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Christian theology and the new antisemitism
Not evil? What have the Jews done to provoke such an astonishing suggestion? Aren’t they actually the victims of evil? Aren’t the Jews in Israel the objects of a relentless bombardment of terror? Haven’t they suffered casualties equivalent in Britain to more than 7,000 dead and many thousands more injured since the current Intifada began in November 2000? But Israel’s struggle against the Arabs has unleashed an apparently unstoppable torrent of lies, distortions, libels, abandonment of objectivity and the substitution of malice and hatred for truth, all of which pours relentlessly out of the British and European media and establishment. And this morphs seamlessly into a public animosity against ‘the Jews’. There are many who deny that antisemitism is resurgent in Britain. They dismiss such a view on the basis that ‘the Jews always stick together’ and that they ‘never criticize Israel’: claims that are demonstrably untrue and themselves examples of prejudice. Any public hostility, they say, is directed not at Jews but at Israel, and is only to be expected since Israel has behaved so badly towards the Palestinians. If Jews are being attacked, it is all Israel’s fault. To be anti-Zionist is not the same as being anti-Jewish. Those Jews claiming antisemitism, they aver, are simply trying to divert attention from Israel’s many crimes. To make matters still more complicated, some British and Israeli Jews say exactly the same thing. So where does the truth lie?
Of course, it is perfectly proper to criticize Israel’s behaviour. I myself am deeply critical of the creation of the settlements, the appalling and indefensible attitudes and behaviour of some of the settlers, the excessive behaviour of some Israeli soldiers, and the ‘Greater Israel’ philosophy of the ruling Likud party. Other Jews are even more critical. Yet we are repeatedly told that we all ‘stick together’ and ‘never criticize Israel’. What we are seeing here, however, is not legitimate criticism or disagreement. We are witnessing something quite different, and wholly malevolent. Israel’s history is routinely denied or ignored, so that the defence against attack that it has been forced to mount since its inception is falsely represented as aggression. Double standards are applied so that Israel is damned for its behaviour while silence is maintained over countries doing far worse. Impossible expectations are made of Israel that are applied to no other country in such circumstances. It is the target of systematic and egregious lies and smears. It is presented in the worst possible light by people who display an eagerness to believe that all its actions are malign, even when the facts clearly refute such assumptions. There is a refusal to report the genocidal nature and intensity of the attacks being perpetrated against Israel. Instead, Israel’s attempt to defend itself and stop the terror is represented as a desire for vengeance or punishment—tapping into the ancient prejudice that the Jews are motivated by the doctrine of ‘an eye for an eye’—or sheer malice against the Palestinians. Israel’s behaviour is equated—obscenely—with Nazi Germany or South Africa under apartheid, comparisons grotesquely at variance with the demonstrable facts. And, increasingly, people are saying that Israel should not exist at all, thus denying to the Jewish people alone the right of self-determination. When Israelis are terrorized by mass murder, outrage in Britain is muted on the grounds that ‘they had it coming’. Instead, more sympathy is expressed for the so-called ‘suicide bombers’ who have perpetrated the carnage, on the grounds that they are in ‘despair’ because of the way Israel has treated them. The gross imbalance and unfairness of these views can only be explained by antisemitic prejudice. Indeed, these attacks go far beyond the issue of Israel. Jews in general have become the target. Synagogues and Jewish cemeteries are being vandalized, and Jews are being abused in the street. Jewish students who support Israel are running a gauntlet of intimidation. These attacks rise in volume in direct relation to the adverse comment about Israel in the press. The torrent of Nazi-style, genocidal antisemitism pouring out of the Arab world is not only barely remarked upon by British public figures, but some of its tropes now emerge in the mainstream media with no adverse comment. Claims are being made about the Jews controlling the United States or the media that would have been inconceivable in British public life even as recently as five or ten years ago. We are witnessing a wholesale moral inversion, in which the very worst is automatically believed of people who normally tell the truth, while false claims made by those who have told demonstrable lies are reported as proven fact; in which victims are treated as victimizers, and vice versa; in which respectable English people say openly that they support mass murder of Jews by Palestinians because they are ‘fighting for their freedom’; in which hatred directed at Israel’s Jews is being translated into an equivalent hatred towards Jews in Britain and the United States; and in which attitudes and images demonizing Jews that were once shunned as beyond the pale have now become respectable. Indeed, this moral inversion has become the norm among the liberal intelligentsia, feeding political circles, the media and other branches of the establishment. In this essay, however, I am looking in particular at the way this has affected the Christian churches and the role they are playing in promoting the new antisemitism.
