Conflicting visions of Gaza

With the clock ticking down inexorably, it’s sorely tempting to begin posting this year with a comment on Bush’s final limp from office, or perhaps a bit of speculation about presidential pardons (and a comparison to Clinton’s last, lowest moment in office). Or an attempt to take stock of the past eight years and draw some general conclusions. Equally, it might make sense to say something about the continuing travails of the global economy or the nonsense that is Burris-gate. But in truth these'll have to wait. In this New Year it’s very hard to avert one’s eyes once more from further pain and suffering in the Middle East. A friend of mine is a reservist in the IDF – I can’t say I agree with his politics, but it was difficult to watch his obviously conflicted emotions as he was called up and, on New Year’s Eve, no less, preparing to pack and go off to war: an experience that most of the rest of us have no experience of, certainly not me.

I don’t presume to have much to say on the events in Gaza, in fact I think my only qualification is a reluctance to jump into judgement on the matter. I’m about as informed as most of us who pontificate at length on the issue: which is to say, not that much. But I have been struck by one thing in the past week or so that might be of note, something which was perhaps brought into relief coincidentally by reading Philip Roth’s excellent book, The Counterlife, over Christmas (in which he imagines a series of different experiences of being Jewish, in America, in Europe and in Israel, and meditates on their implications). And that thing is quite how dramatic the difference is in the terms of debate between the United States and Europe on this issue.

Last week Jon Stewart received a lot of attention, and no small amount of praise by posing the question on The Daily Show of whether it was possible to criticise Israeli policy in Gaza without being accused of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Barack Obama returned to AIPAC and told them that he empathised with their need for homeland and security, trying to make it clear, without saying it in so many words, that he was not about to condemn their actions in Gaza (as much as I suspect that an Obama administration would have firmly prohibited this invasion). A trenchant, ritualistic coidentification with Israel as the only truly democratic state in the Middle East seems the default position in the US, with critiques like Stewart's operating in response to this mainstream. Not that I'm saying there aren’t lots of critics of Israeli policy in the States, or a growing number of them, just that the norm, the centre of debate, is a default defence of Israel, and that’s the point of divergence amongst people of differing political views.

The difference, at least in my experience, in Europe is striking. News reports focus on the deaths caused by Israeli bombing, cover the anti-Israel marches in London (without giving attention to similar, pro-Israel marches), and tend to be more nuanced and subtle in their assessment of the conflicts within Palestinian communities (Hamas, Fatah, etc.) than toward the many different Israeli groups (or, indeed, between the diaspora and Israeli Jews). Amongst left-wingers over here, the default assumption is a blanket condemnation of Israel as an illegitimate, stolen state; comparisons between Israeli policy and the Holocaust, or the Warsaw Ghetto are made surprisingly often; and people are fiercely critical of the idea of the Holocaust operating as a foundational myth for the Israeli state (as if the Magna Carta or the American Revolution is somehow a more legitimate basis). Again, this is not to say that there aren’t wide divergences in attitude (in truth, I think support for Israel has probably grown in proportion to a growing hostility to Islam in the past twenty years; and the government in the UK continues to pursue a careful middle road on the issue); the point is that the default position for debate, from which discussion emerges, is one that is suspicious of, and hostile to, Israel.

I never used to have much time for the argument that this was about anti-Semitism in Europe. But in this latest event, even though what’s happening in Gaza is horrendous, I’m beginning to be not so sure. The attacks on Israel from the European left seem to be couched in such black and white, absolutist, terms that it’s very hard not to think that at least part of it comes from prejudice rather than politics, and therefore that at least part of it is a troublesome, deeply hidden and darkly civilized form of inherited anti-Semitism which is bound up with and masquerades as straightforward left-wing politics, and denies itself (prejudice being perfectly compatible with self-delusion and a rhetorical commitment to the Enlightenment).

So it seems to me that the question Jon Stewart raised – can one criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic? – is really a profound one, because it has quite different meanings in Europe and America because of these very different political contexts. (Perhaps the only option is to organize a massive exchange programme, where the best instincts of Americans can be brought to bear in Europe, and vice versa!) In the interim, people will continue to die in Gaza, and a solution – an understanding, even – to this terribly complex and depression environment of hatred, remains far away.

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