Who claims to know what British Jews think of Israel?

On the way to the demo, no, rally, my daughter said, I don't like demos

Nor do I, I said.

Then she said, I don't like rallies either.

Nor do I, I said.

But we went all the same. Along with others from the British Jewish community.

It began to look like it might have been a mistake.

The leaden grey skies opened, and rain and hail began to pour down.

And then I realised that it was going to be held in an open field on the JFS site in suburban Kenton, with no shelter, and no seating.

So it looked as if we were in for a thorough soaking.

But it cleared up quite quickly, and the rest of the afternoon was warm and peaceful.

The crowd of people who turned up looked as if they were much more likely to want to spend their Sunday afternoon in Brent Cross or Starbucks.

I was interested in the age profile. Looked like a higher proportion of middle aged and older people then you'd find in the population of the UK, and certainly, a much higher proportion of us over 60s.

So how many were there?

The organizers said 7,000. The police said 3,000 to 4,000. I wasn't in a position where I could see the whole crowd, but it did fill a very large part of a huge field. So I reckon 4,000 to 5,000.

In proportion to the size of the UK population as a whole, that's like a crowd of around 2,000,000.

So the atmosphere at the rally was just like an afternoon at Brent Cross. There was a lot of waving at people I last saw at the bakers in Temple Fortune, or queueing at the local cinema multiplex, or at one of my daughter's engagement events.

I'm always impressed by demos where there's lots of evidence that people invent their own banners and slogans. This wasn't one of those. There were almost no banners other than the officially handed out one of "Yes to Peace, No to Terror" (which is at least something I wholeheartedly agree with).

But then, how many demos or rallies can you think of that include the singing of "God Save the Queen" (with the words helpfully projected up on the plasma megascreen)?

So, yes, it was very much the face of the official Jewish community, passionately eager to demonstrate that loyalty to Britain comes before the singing of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva, which followed it.

There was of course a counter demo. We are talking Jews here. You know the saying, two Jews, three opinions. Though on this occasion, it seems like it was more like 4,500 Jews one opinion, 9 Jews a very different opinion.

But of course the 4,500 weren't actually of one opinion. As my daughter later remarked, it was a fairly mundane and predictable event in terms of what was said from the platform.

What suprised both of us was what the Chief Rabbi said in his speech. The money quote, as Norm would put it, was this:

Israel is fighting today in Lebanon because six years ago it withdrew from Lebanon."

"Israel is fighting today in Gaza because one year ago it withdrew from Gaza. And Israel discovered the terrible truth spoken by the late Mother Theresa - that no good deed goes unpunished."

The Chief Rabbi is widely regarded as being amongst the more politically liberal-minded of orthodox Jews. That quote makes it look as if he's taken a political stance on the current war which is well to the right of the current Kadima-Labour government, and akin to that of the Likud. It comes very close to saying all the Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory were a mistake.

But then, he has something of a track record in apparently being keen to tell different groups of people what he thinks they want to hear.

My daughter commented, I don't think he's likely to say that on Thought for the Day.

Perhaps we're both wrong. But I don't think he was voicing a widely held opinion amongst the crowd at the rally.

In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, following the Israeli action in Jenin, newspapers like the Independent and the Guardian, and of course the BBC, were proclaiming that the Israeli army had committed a massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Jenin. They uncritically carried the claims of Saab Erekat and other Palestinian mouthpieces that thousands had been murdered and their bodies spirited away or bulldozed beneath the rubble by the Israelis.

It was a time of huge and pretty well universal opproprium against Israel, very widely shared amongst the general British public. The first organised attempt was made to start an academic boycott against Israeli universities and academics, and a number of Jews with prominent academic records were amongst the organizers of the petition for it.

Yet in May of that year, there was an unprecedented demonstration by British Jews in Trafalgar Square in solidarity with Israel, under the same slogan, Yes to Peace, No to terror. The organizers estimated 40,000. Even at the lower estimate, that's well over ten percent of the total population of Jews in the UK.

Just as on Sunday there was a tiny counter demonstration by Jews for Justice for Palestinians and other anti-zionist Jewish groups; it looked like a couple of dozen people at the most. Then there was the larger vocally hostile counter-demonstration, mainly by radical Muslims and Islamists, which featured a handful of members of the tiny fringe Chassidic group, Neturei Karta, standing amongst the chanters of "Bomb, bomb, bomb Tel Aviv."

A comparable demonstration in relation to the whole UK population would require a crowd approaching six million. The largest comparable cross UK political demonstration ever was the over one million who joined in the 1993 Stop the War demonstration.

That demonstration was organized over a period of a month, with buses organised to transport Jewish community members from all over the country.

There's certainly no evidence from this Sunday's demo to suggest that the vast majority of British Jews have radically altered their traditionally supportive stance towards Israel.

