for the safety of the entire western world. For those people
and others who have yet to be persuaded -- not to mention the duty to record
this infamy into the memory of the world -- the truth behind this terrible
departure from reason and decency over Israel and Zionism must continue to be
publicly told.
Thanks NG
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