Israelophobia is the one hatred that polite society embraces
What’s with Israelophobia? From one point of view, the Jewish state shouldn’t matter very much. Accounting for just a quarter of 1 per cent of the Middle East, its area is the size of Wales, with a population the size of London.
Despite all the controversies, it is the only liberal democracy in the region. It’s not particularly violent; in its 75-year history, its conflicts with the Arab world have claimed 86,000 lives. The 2003 Iraq invasion killed 600,000 people in three years.
It is not a bad place to live. Its health system is excellent, its economy thriving. It is ranked above Britain and the United States for freedom of expression and, according to the UN, is the fourth happiest country in the world, behind only Finland, Denmark and Iceland.
Yet there is not one Israel but two. As the American novelist Saul Bellow observed, the Israel of facts is “territorially insignificant”. The second, however, is “as broad as all history and perhaps as deep as sleep”. This is where the fever-dream of Israelophobia takes hold.
However secular Western society becomes, it remains steeped in Christianity. The Bible elevated the Jewish land to the Holy Land, the Jewish city to the Holy City and a Jewish prophet to the Son of God; yet the Chosen People were blamed for killing Christ. This fetishisation and demonisation of Jews lies at the very foundation of our civilisation.
In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of murdering Christian children to drink their blood; last month, a BBC presenter was forced to apologise after remarking that Israel was “happy to kill children”. As the novelist Howard Jacobson put it, Israelophobia is “the old hatred decanted into new bottles”.
Like the anti-Semitism of previous centuries, the bigotry is based on conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Israel is accused of pulling the strings of politicians, finance and the media.
The country is labelled “white supremacist”, despite being at least 60 per cent non-white. It is blamed for “genocide”, even though the Palestinian population has grown five-fold since its birth. There are no concentration camps or execution pits in the Jewish state.
It is accused of “apartheid” when its national football team contains more Arabs than Jews. Although it is the Middle East’s only democracy – the only country in the region to protect the rights of women and minorities – it is routinely compared to the Nazis.
The further up the social scale you go, the worse the problem becomes. Israelophobia is now one of a suite of “luxury beliefs” about race, gender, colonisation and slavery which are taken on by the elites as badges of political identity.
This produces a toxic blend of patrician liberalism and old-fashioned socialism, shot through with the sort of intense focus on race that is normally only seen on the far Right.
The moral virus has infected the progressive elites and is cascading through the institutions they dominate. Last year, the UN General Assembly issued 15 resolutions against the Jewish state, compared with just 13 against all other countries combined.
Wherever you find toxic identity politics, you find Israelophobia. From the EU to the Foreign Office, from universities to museums, from publishing houses to advertising agencies, bigotry towards the Middle East’s only democracy is rife.
This broad ideology is a true danger. Although masquerading as a virtue, it erodes Western self-respect; undermines our history; destroys national pride and patriotism; and sows social division. It emboldens our enemies, whether Islamists or Putin’s fascists.
Make no mistake. The fight against Israelophobia is the fight for Western liberalism.
Jake Wallis Simons is the author of Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred, out next month
