Well, I shouldn’t have worried. (See my previous post.) The book came through, and on the appointed day. Of course it may still have been the Israel/Palestine issue that very marginally delayed it; viz those ‘related items’. But I could have  been over-suspicious over this – even ‘paranoid’.

On the other hand, a measure of paranoia is surely excusable in this case. The book is Weaponising Anti-Semitism. How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, by Asa Winstanley (O/R Books, New York, 2023); and it chronicles the dirty tricks that what is called the ‘Israel Lobby’ got up to in Britain against supporters of the Palestine cause. Those supporters of course were not necessarily or even mainly the ‘anti-semites’ that most Zionists, including their propagandists, painted them as, using this as their main ‘weapon’; and of course a highly effective one, in view of the Jews’ long historical experience of anti-semitism, and its abhorrence to most liberal Europeans and Americans; so that being called an anti-semite now is almost on the level of being called a paedophile. It is this that makes philo-semites (like me) uncomfortable and nervous of criticising Israel’s policies in Gaza currently. This may be what the avowed ‘anti-anti-semites’ genuinely believe. If not, however, they are being indescribably wicked.

The trick may have worked. Certainly the reputation of the Labour Party as a particularly anti-semitic one, which was a total lie (see the book, and also https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/check-evidence/), was immensely damaging, and is still hanging around the party’s neck today. (I heard the generally reasonable James O’Brien repeating it in his podcast only a few days ago.) It’s one of those gross libels that is likely to outlive the truth; as many libels do, like the old one about King Canute. (He didn’t think he could hold back the tide.) And it’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to try to combat. That, and the idea of an ‘Israel Lobby’, which seems to imply the kind of ‘conspiracy’ of which Jews themselves have been accused for centuries. (Viz the ‘blood libel’, and their supposed part in fomenting the First World War.) The ‘Israel Lobby’ could be just another of those anti-semitic ‘conspiracy theories’, which no respectable person – certainly no scholar, like me – could openly avow. It puts him or her in the ‘tin foil hat’ brigade, together with flat earthers, moon landing deniers and nutters like David Icke.

In this way, denial of anti-semitism can be presented as a form of anti-semitism itself; especially when expressed by critics of Israel’s policies in the ‘occupied territories’, and even when Jews themselves come out on the other side – defending Corbyn, for example. One of these was the distinguished historian of British Jewry Professor Geoffrey Alderman, who knew and worked with Corbyn in his north London constituency, and so had a very different slant on him. And it should be remembered that not all Jews are Zionists, and many hold the Zionists’ territorial ambitions to be fundamentally un-Jewish. The Zionist term for them is ‘self-hating Jews’.

In these ways Israel has a peculiarly privileged position when it comes to debating its policies, and even its very existence as a state. Established on lands stolen from others, its legitimacy has always been questioned. The words ‘colonial’, ‘racist’ and ‘apartheid’ – highly unfashionable today – are often applied to its domestic policies; quite accurately, as it seems to an imperial historian like me. In my (personal) view, however, this should not be thought to justify its abolition as a nation, as Hamas apparently wants. Nations are created in many different ways, and most other countries on earth – the USA included – have been founded on a degree of territorial theft. We can’t undo all of these. But it should surely make Israelis more aware of the injustices that helped to create their nation relatively recently – that makes a difference – and willing to compromise with their non-Jewish inhabitants and neighbours as a result.

The Gaza invasion – however provoked – and its brutal continuance will have done nothing to make Israel safer; and runs the huge risk of alienating many in the wider world who, like me, were sensitive to the sufferings of the Jewish people, and supported them as history’s great victims; but may no longer be able to do so when the Israelis become oppressors too. This has nothing to do with anti-semitism, but rather the opposite: disappointment that people’s pro-semitism has been so betrayed. And resentment at how, in the course of this,  the charge of anti-semitism has been – to use Winstanley’s term – so ‘weaponised’.