Yet last Wednesday's Independent suggested exactly that in this article by Linda Grant.

Perhaps Linda Grant did not choose the title "What British Jews think of Israel". Perhaps  she just intended it as a tour d'horizon of a range of Jewish opinions in the UK in the face of the current conflict between Israel, Hamas, Hizbollah and Lebanon.

Whatever she intended, this article gives a profoundly misleading view of what the vast majority of British Jews think. The article seemed to give the impression that the Jewish community was deeply divided, and perhaps relatively evenly divided in its attitudes, with almost as many being highly critical as supportive.

I presume that she was not responsible for the lead in paragraph which proclaimed:

For Britain's 267,000 Jews, liberal by instinct and socially progressive, Israel represents their greatest hope and, at times, their deepest shame. The nation that was forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust was once regarded as a bold experiment in democracy and collective living.

Elsewhere in the article (now on subscription link), Linda Grant suggests Jews are "naturally" inclined to be socialist. I think it's important to take issue with any statement that Jews are "naturally" anything. That most Jews were socialistically inclined was true for a period of about ninety years, from the 1880s to the 1970s. But there's no shortage of demographic and political science research which demonstrates that for the last thirty years, British Jews, like most of their fellow Jews across the world, have tended to vote for conservative parties, or at least to endorse the most conservative elements in left wing political groupings, as in the US. And historically, Jewish communities supported the communal leaders who favoured behind the scenes negotiations with the powerful. This was the traditional Jewish approach of Shtadlanut.

Whatever their present political leanings, the number of Jews in Britain who think Israel represents Jews' deepest shame is about proportionately as great as the ratio of the 9 Jews of yesterday's Jews for Justice for Palestinians demo to the 4,500 who were in the crowd at the rally.

There is of course no shortage of  British newspapers, such as the Independent and the Guardian who think Israel represents Jews' greatest shame. And the BBC in particular is going hammer and tongs at trying to suggest that Israel is committing war crimes. That was the leitmotif of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, with Human Rights Watch being given prominent opportunities to explain that they are currently engaged in looking for evidence of Israeli war crimes.

It's that context, I think, which pulls exceptional numbers of British Jews away from Brent Cross and other preferable pursuits, to go to a rally in solidarity with Israel. For the overwhelming majority of them, it's the only gesture of political activism they're likely to make.

Comments

[Stephen]

There was a big argument during the kiddush at my shul on Shabbos about the demo. Some were very strongly of the view that to "hide in a corner", demonstrating effectively only to fellow Jews, was pointless, and that another Trafalgar Square was the only proper response. Others felt the point was to come together as Jews before Hashem. I wasn't very convinced by this.

What you report of the Chief Rabbi is very interesting: I remember being surprised by his very moving support for Israel at Trafalgar Square, but as you say, he's not usually very consistent, and "uncompromising" is not a word that springs to mind when describing him.

Regarding the comment that may or may not be attributed to Linda Grant: I don't know whether anyone outside the Left mourns the loss of the "collective living" experiment, but last I looked the "democracy" aspect was doing pretty well, in marked contrast with every one of Israel's neighbours. Almost alone among her sisters in neighbouring countries, the Arab Israeli woman has the vote.

[Delbarre]

Les Katyoucha (bombe de fragmentation) avec des balles en aciers

[URL=http://imageshack.us][img]http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/6474/akatyushashrapnel04ze6.jpg[/img][/URL]

[URL=http://imageshack.us][img]http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/9365/akatyushashrapnel03gh7.jpg[/img][/URL]

ET bien sur que des armes pareils sont très légitimes quand ils sont utilisés par les musulmans du Hezbollah
[img]http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/pictures/KatyushaShrapnel01.jpg[/img]
[url]http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21730_Hizballahs_Terror_Weapons&only[/url]

mais de cela nos médias Eurabétisés ne vont pas en parler

[Jerusalem Posts]

It was a great rally and many thanks to LGF member Nordish who was taking the photos for Little Green Footballs.

More photos here

[Jerusalem Posts]

Why we, as Jews, sing "God Save The Queen".

The Persian king (2500 years back when Iran still was what Iran still could have been before the mad Mullahs took over) asked the Jews to pray for him in exchange for being allowed back into the land of Israel (which was then part of the Persian empire). The elders decided that while praying TO a man is wrong, praying FOR a man is acceptable and, as a ritualised display of allegiance, to be promoted.

Since then Jews pray for the country they live in and for the protection of the head of state/government of the country.

In the UK at all Jewish weddings and barmitzvah parties, God Save the Queen is always played at some point.

