The Myopia of a Madman

The Myopia of a Madman

A review of Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It, by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, London, 2023), 211 pp.

Deborah Maccoby, 5th October 2023

In 2020, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din (“there is law”) published a Legal Opinion concluding that “the crime against humanity of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank”. But what marked the beginning of a step change in mainstream international perception of Israel was the Opinion’s ending. Pointing out that the Israeli government “is carrying out a process of ‘gradual annexation’ in the West Bank”, the authors of the Opinion wrote:

Continued creeping legal annexation … is an amalgamation of the regimes. This could mean strengthening the argument, which already is being heard, that the crime of Apartheid is not committed only in the West Bank. That the Israeli regime in its entirety is an apartheid regime. That Israel is an Apartheid state.

In January 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem (“in the image [of God]”) published a position paper which reached the conclusion that, (as Yesh Din puts it,“the Israeli regime in its entirety” has indeed become one Apartheid State across the whole land):

“the Israeli regime, which controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, seeks to advance and cement Jewish supremacy throughout the entire area. To that end, it has divided the area into several units, each with a different set of rights for Palestinians – always inferior to the rights of Jews”

The paper concludes: “the bar for labelling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met”.

In April, 2021, the mainstream international human rights organisation Human Rights Watch followed suit, concluding that:

“the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination for Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT.  In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these elements come together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.”

And in 2022, another mainstream international human rights group, Amnesty International, published a long, meticulously documented Report which concluded that:

“all Palestinians are subject to the same overarching system. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians across all areas is pursuant to the same objective: to privilege Jewish Israelis in distribution of land and resources, and to minimize the Palestinian presence and access to land.”

Jake Wallis Simons’s new book Israelophobia is essentially a response by Israel’s apologists to this new international human rights consensus. This purpose, however, is never stated openly. Israelophobia’s ostensible “mission” is “to make a plea for tolerance, liberalism, factual analysis and proportional judgment” (p. 29).

Wallis Simons, who is Editor of the Jewish Chronicle (JC), writes in what, on the surface, appears to be a clear, simple, and readable journalistic style. But the book resembles the later novels of Henry James in that what is not said is more significant than what is said. Wallis Simons never mentions Yesh Din or B’Tselem (he clearly cannot bring himself to acknowledge that Israeli human rights organisations have labelled Israel an apartheid regime). He also makes no reference to Human Rights Watch or its Report (though a mention on page 105 of Kenneth Roth as an antisemite and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn may have an oblique connection with the HRW Report, as Roth was Director of HRW until 2022).  Wallis Simons confines himself to four references to Amnesty (p. 8, p. 116, p. 123 and p. 166), the first three very cursory (on page 8, he refers only to Amnesty’s tweets; on p. 116 he mentions the Amnesty Report in a footnote; only on p. 123 and p. 166 is the Report mentioned in the text). But the word “apartheid” is prominent throughout the book, which reaches a revelatory moment on page 166, where Wallis Simons complains that the “apartheid smear … is now depressingly commonplace”. He goes on (with typical exploitation of the Holocaust):

“In February 2023, just after Holocaust Memorial Day, the left-wing Labour MP Kim Johnson was forced to apologise after asking in the Commons: ‘Since the election of the fascist Israeli government last December, there has been an increase in human rights violations against Palestinians, mostly children. Can the Prime Minister tell us how he is challenging what Amnesty and other human rights organisations refer to as an apartheid state?’”

“It later emerged that another Labour MP, Faiza Shaheen, had said in an interview: ‘If you can’t say that Israel is an apartheid state, or if Palestinians in this country can’t say that it is racist, without being labelled antisemitic by the Labour Party, then I think there is a problem.’” [Incidentally. Faiza Shaheen is Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. She is not, and never has been, an MP – DM]

Simons spends many pages listing the crimes of other countries, particularly those of China in relation to Hong Kong and Tibet (pp. 43-44). He writes: “Some say that higher standards are expected of a western-style democracy. But that does not explain why the Jewish state is criticised, scrutinised and undermined so much more than the United States, Australia, France or Britain” (p. 44). One answer is that none of these western democracies, whatever their many flaws, currently maintain an “over-arching system” (to quote Amnesty again) that officially privileges one ethnic, religious, or national group at the expense of another. Another answer lies in the fact that those who publicly call Israel an apartheid state are forced to apologise and are labelled as antisemitic.

