Iraq and Israel: A Jew answers back

Many people in this country and around the world believe that to be anti-war you need to be anti-Israel. But they are wrong. And this is why...

Read Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's article

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In an unusually honest and soul-searching article, even by her own standards of candour, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown told earlier this week of the cracks appearing in a small discussion group of Muslim, Jewish, Asian and Black Britons to which she belongs, whose raison d'être, to put it at its simplest, is the exploration of common sympathies. An admirable group, it sounds, with admirable aims, committed to finding understanding and friendship where we are accustomed to expect only hostility. Now, suddenly, these alliances, "painstakingly stitched together, are stretched to breaking point". The reason – the connection some members of the group see "between what we are threatening to do to Iraq and what we tolerate in Israel". Without any movement of intervening thought or argument, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown transforms this "seeing" of a connection into an assumption that there is one. "I am becoming aware," she says, "that this connection" – there it is, a cemented fact now – "worries the Jewish group members."

Though I am not myself a member of the group, I would like to explain why this "connection", and the method of deduction by which it comes to be adopted as irrefragable truth, worries me as well. Andrew Murray, who chairs the Stop the War Coalition, justifies the slippage from "Don't Attack Iraq" to "Justice for Palestine" by insisting that the two issues are "inextricably linked" – inextricable meaning free-associated, as in these are a few of my least favourite things. And the Muslim Association of Great Britain, a co-sponsor of the recent peace marches, is just as quick to roll all its grievances into one ball: we don't like this and neither do we like that. Unquestioned, this notion of connectedness – in most cases pure opportunism – passes into received idea, passes into cliché, passes into that about which we all agree. And society is never less to be trusted than when it is in a fit of agreeing with itself.

In a general, and if you wish to be unkind you might say legalistic, way, Jews are not impressed by connections. At the heart of Judaism is the principle of separation – havdalah. In prayer, God is sometimes referred to as "He Who Distinguishes", separating the sacred from the profane, light from darkness, one thing from another. I am not saying you have to be Jewish to be fastidious about confusing objects and events that merely appear on the surface to be similar, but Jews are especially on guard against the habit. We are also frightened by it. Of the sexual abominations listed in Leviticus, the worst are condemned as "confusion". In confusion we not only defile ourselves, we lose ourselves. So our feathers are ruffled by the procedure of connecting – the intellectual methodology of it, if you like – even before we get on to the matter of what it is that is being connected with what.

Wherein, then, lies this "connection" in particular? That it lies heavy on Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's heart – heavier than on the hearts of many less conscientious commentators – is plain to see. She is willing to risk her Jewish friendships for it, and I believe her when she says that their loss is like the death of hope itself. But her feeling the "connection", however deeply, does not make it so. She is "consumed", she says, by the "iniquitous actions of Israel" and is distraught that her Jewish friends do not adequately comprehend the strength of her feelings.

As a Jew I wish to say that I am made equally distraught by the inadvertent rhetoric of her distress. "Some 600 or so Israelis have been murdered by Palestinians," she reminds us, wishing to be even-handed. "That is unequivocally condemned by me. But 2,000 or more Palestinians have been massacred by the overwhelming force of the Israeli army." Note the "but", which if it does not exactly make her "unequivocally" equivocal again, points to qualitative, no less than quantitive, difference in the deaths. Not just 2,000 as against 600, but "massacred" as against "murdered", and massacred by an overwhelming force, as though there is nothing overwhelming about a bomb in a suicide bomber's pocket, and as though it is not a massacre when it goes off on a crowded school bus.

