This cowardly Jewish leadership

Throughout last month, what was that deafening sound emanating from Britain’s Jewish community as the world convulsed over the Lebanon war? Silence.

Six weeks ago, I wrote on this page about the failure of British Jews to rebut the wholly unwarranted charge of Israel’s ‘disproportionate’ response to the attack by Hezbollah on its northern towns.

I didn’t know the half of it. Since then, Israel has been the target of a verbal and psychological pogrom of vilification, distortion and outright lies. Calumnies were hurled at it almost daily by the media, politicians and intellectuals.

It was accused of aggression when it was the victim of aggression. It was accused of bombing most of Lebanon when only a tiny part of it was bombed. It was accused of destroying the fragile Lebanese nation when that same nation had in fact been hijacked by Iran, through its proxy Hezbollah which had set up a state within a state.

These libels were underpinned by outright fabrications such as the bald claim that Israel had started the war, the publication of doctored photographs and the solemn reporting of staged and implausible ‘atrocities’ as facts.

Such hysteria has resulted not only in an inevitable rise in physical attacks upon Jews. It has also caused a significant section of the Labour party to descend into madness. There is now the surreal possibility that the Prime Minister might be driven from office because he failed to call for an early cease-fire— and thus force the one democracy in the Middle East to surrender to genocidal Islamic fascists.

Yet during this hate-fest against the Jewish state, there was not a peep of protest from the UK’s Jewish leadership. In private, they were wringing their hands; in public, not a ripple disturbed the glassy surface of communal complacency.

With such a torrent of lies and distortions crying out for rebuttal, such behaviour is simply astounding. In Israel, people were amazed and distressed by the silence of British Jews. In America, they simply could not believe it.

American Jews expected Britain to respond as they would have responded to such an assault upon the Jewish people: full page ads rebutting the lies, mailshots to MPs, questions in Parliament about the blatant manipulation of journalists by Hezbollah, protests by prominent community leaders, public rallies, articles placed in the press.

There was none of that. It was left instead to a few non-Jews, such as Freddie Forsyth, Julie Burchill or other voices of gentile conscience, to ask why the country had taken such comprehensive leave of its senses.

It’s shocking — but not surprising. It’s minhag anglia, the historic custom of the leaders of British Jewry, to be craven and servile, to be terrified of rocking the boat and drawing attention to the fact that they are different, that they are Jews.

They are frightened for their reputations and their interests, for their place in British society. They are frightened of being accused of being partisan and not properly British, of being demonised as extremists, of being stamped as supporters of Jewish war criminals.

They are frightened, indeed, that the big lie that Israel is guilty of war crimes might be true. Above all, they are frightened that if they say anything about antisemitism they will provoke even more of it.

We have been here before. In the 1930s, when like today the scapegoating and hatred of the Jews were received with widespread denial, indifference and appeasement, the behaviour of Britain’s Jewish establishment was similarly compromised.

As Richard Bolchover documented in his book British Jewry and the Holocaust, community leaders were all by paralysed in their response to the Nazi threat by their fear that identification as Jews with the suffering of other Jews would raise the spectre of dual loyalty.

So they subsumed specific warnings in general condemnations of Nazism, blamed Jewish misbehaviour for expressions of antisemitism, and viewed non-Jews as more effective advocates of the Jewish cause.

Today, such an attitude is creating a wasteland of ignorance in which lies are taking deep and lethal root. The situation requires the urgent establishment of an infrastructure of public rebuttal and education about Israel and the Jews: detailed, painstaking monitoring of the lies about Zionism and Israel’s history, and the promotion instead in the public domain of the truth.

Some say we cannot hope to defeat the longest hatred. Maybe so. But what is better, to stand up for ourselves and go down fighting for truth and justice —or to cower on our knees in the refined but malodorous drawing-rooms of British society while Jewish self-determination is viciously delegitimised?

Our community’s public silence, alas, itself answers the question. You can take a man out of the ghetto but, as we are now learning once again, you can’t take the ghetto out of the man.