One subject publishers in Britain will not touch

An uncomfortable question hasbeenrattling around at the back of my mind this week: Did I used to be an anti-Semite?

The thought is prompted by the essays in “A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st Century Britain,” published jointly by Profile Books and the Institute of Jewish Policy Research.

Note the question mark in the title. Some contributors, such as prominent lawyer and author Anthony Julius, argue that the fears are overstated. Others, polemicist Melanie Phillips chief among them, are much less sanguine. In the process the book addresses the trickiest question of them all: When does legitimate criticism of Israel cross the line into something altogether more vicious?

Whether you share the glass half-full or glass half-empty tendency, the collection could hardly have arrived at a better moment. Optimists will see the emergence of Michael Howard — the son of Jewish immigrants — as the Conservative Party’s leader-elect as proof that old prejudices are dying away.

Pessimists point to more troubling signs, including an increase in racially motivated attacks, not to mention a new pan-European survey which suggests that 60 percent of British people believe, somewhat bizarrely, that Israel is the prime threat to peace in the world. (It comes almost as a relief to learn that the figure was even higher in Germany, Austria and Holland.)

There have been suggestions that the survey relied on too small a pool of respondents to be reliable. To me, though, the figures have the ring of truth. I have lost count of the number of Palestinian sympathizers I have stumbled across in the last few years. To find a person who is willing to voice sympathy for Israel is a genuine event. Most of the time I am on my own.

Until 20 years ago I was very much on the other side of the argument. As a left-wing teenager in the Seventies, I was so committed to the anti-Zionist cause that I would send off for pamphlets from the Arab League offices in London and then quote from them at length in my school history essays. In my youthful ignorance, I had bought into the standard line that Tel Aviv was an outpost of American imperialism.

Supporters of Israel occasionally make the mistake — for good reason — of crediting the anti-Zionist left with all sorts of sinister motives. Sometimes those motives really are at work. But we should never forget the power of ordinary stupidity too.

One event — the slaughter of thousands in the Syrian town of Hama in 1982 — forced me to re-evaluate everything. I can still remember my bewilderment at how little coverage the event received in the British media. Years later, when I read Thomas Friedman’s compelling account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” I couldn’t help being struck by his summing up of the rules of the game in the states surrounding Israel. The rules, he wrote, are Hama Rules.

Mr. Friedman is not among the contributors to “A New Antisemitism,” but more than one author cites his definition of what might be called the fellow-traveling version of anti-Semitism: “Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction — out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East — is antisemitic, and not saying so is dishonest.”

I’m still not sure I accept that precise formulation. After all, anti-Semitism embodies a precise set of attitudes. I’m absolutely confident that I never shared them. But Mr. Friedman is right in spirit. And that, I have to say, troubles me almost as much.

Melanie Phillips’ defense of Israel — along with her nonconformist views on education and social policy in general — have helped to make her something of a hate figure to the British left. If there is such a thing as a British neoconservative, this self-styled “progressive” comes close to fitting the bill. Having made her name on the Guardian, she now occupies a berth at the right-wing Daily Mail. To imagine how great a journey that entails, you have to try to imagine Anna Quindlen throwing thunderbolts from the pages of the New York Post.

How does Miss Phillips account for the British public’s unrelenting hostility to Israel? Ignorance, she told me, is part of the problem. “The vast majority of Brit people have no interest in or knowledge of Jewish people or the history of the Middle East, and no particular interest in foreign lands far away. They rely entirely on very superficial sources of information — I’m not just talking about uneducated people — and because their ignorance is so complete it’s created a vacuum into which has come a fantastically sophisticated propaganda campaign by the Arab side. That in turn has legitimated what has always been a subterranean prejudice here. It was always there — some of us felt it more than others — but now it’s come roaring into sight.”

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