LETTERS The other anti-Semitism
From Mr William Dalrymple Sir: Anthony Julius (England's gifts to Jew hatred', 11 November) suggests that news- paper criticism of Israel's murderous poli- cies in the occupied West Bank is the result of a deeply engrained British anti- Semitism. He gives as an example of this the miscaptioning of a picture of an Israeli soldier standing over the bloody body of an Israeli teenager, and comments that 'this conforms with an anti-Semitic conception of the Jew as the villain of the piece'.
What Julius conveniently forgets is that there is a huge seam of anti-Semitic litera- ture which stereotypes and villainises anoth- er Semitic race, the Arabs. Throughout European literature, from The Song of Roland to Chesterton's 'Lepanto', Arabs are portrayed as irredeemably vicious, blood- thirsty, corrupt and treacherous — stereo- types to which Israeli writers have greatly contributed. Moreover, while anti-Jewish writing is today more or less confined to a few neo-Nazi hate rags, straightforwardly racist depictions of the Arabs are still widespread and relatively acceptable: in the past few weeks we have had American con- gressional candidates calling the Palestinians `lower than pond scum'; a senior Israeli rabbi calling them 'snakes and scorpions'; and the wife of your own proprietor compar- ing them to 'animals' in the Daily Telegraph.
As for the miscaptioned picture, has it occurred to Mr Julius that there might be other, more obvious, reasons why picture editors the world over assumed that the boy's bloodied body was a Palestinian? Might it possibly have something to do with the fact that since the beginning of October Israeli soldiers have indeed stood over 60 such teenage Palestinian corpses; that they have, in addition, shot down 160 Palestinian adults, 95 per cent of them unarmed civilians; that Israel has indis- criminately used helicopter gunships, mis- siles and tanks on Palestinian villages; and that it continues to suppress Palestinian dissent by tactics so brutal that Amnesty International has declared that some Israeli commanders may be open to prose- cution by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague?
Such Israeli brutality and ruthlessness is not some English anti-Semitic fantasy, resulting from an overdose of Dickens and Shakespeare: it is the horrible and murder- ous reality, however difficult and unpleas- ant it may be for Mr Julius to accept it. The disproportionate response of the Israeli army to stone-throwing demonstrators is, quite rightly and legitimately, a cause for extreme concern to Jew and Gentile alike, as a quick glimpse in the letter columns of Ha'aretz and the Jewish Chronicle would demonstrate. Moreover, these actions come as the latest chapter in a long history of Israeli complicity in the mass-murder of Palestinian civilians that includes such mas- sacres as Deir Yassin, Qana, Sabra and Chatila, and Israel's original sin: the brutal ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
After 33 years, Israel continues to ignore more than 50 United Nations Security Council resolutions instructing it to vacate the occupied Arab West Bank, and disre- gards both international law and the Gene- va Convention by colonising that land with more than 200,000 illegal settlers. Only two countries in the world — Micronesia and El Salvador — accept Israel's military occupa- tion of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Everyone else — including Britain and the USA — are agreed that Israeli occupation is illegal and that one way or another Israel must get out, in line with UN Resolution 242.
Anti-Semitism — directed at any and all Semitic peoples — must always be vigor- ously condemned. But, by insinuating that those who criticise Israel are actually secret anti-Semites, Julius is effectively trying to suppress and muzzle justified criticism of a thoroughly brutal occupation. In doing so, he makes himself complicit in the contin- ued enslavement of the Palestinian people, the ongoing seizure of their land, and the systematic abuse of their human rights.
William Dalrymple
Old Chiswick, London W4
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