After reflecting on some scattered brushes with anti-Semitism in his youth, the British novelist Howard Jacobson examines the anti-Israel obsession that has overtaken the left since the Six-Day War, and that has been manifesting itself more and more explicitly in the Labor party as sheer hatred of Jews:
The Israel-loathing that began to consume the left altered my sense of being Jewish in this country. Past slights—the odd teacher wondering if Jews controlled the Nobel-prize committee, my tutor at university calling me Finklebaum one day and Goldfinger the next—had been as nothing. A pantomime. But suddenly no one was laughing. I didn’t walk the streets in fear. I didn’t think of emigrating. And I didn’t consider becoming less conspicuously Jewish. . . . I still think Britain is a fine country to be a Jew of any complexion in. But it is as though I now live in the shadow of an unseen enemy. There are people not far away who hate beyond reason an enterprise to which I am only tenuously connected, but connected nonetheless.
If I think back to moments of Jew-related tension I’ve experienced in the second half of my life, they have almost all been to do with Israel. There is no point in citing instances. They aren’t personal to me. And they are more to do with a changed atmosphere than with deeds. You can say I’m the lucky one. Post the emergence of anti-Zionism as a faith, Jews have been attacked and, in some European countries, killed. So far, I have had only to tolerate the vituperation that trails my articles.
But the atmosphere of which I speak is of a sort to which no group should be subjected. It manifests itself in habitual abuse on social media, the drowning-out of any speech considered dissonant in universities, local councils, and debating chambers, that cold-eyed contempt of which [the Labor party leader] Jeremy Corbyn is master, and the undisguised assumption, within leftist politics, that when a Jew complains of anti-Semitism, he is lying. Most Jews know what anti-Semitism is and what it isn’t. Its history is written on the Jewish character in blood. To invent it where it is not would be a sacrilege.
The incantatory repetition of the charge that Jews cry anti-Semitism only in order to subvert criticism of Israel or discredit Corbyn is more than fatuous and lazy, and it is more than painful to those many Jews who own an old allegiance to the Labor party and who are not strangers to criticizing Israel. It is the deepest imaginable insult. I cannot speak for all Jews, but a profound depression has taken hold of those I know. For myself, I feel I am back in that lightless swamp of medieval ignorance.
Read more on Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/07/howard-jacobson-jews-know-what-antisemitism-is-and-what-it-isnt-to-invent-it-would-be-a-sacrilege