[Ben-David]

I don't know very much about Rabbi Sacks' style or views, but the past 3 weeks have caused many ostensibly liberal Israelis to shift their views. We've had a string of opinion pieces with titles like "death of a worldview" that pretty much sum up the score as Rabbi Sacks did, and drawn the obvious conclusions: there is no one to talk to, unilateral withdrawals have deleterious effect, and the liberal dream-policies that started with Oslo's dream of the New Middle East, and ended with Israelis battening down behind Sharon's partition fence, have completed their trajectory of failure.

Nothing like the facts to change most people's minds.

[Silverbrow]

I find it a shame that the rally had to be held in a school playing fields in suburban London. And it was only scheduled to last for an hour - I didn't attend so I don't know if it ran on.

I think it would have been good to have got greater publicity by doing a big Trafalgar Sq type event. Increasingly, Trafalgar Sq is becoming home of the irrational march, it would be good to reclaim it.

[Linda Grant]

The Independent piece was commissioned at the end of May. The brief was to survey the range of opinion inside the Jewish community, not to give expression to what I might guess was the majority persective. All but one of the interviews were conducted before the Lebanon war started and around half before the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit. On three separate occasions the article deals with the view that the overwhelming majority of Jews support Israel's right to exist.

[Jerusalem Posts]

resistor, look at the following photos and then see who the child killers are.

Children as human shields 1
Children as human shields 2
Children as human shields 3
Children and bombs shouldn't play together

[Judy]

Linda, the issue for what the Jewish community thinks is not about whether it supports Israel's right to exist.

Seeing that as a basic issue which needs to be discussed is a mark of the extent to which the left in the UK has taken on a radically anti-zionist stance. What other countries are having their right to exist questioned?

My point is that the demonstrations indicate is a huge majority of UK Jews who do not merely support the right of Israel to exist. They are actively supportive of the state of Israel, including at times of war/conflict such as 2002 and now, and hostile to the stance taken by Jews for Justice for Palestinians and similar groupuscules.

If the article had been billed as about the range of Jewish views to be found, it would have been entirely uncontroversial. But whether it was the writing, the editing or the editorial spin lent by the headlining and the lead in paragraph, it did seem to give what I believe was a highly misleading impression.

[linda Grant]

Journalists never write headlines, intros, cross-heads or photo captions. We supply the copy, that's it and have no control over how the piece is presented. I did, however, ask to see the artwork so as to avoid a repeition of the Independent's previous efforts.

You are quite right when you say that - 'Seeing [Israel's right to exist] as a basic issue which needs to be discussed is a mark of the extent to which the left in the UK has taken on a radically anti-zionist stance.' That's why it has to be dealt with. It's not going away.

That people are comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto (entirely fallaciously in my view) is another thing that Jews in this country should become aware of.

[Judy]

Just today treppenwitz has a timely post reviewing his rules for commenters, and promising to delete any which cross the line. I haven't published a list of rules-- the pleasure of having a blog is that I can make them up as I go along-- but I share the same sort of approach as treppenwitz and Lisa.

So I've deleted two comments on this thread. One labelled the Israeli Forces as (by implication, intentional) "child-killers", and suggested the crowd at the rally were there to cheer them on in this task. The other, in making a useful point about the way in which some Jews make outrageous analogies between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza and the Nazis and the Jews in theWarsaw Ghetto, expressed the wish that those with those views had taken the place of the Jews who were murdered.

You can work out which of the various rules they fell foul of.

[resistor]

So you deny that the IDF kill children? Where is your humanity? All those at the pro-Israel rally are complicit in the war crimes committed in Palestine and Lebanon.

[Stephen]

"You are quite right when you say that - 'Seeing [Israel's right to exist] as a basic issue which needs to be discussed is a mark of the extent to which the left in the UK has taken on a radically anti-zionist stance.' That's why it has to be dealt with. It's not going away."

It has to be "dealt with" in the same way as other racism: by being put outside the realm of reasonable discourse. No-one who goes around questioning the right of, say, Pakistan to exist is given the time of day: why is Israel different? Can you answer me that?

[Shmuel]

"no good deed goes unpunished."

That's a very ambiguous statement. Think about it. It's not critical of disengagement as much it is the Islamist extremists.

[Mark]

Shmuel says very much what I was thinking (I don't know Rabbi Sacks' views).

It is true that except for the Sinai, Israeli withdrawal has been greeted with acts of war. On the other hand, if like me, one believes that withdrawal from at least most, of the occupied territories is - security being sorted, the better option for ISRAEL, let alone the Palestinians, one would still see it as an ideal to be worked towards.

I enjoyed the demo/rally (whatever!). I tried on the way home to remonstrate with the lady holding up the "eye for an eye" poster. The silly and downright anti-semitic attribution of Israeli policy to this (actually much misunderstood) doctrine is something that makes me see red.