One might expect Christians to be in the forefront of the defence of the Jewish people against both physical attack and the campaign of lies and smears being mounted against them. And, indeed, some of Israel’s most stalwart defenders are evangelical Christian Zionists, who passionately support it as the fulfilment of God’s biblical promise to the Jews. Yet, at the same time, some of the most virulent and disproportionate attacks on Israel are made by Christian aid agencies, clerics and church newspapers. Clerics and lay people alike say openly that Israel should never have been founded at all. I learned that in Wales, a Christian GP told co-religionists that ‘the Jews are a most inhuman race and are killing babies’. In the Guardian, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, having compared Israel to South Africa under apartheid (despite the fact that Arabs are members of the Knesset and Israel’s Supreme Court), claimed that people were scared to say the Jewish lobby in the United States was very powerful. ‘So what?’ he asked. ‘The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust’.[1] I never thought I would see brazenly printed in a reputable British newspaper not only a repetition of the lie of Jewish power but the comparison of that power with Hitler, Stalin and other tyrants. I never thought I would see such a thing issuing from a Christian archbishop. How can Christians be gripped by such a travesty of moral reasoning? How can Christians maintain a virtual silence about the persecution of their fellow worshippers by Muslims across the world, while denouncing the Israelis who are in the front line against precisely this terror?
It was rooted instead in ‘replacement theology’. This doctrine, which dates from the early church fathers and was suppressed after the Holocaust, has now been given a new lease of life under the impetus of the Middle East conflict. In essence, replacement theology holds that the Jews have been replaced by the Christians in God’s favour. So all God’s promises to the Jews, including the land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity. To those who have absorbed replacement theology, the Jewish state is illegitimate and Zionism is racism. The churches disliked Israel, said these Christians, because of their theological belief that the Jews were not entitled to the land. The hostility to Israel within the church was rooted in the ancient hatred of the Jews. Church newspaper editors say they are intimidated by such overwhelming hostility to Israel and to the Jews from influential Christian figures that balanced coverage of the Middle East is impossible. ‘Whenever I print anything sympathetic to Israel, I get deluged with complaints that I am Zionist and racist’, explained Colin Blakely, editor of the Church of England Newspaper, in a recent interview with me. Clerics and lay people alike are saying openly that Israel should never have been founded at all. And this antipathy to Israel is indistinguishable from a prejudice inside the church against the Jews, aired in what is often preached from the pulpit and repeated in the pews. One church source said what he was hearing was a ‘throwback to the visceral anti-Judaism of the middle ages’. ‘When I hear “the Jews” used as a term, my blood runs cold—and I’ve been hearing this far too often’, I was told by Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Wales and now the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Andrew White, the canon of Coventry cathedral who came to prominence as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative in the Middle East, has been heavily engaged in trying to promote dialogue and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He told me of attitudes in the church: ‘These go beyond legitimate criticism of Israel into hatred of the Jews. I get hate mail calling me a Jew-lover and saying my work is evil.’ The reason, he said, was that Palestinian Christian revisionism had provoked a revival of replacement theology. ‘This doctrine was key in fanning the flames of the Holocaust, which could not have happened without 2,000 years of anti-Jewish polemic’, he said. After the Holocaust the Vatican officially buried replacement theology, the current Pope affirming the integrity of the Jewish people and recognizing the state of Israel. But according to Canon White, the doctrine is ‘still vibrant’ among both Roman Catholics and Anglicans. ‘Almost all the churches hold to replacement theology’, he said. The catalyst for its re-emergence has been the attempt by Arab Christians to reinterpret scripture in order to delegitimize the Jews’ claim to the land of Israel. This has had a powerful effect on the churches, which, through humanitarian work among the Palestinians by agencies like Christian Aid, have been profoundly influenced by two clerics in particular. The first is the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El-Assal, a Palestinian who is intemperate in his attacks on Israel. ‘We interviewed Bishop Riah after some terrorist outrage in Israel’, said Colin Blakely, ‘and his line was that it was all the fault of the Jews. I was astounded.’ The Bishop also has an astounding interpretation of the Old Testament. He has claimed of Palestinian Christians: ‘We are the true Israel . . . no one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew . . . He is the father of the faithful.’ The second cleric, Father Naim Ateek, is more subtle and highly influential. Although he says he has come to accept Israel’s existence, his brand of radical liberation theology undermines it by attempting to sever the special link between God and the Jews. In the Terence Prittie lecture delivered in 2001, Andrew White observed that Palestinian politics and Christian theology had become inextricably intertwined. The Palestinians were viewed as oppressed and the church had to fight their oppressor. ‘Who is their oppressor? The state of Israel. Who is Israel? The Jews. It is they therefore who must be put under pressure so that the oppressed may one day be set free to enter their “Promised Land” which is being denied to them.’ This view, said Canon Andrew, had now influenced not only whole denominations but the majority of Christian pilgrimage companies and many of the major mission and Christian aid organizations. I have read websites of Christian aid agencies that represent Israel as a malevolent occupying power, with no reference to the fact that some of the refugee camps in which they were working were terror factories manufacturing homicide bombers. One such outfit, said Canon Andrew, had sent every UK bishop a significant document outlining Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and of systematically ‘Judaizing’ Jerusalem. David Ison, the canon of Exeter cathedral, took a party of pilgrims to the Holy Land in 2000 at the start of the current Intifada. They had a Palestinian guide, visited only Christian sites in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and talked to virtually no Jews. ‘The Old Testament is a horrifying picture of genocide committed in God’s name’, he told me. ‘And genocide is now being waged in a long, slow way by Zionists against the Palestinians.’ The Bishop of Guildford, who is consistently hostile to Israel, shares the view that the Jews have no particular claim to the Promised Land. Christianity and Islam, he said, could lay equal claim. And although he said Israel’s existence was a reality that must be accepted, his ideal was very different. A separate Palestinian state would be merely a ‘first step’. ‘Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue, although it’s unlikely this will come about.’ As for the churches’ hostility to Israel, his reply was chilling. ‘The problem is that all the power lies with the Israeli state.’ So, by implication, Israel would only merit sympathy for its casualties if it had no power to defend itself. The Bishop of Guildford, who chairs Christian Aid, said he particularly admired Bishop Riah and Naim Ateek. He also warmly endorsed a parish priest in his diocese: Stephen Sizer, vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water. Mr Sizer is a leading crusader against Christian Zionism. He believes that God’s promises to the Jews have been inherited by Christianity, including the land of Israel. He acknowledges that Israel has the right to exist since it was established by a United Nations resolution. But he also told me it was ‘fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race’, and ‘even worse than south Africa’. He therefore hoped Israel would go the same way as South Africa under apartheid, ‘brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people’. So, despite saying he supported Israel’s existence, he appeared to want the Jewish state to be singled out for a fate afforded to no other democracy properly constituted under international law. But perhaps this was not surprising given his attitude towards Jews. ‘The covenant between Jews and God’, he stated, ‘was conditional on their respect for human rights. The reason they were expelled from the land was that they were more interested in money and power and treated the poor and aliens with contempt.’ Today’s Jews, it appeared, were no better. ‘In the United States, politicians dare not criticize Israel because half the funding for both the Democrats and the Republicans comes from Jewish sources.’ A number of authoritative Christian figures are extremely concerned by the elision between criticism of Israel and dislike of the Jews. Rowan Williams said that, after a website of the Church in Wales attracted inflammatory language about Jews and a meeting in Cardiff about Israel provoked similar anti-Jewish rhetoric, he was forced to introduce some balancing material about the Middle East into his church periodicals. Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, has addressed Christian groups up and down the country on the implications of 11 September. When he suggests there is a problem with aspects of Islam, he provokes uproar. His audiences blame Israel for Muslim anger; they want to abandon the Jewish state as a ‘dead’ part of scripture and support ‘justice’ for the Palestinians instead. ‘What disturbs me at the moment is the very deeply rooted antisemitism latent in Britain and the West’, he said. ‘I simply hadn’t realized how deep within the English psyche is this fear of the power and influence of the Jews.’ Since 11 September, he said, the Palestinian issue has had a major distorting impact on the whole of the Christian world. ‘Those who blame Israel for everything don’t realize that, for Islam, the very existence of Israel is a problem. Even a Palestinian state would not be sufficient. Israel may be behaving illegally in a number of areas, but she is under attack. But white liberal Christians find it deeply offensive not to blame Israel for injustice.’ When I wrote about this for the Spectator,[2] many mainstream Christians went into denial. I had spoken to exceptions on the fringe, they protested, and replacement theology no longer existed. But it is quite clear, not just from what I was told but from what I have read of very influential Christian texts, that a hatred of Israel is being underpinned by a theological analysis that implies, at root, that the Jews must be punished by the loss of their homeland for their refusal to believe in Christ. Over and over again, I was told of the great influence in Britain of the Palestinian canon Naim Ateek. Yet his book, Justice and Only Justice, inverts history, defames the Jews and sanitizes Arab violence.[3] Modern antisemitism gets precisely one paragraph; Zionism is portrayed not as the despairing response that it was to the ineradicable antisemitism of the world, but as an aggressive colonial adventure. Courageous Jews are those who confess to ‘moral suicide’ and who say that Judaism should survive without a state; real antisemitism, says Ateek, is found within the Jewish community in its treatment of the Palestinians. The real sting of this bitter and twisted analysis is in the liberation theology on which it is based. Ateek makes clear that the existence of the Jewish state has thrown the interpretation of scripture into turmoil for Palestinian Christians, for whom this calamity calls into question the integrity of God. So, says Ateek, God is not indissolubly linked with Israel but is instead a universalist. Zionism was a retrogression into the Jews’ primitive past. God’s choice of Israel for the Jews was merely a paradigm for His concern for every land and people. While such a universal blessing does not exclude Jews or Israel, he writes, ‘neither does it justify their invoking an ancient promise—one that betrays a very exclusive and limited knowledge of God in one stage of human development—in order to justify their uprooting an entire people and expropriating their land in the twentieth century. To cling only to the understanding of God in those limited and exclusive passages is to be untrue to the overall biblical heritage.’ Ateek thus uses the Bible to delegitimize the Jewish state by misrepresenting the Jews’ relationship with God. He goes further. Having accused the Jews in Israel of systematically oppressing the Palestinians (with no acknowledgement of the fact that all Jewish conquest from 1948 has been defence against Arab violence against Israel’s existence) he inverts God’s promise to the Jews by saying that God takes the side of the oppressed and ‘can only will and affirm a state that is based on justice’. Not only is this not true, but it is not relevant to Israel’s existence, which was not based on divine revelation but a resolution of the United Nations. There is no other nation in the world whose right to self-determination is deemed to be forfeit through its bad behaviour. There is no nation in the world whose right to self-determination is deemed to be forfeit through someone else’s bad behaviour for which it is then made the scapegoat. I agree that Israel’s behaviour is far from blameless. Yet any fair-minded person would surely conclude that the roots of the conflict lie not in the colonial aggression of the Jews but fact that the Arabs resisted with extreme violence from the outset a Jewish political presence in Palestine, refused to have their own state alongside the Jews and continue to threaten the Jewish state’s very existence. Instead, through tendentious history and the hijacking of scripture, Ateek vilifies the Jews as oppressors and war-makers and tells them, in effect, that their salvation lies in abandoning their state and scattering to the four winds. Although he calls for both Israel and Palestine to recognize each other’s right to exist within secure borders—the dream of most Jews, including myself, and most Israelis—the thrust of his analysis undermines this vision. His call for the repatriation of all Palestinian refugees would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Yet Ateek is claimed by bishop after bishop as a good friend who, they say, is hugely influential throughout the Anglican communion (and, indeed, is apparently a good friend of Desmond Tutu). Ateek is not alone. A revised version of Colin Chapman’s book, Whose Promised Land? was published in 2002.[4] Although Chapman carefully condemns antisemitism and says the Christians have not superseded the Jews, his book is a poisonous travesty that uses theology to delegitimize Israel. Although the Jews are still in a special relationship with God, he says, their only salvation is through Christ when they will be ‘grafted back’ on to their own olive tree. Christians have come to share the Jews’ privileges; through Christ, the division between Jews and Christians broke down and they became as one new man. These ‘new men’ don’t believe it is important to have a Jewish state (hardly surprising, surely, since they are not Jews). To a Jew, such an analysis is profoundly offensive and a direct threat to Jewish integrity. Chapman delegitimizes Israel quite explicitly on theological grounds in his conclusion: When seen in the context of the whole Bible, however, both Old and New Testaments, the promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants does not give anyone a divine right to possess or to live in the land for all time because the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in the Old Testament. . . . Jesus the messiah who lived, died and was raised from death in the land has opened the kingdom of God to people of all races, making all who follow him into one new humanity. This is replacement theology masquerading as a dispassionate analysis of the tragedy of Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, the very premise of the book is bizarre. It