To sum up the book’s structure: Chapter 1 – “The Newest Hatred” — paints an alarming picture of current explosive levels of hatred against Israel and against Diaspora Jews because of their association with Israel.[1] Connecting this increase in hate with contemporary “woke” politics, Wallis Simons, with an oblique reference to the decades-old concept of the “New Antisemitism”[2] (which again is never openly mentioned), concludes this chapter:

“If Israel and its friends are targeted in a witch-hunt, so are other racial and sexual groups, religious believers, and those with dissenting political views or unfashionable values. Calling it antisemitism is no longer enough, as that definition remains anchored in the race-based hatred of the last century. This new bigotry, by contrast, is primarily political, enabling it to recruit progressive Jews as allies. It is vital to find a new way to identify and respond to this new intolerance. It begins by giving it a name: Israelophobia.”

In Chapter Two, “What is Israelophobia?”, Wallis Simons explains that it is made up of three characteristics: Demonisation, Weaponisation, and Falsification. The next three chapters are devoted to each of these three characteristics. In the last chapter, Wallis Simons lists “Eight Giveaways” that reveal whether a person is suffering from Israelophobia, and “Five Pressure Points” intended to expose in argument the hidden symptoms of infection by the “virus” (p. 182), so that sufferers will become aware of their Israelophobia and thus have a chance of recovery.

In the penultimate chapter, Wallis Simons traces the “evolution” of the constantly mutating (though eternally the same) pathogen from “medieval antisemitism to Nazi racism, Soviet disinformation and modern Israelophobia” (p. 167).  He links the Nazis and the Soviets to Arab Israelophobia, via the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem and Soviet anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda, of which the author writes: “Whereas Nazi Israelophobia had been limited to the Arab sphere, the Kremlin also projected its version worldwide” (p. 172); this version, he explains, “infected progressives all over the world, becoming a permanent part of left-wing thinking” (p. 182). Referring to Israel’s early years, when it was “the darling of leftists around the world”, Simons asks: “What strangled the progressive love affair with Israel?” and replies: “The answer lies in the Kremlin” (pp. 158-159).  Though he concedes that Israel “is far from perfect” (p. 5), it never occurs to him that it might be Israel’s own policies that have alienated the left.  After citing on p. 166 the Labour MPs Kim Johnson and Faiza Shaheen [not an MP] on Israeli apartheid (see above), Simons muses: “It is likely that Amnesty International, which has officially endorsed this Soviet Israelophobic agitprop, and supporters like Johnson and Shaheen, have no idea that they are parroting old Kremlin falsifications”. Indeed: only those who are blinded by right-wing Zionist ideology can believe that the conclusions of four highly respected Israeli and international human rights groups are “old Kremlin falsifications”. This claim only demonstrates the bankruptcy and desperation of Israel’s apologists.

Wallis Simons does devote one brief section (pp. 116-124) to addressing the charge of apartheid. In relation to apartheid within Israel itself, he confines himself to pointing to individual Palestinian citizens of Israel (tellingly, he calls them “Arabs”) who have made good: “Six Arabs have been awarded Israel’s highest military decoration, including the legendary Amos Yarkoni…. In May, 2022, Israel appointed its first Arab Muslim judge, Khaled Kabub…. Israel’s national football team has included more Arabs than Jews in its first eleven” (p. 118).  He concedes that “on the West Bank, it is more complicated”, because of checkpoints and the Wall, but insists that this is “justified not by institutionalised racism but security concerns” (ibid.). At no point does he address the issue of (to quote Amnesty again) “the same overarching system… pursuant to the same objective: to privilege Jewish Israelis in distribution of land and resources, and to minimize the Palestinian presence and access to land”.