Infortunately a burly cop wasn't having it - "she's heard it before" hes said (I wonder if she really had?) and moved me along - with a slight tug of my arm. This was my first brush with the law since I was a kid. ME - being moved along - by the police. My biggest problem? - how do I tell my mother!!

[Paul]

Stephen is right. Every time a person argues for Israel's right to exist, they undermine the very thing they are arguing for.

Every time some well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) Brit assures me that they "fully support Israel's right to exist", I reply with the greatest disdainful sarcasm I can muster (unfortunately disdainful sarcasm isn't something I'm very good at) "And I support the UK's right to exist".

This business about Israel's right to exist is racism, quite as Stephen says. Therefore it must not be "dealt with" differently from the way in which one might deal with the sort of ignorant racist who finds it necessary to assure you that he doesn't think that black people are inferior to white people, for example. One wouldn't stoop to debate with such a person on his terms, and nor should we stoop to debate with the antisemites who feel Israel's existence needs justification.

On a separate matter, it occurs to me that there are, for example, many people of Irish descent in the US and the UK who are not Irish citizens but US and UK citizens, respectively. But they have Irish names and Irish forebears and feel Irish in some way. They are not challenged to explain precisely how they are Irish, or why they are Irish, or why they identify in some way with Ireland even though they are not citizens of Ireland and have never lived there. When things happen in Ireland, there are no articles (that I have ever seen) about the Irish community in the States, say, and whether or not they support Ireland and whether, for example, Ireland's republicanism is not only their greatest hope but their greatest shame. And that is correct so. Why is it okay for UK papers to be publishing such articles about UK Jews?

[Rick]

http://www.nysun.com/article/36587

Mark Steyn

[bennett]

For a humorous look at "Israel's Right to Exist"

http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2005/12/milestone-on-road-to-peace.html

[Schnitzel]

"They are not challenged to explain precisely how they are Irish, or why they are Irish, or why they identify in some way with Ireland even though they are not citizens of Ireland and have never lived there"

Exactly. Thus, when Paul McCartney wrote "Give Ireland Back to the Irish," I am not aware that his patriotism was ever questioned.

[Schnitzel]

"All those at the pro-Israel rally are complicit in the war crimes committed in Palestine and Lebanon."

All those then who have sung the God Save the Queen or attended Remembrance Sunday services are complicit in the innumerable war crimes committed by Britain in Dresden, post-war Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

And do grow up. I also had a post pulled. I disagree totally with that action, but this is Judy's blog, and she can do whatever the heck she wants in that regard.

[Fabian]

Totally agree with the issue that simply talking about "Israel's right to exist" is racist. Linda, you are so wrong in this, you need to think about it a little more.

Not only that I, as an Israeli citizen cannot picture Israel "ceasing to exist" unless the Arabs unleash a succesful war of total massacre against my friends. I think that the whole argument is foul. Why needs Israel to prove that it is worthy of existance? and before who? You don't even know how arrogant that sounds!

No country should be measured on this racist rule of "right to exist".

It is time that the Jews start acknowledging that the question about "Israel's right to exist" is the same question about "the acceptable size of Jewish noses".

[linda grant]

I'm having trouble following the thread of the argument here. Judy critiises me for writing an article which does not, she believes, represent the mainstream of Jewish opinion. I point out that the article was commissioned to reflect the range of opinion of within the Jewish community, including those, who, like Rabbi Abraham Pinter of the Stamford Hill Charedi, and some members of Jews for Justice for Palestinans, are not Zionists. I am told that seeing Israel's existence as something to be discussed is a mark of how the far left has lost the plot. I agree, saying that I stated three times in the article that the overwhelming number of Jews in Briatin support Israel's right to exist, demonstrating the marginality of the opposing view, just as Judy insisted I should. I am then told I am pandering to ant-semites for having even mentioned it.

People burden newspaper journalism with all kinds of expectations and demands. It's simple. The piece was commissioned to inform, and the responses I have had from non-Jews indicate that it has done so. It's not an op-ed.

I don't have anything further to say on this matter. Everyone can find something to crticise in any piece of journalism. The point is to keep one's eye on the bigger picture.

[JJM]

"I think that the whole argument [Israel's right to exist] is foul."

You are absolutely right; those who engage in such arguments are beneath contempt.

[szenidedatz]

I find it hilarious that Sir Harold and the Neturei Karta rabbi share not just pathological hatred of Israel but name as well. Are they related? Perhaps one day scientists will discover the genetic mutation responsible for this pathology.

[szenidedatz]

I was also surprised with the Chief's verdict on the pull-outs from Gaza and Lebanon. On the other hand, when the chips are down, Sachs always reverts to plain English, as when Barak offered Arafat Har Habait six years ago