investigates the claim to the land based on biblical exegesis. But the Jews’ claim to Israel was not based on the Bible. Certainly, the dream of Zion is integral to Jewish attachment and religious focus. And a minority of Jews believes in the literal truth of prophecy. But that wasn’t why Israel was founded. Zionism was never a religious movement. Israel was established because the world wanted it to be a homeland for the Jews after the Holocaust. This version of replacement theology is based on the premise that the existence of Israel has to be justified. It does not. To single out Israel’s existence in this way is without precedent in the world and is itself evidence of prejudice. Moreover, replacement theology is not just a form of anti-Zionism, but directly attacks Jewish religion, history and identity. Chapman’s history is just as flawed. It grossly downplays, for example, the extent of Arab violence against Jews in the decades of Jewish immigration to Palestine before the state of Israel was created. It doesn’t mention explicitly the Arab pogroms and massacres against the Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. Even Benny Morris, the revisionist Israeli historian whom Chapman quotes extensively, makes clear that all Jewish violence was in response to the savage Arab refusal to have a Jewish political presence on Arab land. Chapman’s conclusion that Zionism was an innate deception and that violence was always implicit is a gross slur, as is the confusion of Jewish self-determination with racism. Not surprisingly, this elides seamlessly into the anti-Jewish trope of Jewish power over the United States, with the repetition of the absurd (but frequent) claim that no US president could win without Jewish votes. Since American Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats, the victory of so many Republican Presidents must remain on this theory a complete mystery. There is no question but that this book will inflame not just anti-Israel but anti-Jewish feeling. Yet this new edition will almost certainly be considered authoritative in church circles.
For a start, the British find it very hard to grasp the reality of murderous ethnic or religious hatred. It is simply beyond their experience or recent history. This imaginative deficit is reinforced by an almost total ignorance of the history of the Middle East, so that the majority of the public are simply unaware of basic facts, such as that a two-state solution was on offer in 1948 and turned down by the Arabs, or that the ‘occupied territories’ were in fact aggressively occupied not by Israel but by Jordan and Egypt. This ignorance is then fuelled by stereotypes of Jewish behaviour deeply embedded in British and western culture: for example, that the Jews are all powerful, that they stick together in a conspiracy of evil and are always bent on vengeance and punishment. These antisemitic stereotypes, the clichés of literary and theological stories and imagery, are implicitly believed by many for whom the very notion of anti-Jewish prejudice would be anathema. Such assumptions predispose people to the systemic belief that the worst can always be expected of the Jews. These innate prejudices, however, lay dormant until the Six Day War in 1967. Until that point, Israel commanded the sympathy of the British because it was demonstrably besieged from all sides by Arab states bent on its destruction. In any fight between David and Goliath, the British tend to sympathize with the underdog. The image of ‘plucky little Israel’, however, faltered with the retention by Israel of the territories seized after that war ended, and then vanished altogether as the succeeding years filled the television screens with image after image of aggressive West Bank settlers. This highly partial but nevertheless powerful visual impression, combined with historical ignorance and latent prejudice, prepared fertile ground for the sophisticated propaganda campaign mounted by the Palestinians to present David as having mutated into a murderous Goliath. And since the British find it hard to conceptualize fanatical religious hatred, they concluded that the only explanation for Palestinian terrorism had to be misery and despair. Indeed, the more savage and inhuman the terrorism became, the more despair and misery the British concluded the Palestinians must be suffering, and the more murderous the Israelis came to appear. With no one drawing attention to the genocidal hatred towards Jews that was spewing out of the Arab world, but with commentator after commentator vilifying instead the ‘Nazi’ Israelis day after day, the British arrived at the extraordinary position of effectively blaming the Israeli victims for their own destruction. This conclusion has turned out to be particularly handy for Europeans and for Christians. One of the motifs of the current anti-Jewish animus is the implicit view that the Jews must never fight back. They must only, it appears, play the part of victims, must always be passive in the face of terror. But Israel’s founding mission was to destroy forever the fatalistic Jewish passivity associated with the Nazi genocide. Formed once again into a country with an army, the Jews would never again be powerless to resist the attempt to annihilate them. Henceforth, if attacked, they would defend themselves. They would fight. Yet, when the Israelis do so, their attempts at self-defence are represented in the West as unwarranted aggression. And this feeds straight into the subterranean but potent resentment that has simmered in Europe for more than