Sir: Richard West's diatribe against Israel and his selective rendition
of Anglo-Jewish history (23 October) cry out for a detailed reply. Alas, his inaccuracies, half-truths and sheer distortion would make any point- for-point response intolerably long and tedious.
I shall restrict myself instead to correc- ting one or two of his more glaring lapses. Thus, he describes King John as 'often wrongly portrayed as antisemitic', when that tyrant plucked out the eyes of Jews who couldn't gratify his insatiable appetite for gold and set off an exodus of Jews from England that caused one contemporary observer to refer to the mass emigration as an 'expulsion of Jews from the kingdom'. Elsewhere he writes that 'Ernest Bevin was damned as an antisemite because he made a case for the Palestinian Arabs'. What nonsense! Bevin earned his reputa- tion for antisemitism by his flagrant public utterances abusing Jews: not the least of which was his notorious reference to those Jews still in camps at the end of World War 11, who were seeking Britain's help in emigrating to Palestine, as 'queue jumpers'. And it was not Mr Begin but the scholarly and tolerant Dr Chaim Weizmann who expressed disgust at Bevin's gutter- type antisemitism. West's repeated comparisons of Jews with Nazis do little to sustain his argument that there has been no significant anti- semitism in this country. And his resurrec- tion of events that took place in Palestine in the dying days of the Mandate, when in sheer desperation Jews responded in kind to a brutal occupation, can have no effect other than to exacerbate existing animosities. Nobody asked West 'to feel any guilt for what the Nazis did to the Jews' and it is perfectly true that 'many English people did give help to the Jews', but it is equally true that successive British governments fell over backwards to appease the Arabs. You can't very well blame Jews for feeling let down when the doors to the Jewish homeland were slammed shut by a government whose only justification for being there was their solemn undertaking to facilitate Jewish im- migration. I have a sneaking impression that West's bark is worse than his bite. Surely he should appreciate that Britain and Israel have much need for each other. The kind of in- fighting exemplified in his article only benefits those malevolent forces on the ex- treme Left and Right who would destroy our democratic way of life.
Dr Jacob Gewirtz
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, Woburn House, Upper Woburn Place, London WC1
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