Not only does he deny that Israel is in any way practising apartheid, but he argues, at several points in the book, that it is the Palestinians who are guilty of apartheid, in objecting to the presence on the West Bank of Israeli Jewish settlers. For example, on pp. 119-120, he writes:

“The ‘settlers’ [tellingly, he always puts settlers and settlements in inverted commas] are not of my politics, and I stand with the mainstream against any land theft or victimization of Palestinians. But it must be conceded that opposing any Jewish presence on the West Bank – with its rich and ancient Jewish history – has more than a whiff of apartheid about it”.

Wallis Simons’s own Demonisations, Weaponisations, and Falsifications are so many that to list them all would be to write another book; so I will confine myself to providing—in addition to all that have become apparent so far – one example of each category.

Demonisation: Wallis Simons castigates Jeremy Corbyn for signing “the book of remembrance for Holocaust Memorial Day in 2017, even though he had supported a motion for it to be renamed ‘Genocide Memorial Day’, had hosted a Holocaust memorial event at which Israel was compared to the Nazis and had called Hamas and Hezbollah, the modern Jew-killers, his ‘friends’. He simply ignores inconvenient facts such as that the comparison was made by a Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer; that Corbyn is on record as telling the JC and Channel 4 that there cannot be peace unless Hamas and Hezbollah are included in peace talks. Nor does Wallis Simons even think it necessary to explain why these accusations are evidence that Corbyn is an antisemite. Wallis Simons continues: “As Baudelaire put it, ‘the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist’” (p. 79).

Weaponisation: In an attempt to exonerate the Israeli army from the charge of being “child-killers”, Wallis Simons exploits centuries of Jewish suffering caused by the blood libel: “For thousands of years, even into the mid-twentieth century, Jews were accused of murdering Gentile children and drinking their blood; is it any wonder that Israelis are smeared as child-killers?” (p. 18). There is no mention here that the Israeli army massacred 350 Gazan children in Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009) and 550 Gazan children in Operation Protective Edge (2014), “operations” to which Wallis Simons never refers at all. To add one more very brief example: Wallis Simons tries to exculpate Israel from the apartheid charge by evoking another antisemitic stereotype: “The greedy Jew has become the Israeli, with his troubling taste for other people’s land” (p. 73).

Falsification: Wallis Simons mentions “Jeremy Corbyn’s infamous remark that British ‘Zionists’ don’t understand ‘English irony’ – one of the most consequential stories I’ve broken as a journalist” (p. 86). Corbyn was certainly not using “Zionists” to mean “Jews”, as Wallis Simons implies (he has a way with inverted commas); Corbyn was not even referring to all British or English Zionists, but to two specific right-wing Zionist individuals who had accused the Palestinian ambassador of antisemitism after he had made a wry joke. Corbyn’s point about the ludicrousness of the situation depended precisely on the Englishness of the two Zionists; it was ironic that they did not understand English irony, whereas the Palestinian ambassador did.[3]

A notable feature of the book is a typically right-wing Zionist antisemitic attitude towards Diaspora Jews.   Wallis Simons takes issue (p. 108) with David Baddiel for adopting Woody Allen as his hero and writing that Israelis are “too macho, too ripped and aggressive and confident … Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all”. Wallis Simons, whose hero is the right-wing Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky (a quote from Jabotinsky forms the first epigraph to Israelophobia)[4], argues that authentic Jewishness lies in the Hebrew Bible, so a “nebbish American intellectual” such as Woody Allen is not really Jewish: “With his kvetching and wisecracking and neuroses, Woody Allen bears little resemblance to the swashbuckling Biblical Hebrews, in their pre-Christian kingdom. King David, the Goliath slayer, would surely have felt greater kinship with Zionists like Jabotinsky” (p. 111).[5] Wallis Simons has completely missed the point of the David and Goliath story, which is about intelligence overcoming physical might. Taken as a whole, the Hebrew Bible’s message is against the glorification of war; it is an antisemitic stereotype to view it – as Wallis Simons does – as a militaristic book.

