Rather less than six decades ago, Bernard Levin wrote a widely read essay for the New Statesman. Such is the transience of journalistic fame that Levin won’t be much remembered by readers under 50, though there was a time when he was one of Britain’s most celebrated journalists.
And “Am I a Jew?”, published in July 1965, was one of the best things he ever wrote. I’m old enough to remember reading it at the time, but to do so again today is riveting, particularly in light of the violence in the Middle East and the furious debate over Israel. Levin begins almost frivolously, wondering whether he looked Jewish or had a Jewish nose and suchlike, before stopping to say, “of course… I know perfectly well that I am a Jew.” What he was really asking was what “being a Jew” meant to him: an emancipated, assimilated European, specifically English, living in the second half of the 20th century, without any religious faith apart from a lingering reverence for ceremonies such as Seder (the Passover eve supper), or much interest in Jewish tradition, apart from a liking for its food and jokes (“because of their underlying gallows-humour, which I like because I am at heart a melancholic”).
After deriding the idea of “race”, he suggested that his various opinions did not “seem to mark me off in any way from a Gentile of similar political outlook”. This included his attitude towards Israel: “Admiration for the incredible achievements… combined with the strongest condemnation of her crime against her original Arab population and the campaign of lies she has waged ever since on the subject.”
At that time it was very unusual to read a condemnation of that “crime”, by which Levin of course meant the Nakba (a name that hadn’t yet come into currency), the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs from the newborn state of Israel in 1948. And one might add that it was particularly unusual from someone called Levin. By the “campaign of lies”, he meant the relentless Israeli propaganda since that event, claiming that those Arabs had run away out of sheer perversity, or because they were encouraged to do so by their own leaders. In either case, they had no right to return. This narrative was very much for export purposes. Most Israelis knew well enough what had happened. Yitzhak Rabin, the Labor Party politician who would later serve as prime minister before he was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic in 1995, was a young officer in the Zionist forces in 1948. With David Ben-Gurion’s encouragement, Rabin directed the expulsion of the Arabs from Lydda (now Lod), a story Rabin later unapologetically told, or tried to, in a memoir that was censored by the government. Yet it was a story which was barely known, or maybe wilfully ignored, in the West.
The story of Zionism and Israel is a choice subject for the “historian of opinion”, in Keynes’s phrase, and never has that been truer than today. At a time of widespread anger and revulsion against Israel and its campaign in Gaza, completely submerging the anger and revulsion which might have been expected after the Hamas atrocity in October 2023, most people reading this will find it quite hard to believe – even those of us old enough find it quite hard to recall – just how broadly popular Israel was at one time, notably on the liberal left. The Zionist-labour group Poale Zion (“Workers of Zion”) first affiliated with the UK Labour Party in 1920 (and remains so today as the Jewish Labour Movement). British Labour politicians formed personal friendships with Israeli Labor leaders such as Ben-Gurion and Abba Eban, and the liberal press viewed Israel as a model social democracy. That went too for the Manchester Guardian, whose great owner-editor CP Scott early on befriended Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader and first president of Israel, and then played a part in drafting the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
There was a rift in 1956 with the Eden administration’s lamentable Suez caper, when the British and French governments secretly colluded with Israel to attack Egypt. But the Guardian was in general warmly sympathetic towards Israel in the postwar decades. And so was the New Statesman. As late as 1973, this magazine contained a piece titled “Founding Father”, which began: “The greatness of David Ben-Gurion had never been more apparent than during the weeks before his death,” a eulogy treating him as a visionary socialist leader, accompanied by a beatific drawing.
Sixty years ago, the left had never heard of the Palestinians, who were known then as “the Arabs”. Their rebellion against the British rulers of Mandatory Palestine from 1936 to 1939 was the “Arab revolt”; Zionists once discussed the “Arab question” (an ironical echo of the old “Jewish question”); and some obdurate Zionists and Israelis rejected the very names Palestinian and Palestine to describe a nation and its homeland. A meeting I attended in New York 40 years ago, which was intended to discuss the question in calm and eirenic spirit (and good luck with that), was broken up by a group of young men wearing kippahs chanting: “There is no Palestine.” And in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you had wanted to read about what Levin called the “crime” against Palestinian Arabs, you would have had to turn to the romantic-Tory Spectator, then owned and edited by Ian Gilmour.
