Presenting her contribution to the Labour antisemitism controversy as an unpleasant obligation reluctantly fulfilled, Spectator columnist Tanya Gold delivers one of the more muddled opinions on the subject in the Telegraph.
Gold declares that ‘the intensity of the loathing for Israel – the Jewish state – in parts of the far Left is curious.’ Any serious reflection on the subject would lead to the conclusion that it is one of the least curious phenomena in the post-colonial era to – in her emotive language – ‘loathe’ a state that exists because of large-scale, ongoing ethnic cleansing and racial discrimination. It’s what the far Left does, when not cowed by false accusations of racism.
Gold has reduced a righteous anger at the total impunity Israel enjoys for its serial atrocities to an irrational and very personal emotional response to something disgusting.
She then asks a facile question: ‘Where is the similar loathing for hosts of countries who observe no human rights whatsoever, including Israel’s Arab neighbours?’ Her failure to acknowledge the relevance of successive British governments’ consistent and unequivocal condemnation of Israel’s neighbours – backed up by sanctions – is comprehensible only if one accepts her premise that this is about personal hatred, not outrage at impunity. Gold confuses her growing feelings of resentment at outrage on the Left, with a legitimate grievance. Again, this is understandable given she gets the power asymmetry the wrong way round: she thinks she is backing Israel the victim, not the aggressor.
UPDATE: Tanya Gold now claims that the ‘first defensive war’ (see below) was the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias committed war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes, and during which at least 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from their homes by numerically superior Israeli forces – half before any Arab armies joined the war.
Gold tells the reader she was born in 1973, ‘the year of Israel’s second defensive war,’ betraying her wilful ignorance of Israel’s 1967 war of conquest. Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev set the record straight in 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. Based on exhaustive research of Israeli archival records, diaries, interviews, letters, and minutes of cabinet meetings, Segev disproved the standard myths justifying the war – that Egypt provoked the war and that Israel’s existence was in jeopardy.
As Hadas Thier wrote in her detailed book review,
‘The IDF came up with a number of plans to expand Israel’s borders. Some, like the one code-named Whip, were to occupy West Jerusalem and the West Bank in one go; other, more surreptitious plans involved quietly farming Jordanian land, “acre by acre.” “We thought of the [1949] cease-fire lines as a temporary arrangement,” military leader Moshe Dayan would later explain. But Israel’s primary strategy in the lead-up to the 1967 war was to escalate border conflicts to provoke increased hostilities.
‘[…] Towns throughout Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank were attacked and looted. Refugee camps in Jericho were bombed to inspire fear and encourage Palestinians to flee. Hundreds of homes in Kalkilya were demolished. More than 200,000 Palestinians in all were made refugees, according to Israeli estimates. For the many more Palestinian refugees who stayed in the newly occupied territories, Israelis offered an “enlightened occupation.” But this was far from the case. Segev writes’:
The military and civilian presence in the territories rapidly mutated into an endless labyrinth of headquarters, commands, branches, departments, units, wings, bureaus, authorities, administrations, and outposts—a giant warren of countless officers, soldiers, and civil servants. Their work consisted almost entirely of inventing more and more reasons to interfere in the residents’ daily lives.
Throughout her opinion piece, Gold cites several indisputable and despicable examples of antisemitic abuse directed towards her and her family, but deliberately muddies the water by taking equal – if not greater – offence at the opinion held by many that Israel is an ‘illegitimate state,’ adding sarcastically that she ‘would love to know if Jeremy Corbyn believes, like Naz Shah, that Israel should not exist.’
Gold is not alone in interpreting the satirical Facebook meme shared on 5 August 2014 as a detailed plan for the transportation of Jews. As Finkelstein – who posted the same map on his website a day earlier – has written on what he refers to as the ‘light-hearted, innocuous cartoon making a little joke about how Israel is in thrall to the U.S., or vice versa,’
Shah’s posting of that image has been presented as an endorsement by her of a ‘chilling “transportation” policy’, while John Mann MP has compared her to Eichmann. Frankly, I find that obscene.
It is not at all self-evident that Shah thinks Israel ‘should not exist,’ but saying Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state is not anti-Semitic, as Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz have argued,
This is obviously a battle ground; and we have a clear position: We think it is legitimate and not anti-Semitic for critics to make such an argument. Given the principle of separation of church and state, such an argument has a long pedigree in modern political philosophy. Moreover, Israel’s history shows that creating and maintaining a “Jewish state” has entailed ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on a regular basis, including in East Jerusalem and broad portions of the West Bank to this day, in order to maintain a Jewish majority in certain areas. In practice, the Jewish State in Israel/Palestine has meant an ethnocracy where Jews are given special and exclusive rights over other citizens and non-citizens under the sovereignty of the Israeli government. This is a system that we (Horowitz and Weiss) reject for political, personal and moral reasons that are in no way connected to vilifying or discriminating against Jews, the traditional definition of anti-Semitism.
Gold describes herself thus: ‘I am a lucky Jew […] my grand-mother may have spoken Yiddish as a first language, but I went to Oxford University. I’m not a real Jew. Go and talk to the Ultra-Orthodox in Stamford Hill.’
Given her confessed reluctance to enter the debate, and the fundamentally flawed nature of her contribution, Tanya Gold might have done better to follow her initial impulse ‘to pull the duvet over’ her head.