To conclude: In my view, Israelophobia is anti-Israel, because Israel cannot possibly change unless it faces up to its current apartheid reality.  The best summing up of Israelophobia is provided by Wallis Simons himself. In the Acknowledgements at the back of the book, he thanks his wife and family: “Finally, my extra special thanks go to Roxanna, our children and the wider family for putting up with me working all hours with the myopia of a madman”. “The myopia of a madman”: a succinct and accurate encapsulation of the essence of this book.

Endnotes

[1] Wallis Simons writes on p. 2: “According to Home Office figures, despite comprising just 0.5 per cent of the population, British Jews face nearly a quarter of all hate crimes and are five times more likely to be targeted than other faith groups”. In a footnote he links to a JC piece which shows that it is not “all hate crimes” but all “religious hate crimes” and Muslims endure many more religious hate crimes:

It is true that there are far fewer Jews in the UK than Muslims; but the JC piece also points out that “it is believed, as has previously been the case with other periods of Israeli conflict, that this dramatic increase was due to the flaring of hostilities between Israel and Gaza in May of 2021”. Wallis Simons writes only of Hamas rockets (p. 2), making no mention of the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and provocative assault on the al-Aqsa Mosque that triggered the rockets. Surely the best way to prevent the rise in antisemitism is for Israel to stop attacking Gaza, end the apartheid situation and seek a just peace with the Palestinians.

[2] “The New Antisemitism” is the term given to the concept that Israel has become “the Jew among the nations”, inheriting the role of persecuted scapegoat that was the fate of the Jewish people in past centuries in Christian Europe. For illuminating critiques of the “New Antisemitism”, see Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (New York, 2008), and Antony Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the ‘Collective Jew’ (London, 2022).

[3] See Antony Lerman, op. cit., pp. 43-44 on the “English irony” row. Lerman dismisses the charge of antisemitism in relation to Corbyn’s comments, adding that “throughout his parliamentary political career he has stood in solidarity with Jews when they have been under attack and also used his role and influence as an MP to assist the strictly orthodox Jewish communities living in his constituency” (p. 44).

[4] Wallis Simons’s evident admiration for Jabotinsky is one of the book’s many giveaways (despite Wallis Simons’s claim to be “liberal”). The first epigraph begins: “We are a people as all other peoples. We do not have any intentions to be better than the rest”. Walllis Simons claims Jabotinsky is closer to the Hebrew Bible than is Woody  Allen; but Jabotinsky’s words go entirely against the message of the Hebrew Bible: “Ye shall be unto me a nation of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19: 6). Wallis Simons writes: “For more than a thousand years, the Christian gaze has cast Jews as both the Chosen People and the ‘synagogue of Satan’” (p. 17). But the Hebrew Bible casts Jews as the Chosen People, required by God to set a higher moral standard. The book’s second epigraph is from Howard Jacobson, saying that “we weep” because Israel has not fulfilled hopes and expectations: “The grander the vanished dream, the more copious our tears should be. And to those who will not weep, who would rather march, protest and boycott, I say: You are among those who wanted to see the dream blighted in the first place”. It appears Jacobson has no tears to spare for the Palestinians and would rather weep for Israel than take action to end its apartheid reality.

[5] Wallis Simons (despite his exploitation of the Holocaust) even seems to disparage Holocaust victims, in words that recall the right-wing antisemitic Zionist “trope” that the Holocaust victims “went like sheep to the slaughter”: “The old antisemitism was a known quantity…. It was Fagin and The Merchant of Venice. In particular, it was dead Jews: the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms of eastern Europe and the Holocaust. Israel, however, is another matter. It does not conform to our familiar mental image of Jews queuing for the gas chambers. It fights back. Its fighter jets swoop regularly over Auschwitz, piloted by the children of Holocaust survivors. Its citizens are physically strong, patriotic and assertive, a long way from self-hating Woody Allen stereotypes” (p. 6).