Matthew Norman: Why I salute these dissenting voices

If you've heard the story before, apologies in advance for equalling my own all-comers record by boring you half to death within the first paragraph... but there was this Jewish fella who decided to sail solo around the world. It doesn't strike the eye as a natural fit, as fans of racial stereotyping would agree, and a month later the man found himself duly shipwrecked on a tiny desert island without so much as eight records or the works of Shakespeare for company.

Fourteen years of total isolation pass until one day, long after he'd abandoned all hope, he spots a Royal Navy frigate approaching. Eventually, the captain leads a party of officers on to the shore, and greets him with a cheery: "Ahoy Mr Liebowitz, good to meet you at last! We've been searching for you for a long time." As the overjoyed man stumbles towards the lifeboat, the captain says: "Mr Liebovitz, please don't take offence, but I'm intrigued to notice that on this minute, uninhabited island, you appear to have built two synagogues. Why is that?" "Ah well," says Liebovitz, shrugging towards the larger of two rickety wooden structures, "that one I won't go to."

The Jews are, by nature, a disputatious people. So much do we relish an argument, indeed, that it's impossible to believe in the existence of a single Jewish family without at least one broigus... one of those disagreements so ancient and arcane that two people will have gone 35 years without speaking for reasons (the failure to return a Perspex bowl, perhaps, or a Bar Mitzvah invitation lost in the post) neither can begin to recall.

From Cain and Abel all the way to Mike and Bernie Winters, the history of the Jewish people is one of brothers, literal and metaphorical, falling out. So the miracle about this week's launch of Independent Jewish Voices, to whose charter Harold Pinter, Eric Hobsbawm, Stephen Fry and 147 other prominent figures are signatories, as a counterweight to the Jewish Board of Deputies is that it took so long.

The source of this nascent broigus is anything but arcane. It is, of course, the rather older and more serious broigus in what the former would know, to the fury of the Deputies, as Israel-Palestine. For so long have the Deputies offered unthinking blanket support for Israel's imposition of a form of apartheid on the Palestinians that finally the more liberal, progressive voice can take it no more and demands to be heard.

Already I am aware that some readers will be reaching for the Basildon Bond and pen with which to dismiss me as a "self-loathing Jew" - the peculiarly cretinous phrase that forms the reflex response of the Zionist, and even non-Zionist, to any fellow Jew who criticises Israel. That the critic is overtly proud of his or her Jewish heritage matters no more than the cogency of the specific argument as to why, for example, the recent bombardment of Lebanon was a strategic political error, as well as a shameful abuse of military force against centres of civilian population.

So rigidly intolerant of dissenting opinion has a loud chunk of British Jewry become that, a few years ago, we had the spectacle of Sir Gerald Kaufman - for decades a fervent supporter of Israel - being manhandled in the Chief Rabbi's home synagogue at St John's Wood on one of the high holy days by worshippers furious at his disdain for the works of Ariel Sharon.

As for goyim who express such opinions, they are routinely dismissed as simple Jew-haters. There have been few more vocal and consistently loyal friends of Israel in the British press than Max Hastings yet, when he began to criticise Sharon, various acquaintances asked how I could bear to work for such an anti-Semite. But he's written books that are almost elegiac love poems to the pre-Sharon Israel, I pointed out. He's married to a Jew, and most of his closest friends really are Jews. Max Hastings adores Jews so much, it hurts. Rubbish, I was rebuked. The man's a rabid anti-Semite.

It is precisely this intransigent tunnel vision that has transformed the Board of Deputies from what began a century and a half ago as a sober representative body into a hybrid between a searing pain in the bum and a very weak joke. Its former spokesman even had a Martin Amis character name, and occasionally the reflexive umbrage taken by Mr Mike Whine to any mention of Jewishness verged on the amusing.

I once wrote about the revoking of the Whitechapel Blooms's kosher licence because a piece of non-kosher meat had been found in its fridge, placed there in error by a delivery boy. That this statutory offence should enforce its closure seemed both absurd and to set a dangerous precedent, and I foresaw an outbreak of "gefilte warfare" whereby one butcher, Schlagman of East Finchley, might hire a gentile to throw a prawn into the shop of another, Frowhein of Temple Fortune, thereby putting him out of business. The next day the Deputies' letter arrived, lacerating me for causing grave offence to the butchers, one of whom (Schlagman) had rung to say he enjoyed the article, and would I remember him to my mother? Generally, however, the wild over-reactions and desperation to take offence where none was meant are distasteful, and the self-styling of such a body as "the Voice of British Jewry" hugely embarrassing.

As deplorable and disgusting as the rise in anti-Semitic attacks most certainly is, the commonly held belief that it highlights the dangers of a second Hitler - the engine room, one suspects, for much of the hysteria - verges on the demented. More Asians are racially attacked in a weekend than are Jews in a year, while no ethnic minority in history has been as well protected as the diaspora in an age when no one can be elected US President without the Jewish vote, and when the first hint of an attempt at systematic persecution would be met with overwhelming American military power. And the Lord be praised, it should go without saying, for that.

The problems for Israel in an age of seemingly imminent regional nuclear proliferation are grave, and the stress of life in a region laden with enemies who expressly or tacitly deny its right to exist painfully acute. But the debate-stifling conflation of dissent from its Palestinian policies with flagrant anti-Semitism is little short of an obscenity.

It is primarily to counter this nasty trend - one diametrically opposed to the traditional, almost Talmudic love of exhaustive debate - that Independent Jewish Voices has been founded, and about bleeding time. I wish it every success and look forward to the first schism in the spring of 2009, when Mike Leigh is scheduled to lead a breakaway group to form the rival Voices of Independent Jewry after a broigus about whose turn it was to buy the sponge cake.

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