The appointment of Martin Bright as political editor of the Jewish Chronicle is a remarkable event, for Bright is the first Gentile ever to have been employed in this capacity by the 170-year-old British weekly.
In his former guise as political editor of the New Statesman, Bright often seemed like a neoconservative cuckoo in the leftist magazine’s nest. Accusing the British left of acquiescing in “Islamic fascism”, he was conspicuously partisan toward Israel. That he has now joined a staunchly pro-Israel publication underlines how furiously polarized political positions in Britain, as elsewhere, have grown over Islam and the Middle East conflict. The blunt question posed by ex-US President George W. Bush haunts contemporary debate: “Whose side are you on?”
If Bright is on the side of Israel, it is because he believes that the Jewish state stands for democracy and human rights in the face of what people of his thinking view as the totalitarian menace of Islamism. He is far from alone among Gentiles in this. The truculent right-wing pundit, Julie Burchill, positively flaunts her philo-Semitism, regretting that she herself is not Jewish and insisting that, while Israel epitomizes the highest human values, Islam is inherently intolerant and fanatical.
Behind Burchill’s posture, if not behind Bright’s, there may be calculated provocation, an impulse to taunt those in Britain who sympathize with the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict and regard Israel as a rogue state. Yet the signs are that for elements of the British right, including the far right, being on Israel’s side is coming to be seen as a demonstration not just of support for Zionism but for immemorial British, not to say, English, freedoms.
In an extraordinary development, the Israeli flag was on display with the flag of St. George at a recent Birmingham demonstration by the “English Defense League” against “Islamic extremism”. It has become commonplace to witness members of the far right brandishing not the Union Jack, the symbol of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but the flag of St. George, the symbol of England. The juxtaposition at a fascist rally of the cross of St. George and the star of David suggests that in the minds of not a few of its exponents English nationalism partakes of a common cause with Zionism.
It seems barely credible that the far right, long identified with implacable anti-Semitism, is expressing solidarity with Zionism. The crude motive may be to bait Muslims. Yet English nationalism and Zionism have deep affinities. In the 17th century, the Old Testament, the biblical text that underwrites Judaism and the Jewish state, inspired the English puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell and his followers to believe that the English people were the new Israelites, God’s chosen race. In a period when the English no longer seem sure who they are, with many blaming immigration and Britain’s absorption into the European Union for ruining their country, it is perhaps not surprising that some are turning to the past and rekindling the atavistic faith that, despite their latter-day adversities, they are a special people with a providential destiny — like the Jews of old.
That Islam is seen by English nationalists and Zionists alike as an alien creed is not in doubt. And if this perception is nursed by thugs of the far right, it also informs the thinking of some of the loftier intellectual echelons of British society. Now in its second year of publication, the politico-cultural monthly magazine, Standpoint, brims with the English nationalist spirit of John Bull and Zionist fervor in roughly equal measure. By the same token, it exudes Islamophobia, with contributors who excoriate Islam as the enemy of Western values, bent not least on the degradation of women. In the September issue, Clive James, along with Nick Cohen, fulminates against the oppression of women under Islam, dwelling on honor killings and deploring the indifference to them of Western public opinion in general and Western feminists in particular.
James’ stance is that of a fearless plain speaker with a horror of man’s inhumanity to man, not to mention woman. Yet his moral outrage can seem curiously selective. Unsparing in his denunciation of cruelty to Muslim women, he has on the other hand nothing to say about Israel’s savage invasion of Gaza, or the extreme privations that, because of Israel’s crippling blockade, are the daily lot of its inhabitants.
It is hard to escape the suspicion that, for all his chivalry, this eloquent litterateur regards Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories as being at worst regrettable — something for which the Jewish state cannot in all conscience be held responsible. Indeed, you could be forgiven for wondering if Israel’s delinquencies figure in James’ scale of infamy at all. Like Martin Bright, he has taken sides.
Reviling Islam while vindicating Israel is central to Standpoint’s raison d’etre. In the same issue, Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, speaks of the need to “win the argument” when it comes to Israel, and the venerable Jewish publisher, George Weidenfeld, discloses that he is sponsoring no fewer than six new academic chairs in British universities to champion Israel’s cause. If these Jewish dignitaries fear that the “argument” in question is being lost, it is with good reason. For thanks to its own monstrous military excesses, great numbers of Britons have decided that Israel has irretrievably compromised its moral credentials. The abundant evidence of Israeli crimes against humanity contained in the UN’s Gaza report — about which the British government has cynically declined to comment — can only have entrenched this widespread conviction.
Yet the current upsurge of English nationalism, with its rabid demonization of Islam, may be furnishing British Zionists with a propagandist lifeline. At a time of pervasive economic insecurity and rising panic, they could yet reap much political advantage from the proposition that the people of England and the people of Israel are tribal cousins with a common foe and a shared destiny.
