ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM SIR,—The Spectator arrives in Cape Town three
weeks after publication date so I hope I am not too late to join in the fight about Zionism and anti- Semitism. I have some sympathy for Ian Gilmour's view—the kind of sympathy one reserves for the aberrations of one's youth. Twenty-six years ago I wrote a hook called The Intelligent Man's Guide to Jew-Baiting (the Intelligent Man and Woman were being bombarded every week in those days with Guides to This and That), i followed it up at the re- quest of Laski, Strachey and Gollancz with The' Jewish Question written for the Left Book Club. In both of these I made most of the points touched on by Gilmour, only more logically for I had a solution to offer.
Like him, I maintained there was no Jewish race— the whole thing was a myth. 'A Jew is a Jew only when others think he is a Jew,' I wrote. Unlike him, however, 1 held that assimilation was no solution. Bernard Shaw had just written somewhere that he thought it was. I asked rhetorically: Did he think that poverty could be solved by the intermarriage of poor and rich? Hitler at that time was little more than a gleam in the Rhine industrialists' eyes but he decided the issue very soon after..Fdr the next decade German Jews who had been assimilating like fun were battering at frontiers and standing in queues for passports to Ecuador and Bolivia.
My solution was simple. Anti-Semitism was a pro- duct of the class war. End the class struggle and away would go the Jewish problem. With what I took to be irrefutable logic I asked my readers to look at the USSR for proof of the correctness of my thesis. Forward, then, to Socialism!
Now, of course. I was a silly Communist then just as Gilmour is a silly Arab propagandist now with each believing his views the product of clear and impartial thinking, There was more excuse for me, perhaps, because after all this is 1960. I had a Com- munist axe to grind. Gilmour grinds an Arab axe. It also happens to be a Russian axe at the moment, which doesn't mean he is a Russian any more than Israel is against Algerian independence because France is the only Western country which supplies her with modern arms.
Having made a blithering idiot of myself once I hesitate to dogmatise now, but somehow I can't see Israelis and Jews everywhere whose backs have been straightened through the creation of a Jewish State and who now know quite certainly that they can hit back as hard as they are hit if the need arises, adopting the Gilmour Plan. I wonder if anyone has noticed that nobody talks abolit the Jewish Problem any more. We may be a Headache. Sure. But, by God, we're nobody's problem.—Yours faithfully, GEORGE SACKS 29 Kensington Crescent, Cape Town
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