Is that last phrase rhetoric of my own? No doubt it is. We are at war, here, as to who is the victim of whom. We would do well, on both sides, to drop the concept of victim altogether. We are in too deep for it now. But that is asking a lot in the eyes of those who "see connections", because Israel, as every schoolboy knows and is keen to demonstrate on Question Time, is armed to the teeth. "Why not disarm Israel as well then?" comes the question at more or less the same point of every public debate, as though there is exact or indeed any equivalence between Saddam's deployment of arms and Israel's. "Israel also flouts the wishes of the United Nations and has weapons of mass destruction." Followed by applause. A little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

None of us can be absolutely sure what would have happened, had such and such not happened also, but there is no Jew of my acquaintance, let him be the staunchest opponent of Israel's present policies, who doubts that without the appropriate deterrents Israel would long ago have been driven into the sea. Humanity is short on memory. Thirty-five years ago "brave little Israel" was everybody's favourite underdog, putting to flight the armies of however many Arab countries bent on its destruction. The mistake it made, as far as public relations went, was to learn from its own history and beef itself up militarily. A disappointment, that, to sentimentalists the world over. We preferred Israel svelte and fragile. We enjoyed the frisson of its being ever on the brink. Too bad. Every country has to grow up some time. And no one loves you when you're old and grey. But if Yasmin Alibhai-Brown cannot understand why her otherwise open and amenable Jewish friends go quiet when she tells them that Israel should be treated exactly as Bush and Blair propose we treat Iraq, here is the reason: Israel has the weapons it has because without them it would not exist.

Does this mean we applaud everything it has since done with those weapons? No, it does not.

Is it a massacre every time it uses them? No, it is not.

And what of the other arguments "connecting" Israel to Iraq? Comparable iniquity, say. What right do we have to invade one country when there are others whose policies all decent-thinking people must abhor, blah blah. A strange argument this, as though a judge should stay his hand in judgement of a felon, because other felons walk the streets. And as though we should not try to put one wrong right because we can do nothing about another. Even so, and all other questions aside, why Israel rather than anywhere else? Zimbabwe, say. There are "connections" with Iraq here in plenty. Tyrants lurk on either side of the equation. You die if you question either. France makes love to both. So if we attack the one, what possible justification is there for not attacking the other? Invidious to choose, surely. Connected? We are all connected. If a butterfly beats its wings in Beijing... Except that the reason Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is losing her friendships is the butterfly beating its wings in Tel Aviv.

Geographical and ethnic inequity then – is that it? The perceived inequity in singling out some parties or would-be parties to a regional dispute for chastisement and not others. By invading a Muslim country – though hardly by any account a Muslim administration – we are inviting Islam to believe there is one law for it and another for the Jews? Generally this is held to be an erroneous, not to say reckless, conclusion, since no one in their right mind, at least in the West, believes Bush and Blair to be on an anti-Muslim crusade. But – or so the argument proceeds – it will be construed that way in the Muslim world.

Myself, I think that insults the intelligence of the Muslim world. I have, however, to bow to the opinion of Abdul Bari Atwan, the editor of the London Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, who appears on television nightly to assure us it will be construed that way in the Muslim world. It wasn't me, guvnor, it was them. That being the case, isn't it our responsibility – Abdul Bari Atwan's and Yasmin Alibhai Brown's too, whatever else they feel about the war – to refute the slander at source, to demonstrate its preposterousness? Instead, we do the opposite. There is a wickedness, I believe, in knowing that there are irrational forces at work, and inflaming them. Those who marched to a confused tune, identifying Iraq with Israel, calling for peace with the one and (strangely for a peace march) destruction of the other, were guilty of stirring up the very prejudices they claimed they were concerned to calm.

And thereby, though this might not bother everyone, playing into the hands of Saddam Hussein. If anyone has something to gain by making the dread "connection", by turning the world's displeasure with him into a war about Israel, it is Saddam Hussein. Fire rockets into Israel, invite retaliation, turn the thing into a wider Israeli-Arab conflict, and suddenly he is another Saladin. And this we concede him every time we march with a mixed message. Stooges of someone else's aggressive politics, while we think we stand up for peace.

Not in our name, no indeed.

