Removing antisemitism won't change the Middle East debate much

Here is a silly and offensive anecdote told to me by a Thai guy I was skiing with.

‘At school we used to get these young Westerners coming in to teach us. This was one of the best schools in Bangkok, but they usually expected us to be ignorant, so we would play up to it. So we all spoke good English, but we’d be like [terrible cod accent] “sah-rry, could you speak more slowleeee? I don’t unstaaaaan.”

‘Anyway, once this very idealistic German girl came in and was trying to teach us history. She got more and more upset and frustrated, and as a last resort she made a terrible mistake: she decided to teach us the Holocaust.

‘Well, you can imagine. “Miss, miiiss…. I think it wasn’t real? The Jews made it aaaahp?” “Miss! I think they just upset cause in the camps… no Coca-colaaaah.”

‘So she started crying and went off to complain to the headmaster. And the headmaster asked her to leave.’

The point of this silly story is that, Westerners, other people do not necessarily care that much about your ideals. Not even those ones. The decline of the West and the rise of the Rest is not about the decline of old imperialist values. It is the decline of your values now:

We see that clearly in the global response to Ukraine. Sure, sure, some people in the Global South or whatever think the Russian invasion is terrible. It’s an example of imperialism, right? They should get it! But… come on. This is a faraway people of which they know nothing. It’s terrible in the abstract.

I also think about this story when I think about UK reactions to October 7 and the conflict in the Middle East. It is not the point of this essay, but here is my personal take on that conflict: Hamas are proven genocidal monsters. Defeating them is like defeating the Nazis: there is no more unequivocal ius ad bellum than for Israel to permanently wipe out the organization. It is very likely that in waging war Israel has committed war crimes, like the Allied bombings of Hamburg and Dresden — though much less serious, since those bombings deliberately killed more civilians in a night than the Israelis have killed people in total in the whole war. But like those bombings, that does not change the fact that one side is in the right and must win. Claims that Hamas is a magical, undefeatable Hydra are the disingenuous result of thinking backwards from the desired conclusion to the “facts” that would support it. The Gaza strip needs to be de-Hamasified before it can be free; talk of Palestinian “national liberation” without that context is a dishonest word game. Similarly about the conflict in Lebanon: Hezbollah are terrorists, and have been shelling Israel since October 8; Israel has the right to strike back.

That’s my take, others will differ, I have no special expertise or insight, though for sure many who know less than me are not shy about sounding off on the topic. I want to get at a different point, which is the inadequacy of a certain form of metadiscourse about how the conflict is discussed in Britain. Specifically, I think a lot of people think that:

1. Some of the UK debate following October 7 has been antisemitic;

2. If we could get rid of the antisemitism, the debate would be better;

3. And as a result, there would be more support for Israel.

Now point 1 is true for sure. The many far left groups and pro-Palestinian organizations that came out to celebrate October 7 are antisemites by definition. It doesn’t matter whether this comes from pure Jew-hatred or from the heartless Trotskyite logic that the ends justify the means. It is also true that Muslims in the UK and Europe express antisemitic attitudes at much higher rates than the rest of the population, and that preachers in mosques around the country are on camera venting straightforward, virulent antisemitism. If you feel the urge to duck, ignore, equivocate or waffle in response to these facts, then I suggest you take a long look in the mirror.

I had direct experience of this soon after October 7, by the way. I passed a Muslim family in the street and heard a little girl asking her mother, with an air of troubled paradox, “mummy, if we love everybody, does that mean we love the Jews?” Friends I told about this fell over themselves to think up innocent explanations. Maybe I misheard! She actually said “do we love the blues?”, it was about attitudes to music! I kid, I kid.

But points 2 and 3 don’t follow. Okay, less public antisemitism would be good in itself, so in that sense, point 2, but it’s not true that if you subtract the antisemitism, you will get the public foreign policy attitudes you want, or even a reasonable debate.

For here is another anecdote. I got into an argy-bargy on the group chat. Someone started talking about how the casualties he was seeing were unforgivable, this was an Israeli genocide, and so on. I asked him to take it elsewhere, for the good or bad reason that I know three people who had friends or relatives murdered or kidnapped on October 7; while I don’t like to treat empathy as a competitive sport, I felt this put me in a slightly different position to someone who is just outraged about what they saw on the telly. One thing led to another, accusations of racism followed… you get the idea.

Is this person dumb? I think so, yeah. Is he dumb with a PhD and a professorship? Oh sure. But he’s not dumb because he’s an antisemite. He is just an ordinary guy with partial sympathies who can’t think straight when he’s angry, i.e., a human. Why am I more pro-Israeli? Well, I know more Israelis. No further explanation is required. He’s no antisemite. I’m no Islamophobe. But so what?

The people getting angry about antisemitism are right to do so. But I suspect they are consciously or unconsciously motivated by point 3, and that is a fantasy doomed to failure.

You can see this in one especially silly kind of argument, the “what about Sudan?” argument, which consists in pointing out that the SWP/Imams/middle class protesters/whoever have remained astonishingly silent about (say) the war in Sudan which is far more bloody and cruel than Israel-Gaza. For Sudan substitute Burma, or Eritrea, or wherever. The first problem with this is that we obviously have more influence on Israel, as arms suppliers and/or fellow democrats, than on Burma or Sudan. But more relevantly: British Jews, Muslims and others care about Israel and Gaza, that’s just how it is! We are all like this. I care about Ukraine, more than I do about Burma. Oh sure, I care about them equally if you ask me explicitly like that. But just not in how much time I actually spend thinking or acting about Ukraine versus Burma. And, hypocrite lecteur, you have your biases too.¹

I am not saying that nobody is truly cosmopolitan in their sympathies or that it’s wrong to try. There are some people of true moral courage who come close — I’d mention Oz Katerji if pushed. But most people aren’t. That’s why it takes moral courage! You get shouted at by both sides!

It is also, I’m afraid, true that the policy choices here are intrinsically political, and a dirty kind of politics too. Either we support Israel in fighting a bloody war, under Netanyahu, a crook kept in power by religious bigots. Or we don’t. By so much the less we support Israel, by so much the more we support Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran. Those are the actual actors. Correspondingly on the other side, I’m sure it is unfair to accuse most protesters on UK streets of loving the queer-murdering Hamas. Far from it! They support the Palestinian resistance that respects human rights and the rights of women! That might take up armed struggle but would never stoop to terrorism! There is nothing to say against this Palestinian movement, except for the one small disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.

When I watch “habibi”’s videos of sermons in mosques in Britain, it does not make me more positive about multiculturalism. But I think the bottom line is that Israel now has many enemies in the UK, and that you could purge all the extremism and antisemitism out and that would still be true. Sorry, buddy! Other people’s sympathies are not yours, they vote and this is a salient issue for them, and now that is a real electoral concern for hundreds of Labour MPs. How we should make foreign policy in this context is a difficult question, and I have no nice solutions. How foreign policy will get made has a simpler, more obvious answer. In any case, a good start would be to be clear-eyed about where we are.

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