fifty years. This is the unfinished business of the Holocaust. Ever since the scale of the Nazi genocide was uncovered, Europe has sought to distance itself from moral responsibility. The only way it could do so was somehow to blame the Jews as architects of their own destruction. This monstrous reasoning was inconceivable while the dominant narrative was of the Jews as victims. Now, however, the Palestinians have handed Europe a rival narrative on a plate. The grotesque misrepresentation of Israeli self-defence as aggression implicitly provides Europeans with the means to blame the destruction of the Jews of Europe on their own misdeeds. If now, why not then? The churches are particularly receptive to this set of messages. They are desperately keen to minimize the role played by Christian antisemitism in furnishing the Nazi ideology for genocide. They are hypersensitive, because these antisemitic tropes may have lain submerged for the past fifty years but were never eradicated. Now, an irresistible opportunity is being offered to conceal these uncomfortable facts altogether from view. It is irresistible because the churches now subscribe to the overall values and world-view of the left. And it is the left that, through its alchemy in transforming anti-Zionism into radical chic, has provided the churches with the means to deny Jewish victimhood. For perhaps the most notable factor about the new antisemitism is that it is generally the left that now openly promulgates the view that Israel should not exist, that it is a Nazi state and that the Jews control the United States. It is the left—through publications such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman and Prospect magazine, among others—that is recycling some of the most notorious antisemitic images and tropes that have in the past been associated with the far right. The significance of this development extends far beyond these publications. For the general world-view of the left has become the orthodoxy throughout the intellectual and political establishment—the BBC, the universities and the churches—and through them has become the received wisdom of the general public.
At a still deeper level, the left’s embrace of postmodernism and victim culture has meant that it now tends to confuse truth and lies, right and wrong. Having signed up to moral relativism by replacing truth with opinion, it promulgates the view that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. The resulting moral equivalence between terror and its response quickly mutates into a moral inversion, in which the ‘suicide’ bomber is a hero while his victims had it coming to them. Given this general way of thinking, it is hardly surprising that the left has taken up the Palestinian cause. For the Palestinians are the embodiment of victim culture, blaming others for their own misfortune and turning victims into aggressors and vice versa. The new antisemitism is a prejudice that might have been exquisitely tailored for a morally upside-down age. It is the association with the left that explains the otherwise baffling phenomenon of Jews and Israelis expressing a number of the views that characterize the new antisemitism. For the real division is not so much between Jews and Gentiles as between the political left and the rest. It is mainly left-wing or secular Jews and Israelis, including many who belong to progressive synagogues, who endorse the demonization of Israel, reverse the roles of victim and victimizer, and sneer that the perception of antisemitism is merely Jewish paranoia. Since they cannot disentangle this antisemitism from the wider world-view to which they subscribe, these left-wing Jews and Israelis deny that such a prejudice exists at all. To admit its existence would start to unravel their whole political philosophy, in which they invest all their own moral capital. So they shut their eyes tight, and dismiss the new antisemitism as culpable Israel worship. They thus reinforce the misapprehensions of those in the Christian churches who view the world through the same ideological prism, and who use left-wing Jews and Israelis to legitimate the poisonous prejudices for which their own Christian theology provides the intellectual bedrock. While these ideological bedfellows display such moral blindness, terrorism will succeed. Refusing to recognize its wellspring in antisemitic hatred, and agreeing instead with the terrorist that his victims are the real monsters, simply paves the way for further atrocities. The new antisemitism is terror’s secret weapon. Notes [1] Desmond Tutu, ‘Apartheid in the Holy Land’, Guardian, 29 April 2002. [2] Melanie Phillips, ‘Why the Jews are always to blame’, Spectator, 20 April 2002. [3] Naim Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1989). [4] Colin Chapman, Whose Promised Land? (Oxford: Lion Publishing 2002). Melanie Phillips is a social commentator whose columns have appeared in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and now the Daily Mail. She is also the author of All Must Have Prizes (Warner), The Sex-Change Society (Social Market Foundation) and The Ascent of Woman (Little Brown). A selection of her writing can be found at www.melaniephillips.com.
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t has come to something
when the Sun newspaper becomes so alarmed at the firestorm of
anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred blazing daily out of the British media
that it feels the need to publish a full-page leading article telling its
readers: ‘The Jewish faith is not an evil religion.’
