The theory that Israel is responsible for all the Middle East’s problems may bear a suspicious resemblance to classic anti-Semitic suppositions, but the displays of hatred found regularly in protest marches in the West are much less subtle. The great British novelist Howard Jacobson considers these marches and the Israel-hating Jews who attend them:
Every Saturday in England is now Vilify Israel Shabbes. I meet the marches half-way by not calling them hate marches. I’d like them to meet me half-way by not calling themselves peace marches.
There’s an inevitable carnivalesque quality about a march. The banners, the chanting, the optimism of numbers, the holiday from care and reality. On a march, even the lowliest become kings for a day and briefly, the overturning of the entire old order seems possible.
Exhilarating, these Shabbes-busters must be, if you are a Palestinian. But what if you are a Jew? I don’t mean a Jew watching on the news, I mean a Jew marching in solidarity with people not all of whom like Jews. In these cataclysmic times, aren’t anti-Zionist Jews, too, getting a little something of what they want? The prospect of the end of Israel, say.
Jacobson gets a clearer sense of this thinking by looking at the work of a prominent British feminist novelist and thinker, who happens to be both Jewish and a committed anti-Zionist:
“The answer to racism is to denounce it,” wrote Jacqueline Rose in The Last Resistance, “not to flee behind a defensive, self-isolating barrier of being—and being only—a Jew.” . . . Imagine telling the Jews of Kishinev not to flee but to stay and denounce the racism of the rioters crying “Kill the Jews!”
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-new-hate-marchers-howard-jacobson