Forgive the bitter scepticism of a Jew. It isn't pretty seeing film footage of Jews in Israel rehearsing in their gas masks against whatever Iraq has the capability to drop on them in the name of making a "connection". It isn't pretty learning that Jews with second passports are renewing their European originals, in case they have to flee. And no, it hasn't been pretty seeing Jews charging into Gaza in their tanks. None of this was meant to happen. Zionism had other plans for Jews, chief among them a settled place to live and a freedom, at long last, from looking over their shoulders. The pioneering Jewish socialists who arrived early in the century had no intention of being an occupying army, or of daily burying their dead. None of this was meant to happen. That it has, we can ascribe to history, as long as history includes the intransigence of both Muslims and Jews.

I could have said Palestinians and Israelis, but that is increasingly looking like an evasion. It's becoming more and more a matter for Muslims and Jews now, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is finding. She is bravely honest about this. "How many Muslims have openly campaigned," she asks, "against the anti-Semitism that is freely traded in mosques and other places?" We should be grateful for her witness. But this is a very serious business. The standard line all parties have tried to take is that it isn't anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. Nor is it. Nor should it be. Enough Jews criticise Israel, both within it and without. We look a little silly, though, we Jews of the new hard-skinned variety, being careful not to cry wolf – of course it isn't anti-Semitism, of course it isn't! – when substantial numbers of Muslims think otherwise. And not just in the mosques. In schools all over the Arab world anti-Semitic literature, some of it of Nazi origin, is required reading. Click on to the Radio Islam website and you will find that fraudulent exposé of Jewish world-domination, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Egyptian television, too, has recently disinterred for the behoof of I do not know how many gullible viewers. But one would be too many.

Thus have we adopted an ingenious quid pro quo of race relations: you don't like Jews, but we don't like saying you don't like Jews, therefore you do like Jews.

We have been here before. If we look away, if we pretend it isn't happening, if we call it by another name, maybe it will be another thing. I would prefer to do that myself. Look away. I don't welcome the recrudescence of fears we all thought had gone for good; reminders of ancient perturbations of which some of us never imagined we were capable. I'd like someone else to fix this. Yasmin, you do it. But it doesn't appear as though anybody will or can. How many of those mosques where anti-Semitism is "freely traded" still operate? Why wasn't more of a fuss made the other week when AN Wilson not only recommended to his readers a work by one of America's most notorious white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, but also gave the address where they could get it? The address, mark you. To make absolutely certain no one missed out on their copy. If that wasn't incitement to racial hatred exactly, it certainly wasn't encouragement to racial harmony. The London Evening Standard, in which Wilson's article appeared, and where he has charted for some years his own spiritual journey into hate, formally and in haste apologised, explaining that Wilson knew not the reputation of the author he had been urging on his readers. Some excuse. It looked so innocuous to him that he didn't notice the loathing of which it was made? Didn't start from such phrases as "deep-pockets Zionist financiers" and "the spread of Master Race Zionist ideology"? If that all seemed normal enough, what does it tell you about the inside of his head? And the thoughts with which he has accustomed himself to living?

And another question – why is he still in a job?

In the meantime, a very ordinary film about the Holocaust wins a Bafta for best film and best director. You might think I want it both ways. For Holocaust deniers to be shown the door, and Holocaust-centred art to go unrewarded. Not so. The Pianist is in my view a pedestrian piece of work. Its award, one can only assume, is for the subject – that which existed before the film was even thought of. A subject, I accept, whose importance cannot be overstated. But art is art. We do no one a service by pretending achievement where there isn't any, least of all those in whose name and in whose memory it was made. But there you are: everybody, Jews included, loves Judaism on the edge. As they loved Israel when its life hung in doubt before it. The Holocaust Jew. The Jew dead or dying. Artistic, sensitive, fine-boned, barely alive.

It's a seductive self-image, from which many of us now choose to run a mile. So if Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is finding that her Jewish friends are abandoning her at the moment, this might be the reason: they are edgy and afraid, uncertain what's coming next, but not again willing, not yet, to roll over and capitulate to another slander.