The sediment of hate

Suddenly it doesn't feel safe to be a Jew again. Take that "again" with a pinch of salt. I have not felt Jewishly unsafe before, not in this country anyway. But older Jews and other Jews in other places have; and anxiety of the sort they experienced gets passed on down the line.

I grew up with the idea of unsafety encoded into my Jewish identity, put it like that. Now it is as though I have come into my inheritance. The thing I was programmed to expect - the uncertainty, and even the beginnings of alarm - is here. Not a Kristallnacht, I grant you. But an atmosphere, post 11 September, of rumours and counterrumours, reports of a resurgence of "salon" anti-Semitism, and most recently the French Ambassador's purely topographical description of Israel as "that shitty little country".

Is Israel the problem or the pretext? Impossible to know, but once again the tape of historical consequences is being rewound, and once again it is being stopped, where it has stopped so many times before: at us. Or, at least in this instance, at Israel - a version of us, and the underlying cause, as some would have it, of the religious disturbances threatening us all.

Myself, I do not feel defined by Israel. In the long run this might turn out to be irrelevant, since Israel's closest neighbours and enemies draw no distinction between the Jew and the Israeli and educate their children in anti-Jewish slanders purloined from Nazi Germany. All the more reason to insist on the difference, you might think, but in fact all the more reason to do the opposite. I cannot refuse Israel in my heart simply because I do not wish to be implicated in Arab propaganda.

This does not mean that I take any criticism of Israel or Israeli policies to be ipso facto anti-Semitic. To be a friend of Israel is to want her to survive, yes, but to want her to survive honourably, remembering the great secular dream which Zionism once was, liberating Jews everywhere from themselves as well as from their oppressors, freeing them from superstition and smallmindedness, fitting them for a life of the body as well as the mind, and preparing them for their Utopian cooperation with those Arabs already inhabiting the land. To see settlers, mostly American and born-again, garbed in some parody of 18th century Jewish peasant dress, pointing to the Bible with their rifle butts, finding justificationfor what they have stolen in holy writ, is to despair for Israelis no less than for Palestinians. Zionism was never meant to look like this. And it is not anti-Jewish to say so. In fact, nearly all the Jews of my acquaintance say nothing else.

At one time they said it quietly, to one another, not wishing to draw attention. More recently they have been saying it aloud - leaders of the Jewish community as well as fugitive Jews like me, rabbis as well as journalists, Israeli commentators and academics no less than foreign ones.

At one level this is a cause for Jewish pride. We are capable of seeing all around a question. We will embrace truth, no matter how much it hurts.

Behold, we are once again a light unto nations! (It's just a pity no Palestinian intellectual will follow suit.) But I fear our magnanimity - the completeness of our critique of that aberrant aspect of ourselves which is Israel - might eventually be interpreted differently. Say that you are in the wrong often enough and people won't only believe you, they will come to think of you as fainthearted, sycophantic, lacking the self-respect to be who you are. It has happened before. Did ever a people make themselves as compliant and easy to get on with, as ready for docile citizenship, as the Jews of Germany? And what was our reward?

A precedent such as this need not leave us tongue-tied. If we have overcome our reticence sufficiently to lambast the only country we, as a distinct people, have - even allowing that we might not ever want to go there - what about rounding out the picture a little. What about saying that which we also know to be true, historically, that the brutalisation of Israel is itself as much a consequence as a cause of the drawn-out conflicts with its Arab neighbours; and true psychologically, that the bully is no less a victim of events than the bullied. You wanted us dead, my Arab brothers, and now we both have Ariel Sharon. He was your poisoned gift to us. Just as Arafat was ours to you.

When was there ever a struggle, except in those Holy Books which are themselves part of the problem, between irredeemable evil and spotless innocence? And yet the partial silence of enlightened Jews has allowed it to be assumed, beyond question almost everywhere, that the Arab/Israeli conflict is onedimensional, a story of the oppressed and their oppressors, and that the Muslim world is entirely within its rights to view American support for Israel as an unmitigated wrong, and only marginally not within its rights to blow up everything it can find as an expression of its discontent.

There is a certain grinding, low level of anti-Semitism you learn to live with. A few years ago my grandmother's grave was defaced with swastikas. The work of kids from poor areas, we concluded, with nothing to do except express violence. You wish it hadn't happened, clean the stone, and think of something else.

But it reminds you of the sediment of hate and irrationality waiting at the bottom of society. Activation of it will come from somewhere else. Someone ascribing the world's ills to that "shitty little country", or someone else wondering aloud whether the Jews should ever have been allowed to found that shitty little country in the first place.