There has since been a complete role reversal. Israel’s staunchest defenders are now to be found on the right: see any issue of the Telegraph, or the Spectator, which is today unrecognisable from the paper Gilmour edited, or the Spectator for which I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today the left has no more fashionable cause than Palestine, however belatedly it was taken up. A turning point came just two years after Levin’s essay, with the Six-Day War of 1967, when it seemed as though the Jewish people might suffer another great catastrophe, only a quarter of a century after the horror in Europe. For that moment – maybe for the last time – Israel looked like David standing against Goliath. “David” won an overwhelming victory (which might have cast doubt on that very perception), and after the victory the then foreign minister Eban said that “never before has Israel stood more honoured and revered by the nations of the world”.
No Israeli leader could say that today. So what has happened? The great, late historian Tony Judt grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in south London, with parents who were neither religious nor Zionist. They hailed from eastern Europe, and their politics were the residue of the Bund, that remarkable Jewish-socialist movement which enjoyed strong support in prewar Poland, until its rank and file were killed by Hitler in Auschwitz, and its leaders were killed by Stalin in Lubyanka. In 1967, as an undergraduate, he flew to Israel on the last flight as the war began. He remembered very well “how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel”, and so it was, I remember, at Oxford. Students demonstrating for Palestine today are the grandchildren of the students who cheered Israel to victory in 1967.
A year after the war came the événements of 1968, in France and elsewhere. In hindsight they may seem insignificant or frivolous – as the horrible old Stalinists of the French Communist Party rightly said, this was a street party, not a revolution – but there was another effect. It was clear to the most myopic Marxist that any prospect of socialist revolution in the West was finished. And so, as Judt observed, the New Left became “concerned less with exploited workers and more with the victims of colonialism and racism”. But if the new great divide was not between capitalist and worker but between coloniser and colonised, then Israel was cast on the wrong side of the line, increasingly seen not as “a nation struggling justly to be free” but as a colonial settler state which had dispossessed the original inhabitants. In time, as Judt also saw, “Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless.”
Even if this great shift in perception was unforeseen, it may have been overdetermined. The earlier Zionist cause had no more famous supporter than Winston Churchill, revered to this day by Israeli politicians and American supporters of Israel. But when you examine what he actually said, he’s no help at all for Israel today. In 1937 he remarked bluntly that the British faced a choice as rulers of Mandatory Palestine: either “facilitate the establishment of the Jewish National Home, or… hand over the government of the country to the people who happen to live there at the moment”. When asked whether he thought Palestinian Arabs were suffering an injustice, he said they could not be allowed to dictate the future of the country simply because they had lived there so long: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s cheerleaders in the US media are welcome to quote those words, but even they might hesitate.
A vigorous correspondence in these pages followed Levin’s essay. One angry letter was from the former attorney general of Mandatory Palestine Norman Bentwich, a remarkable figure then in his eighties. Replying to Levin, Bentwich was dismayed that any Jew “did not feel a loyalty to it [the Jewish community] and some thrill in its present achievements in the field of social ethics in the land of Israel”, whatever quite that meant.
Although Bentwich also accused Levin of “utter cynicism”, one charge was not made, not against Levin or more broadly against such critics of Israel as there were in the early years of the state. It was in 1967 that a reader, maybe for the first time, accused the Guardian directly of “anti-Semitism” because of its critical scrutiny of Israeli conduct after the Six-Day War. Since then it has become the ceaseless refrain of those who defend Israel and denounce her critics. My own first taste of this was in 1988, when I wrote a column for the newborn Independent. At the time I didn’t really know much about Zionism and I had never visited Israel. One might say lightly that complete ignorance of a subject has never stopped any journalist worth their name writing about it, but that piece, looking back, was the germ of my 1996 book The Controversy of Zion, a study of Zionism as an “idea in history”. My Independent piece merely described, and deplored, the conduct of the Israeli government at that time, the prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud party.
This provoked several hostile replies, one from Lionel Bloch, a prominent Anglo-Likudnik whom I knew slightly, and one from someone called Karen Wald, who accused me of “genteel anti-Semitism” (thanks for the “genteel”). For a moment I smarted, but then two days later another letter was published, from Isaiah Berlin. He congratulated me on the “intelligence and understanding” of my piece, and rounded on my critics, saying of “Karen Wald’s strange letter” that, “I cannot discover in it a single statement which seems to me to have any discernible relation to reality.” I have never forgotten Berlin’s letter. May his name be a blessing.
Although I’m not Jewish, I was brought up in a philosemitic home. My parents were politically “progressive” stalwarts of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Labour Party, who took the Guardian and New Statesman. They were also instinctive admirers of Israel, and not only because we had numerous Jewish friends. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was still a good deal of casual social anti-Semitism in England, and my distaste for it may be one of the few instincts I retain from my upbringing. But more than that, I might have been Levin’s “Gentile of similar political outlook”. At that time, traditional liberal philosemitism combined with shock and shame at the fate of the European Jews to produce “admiration for the incredible achievement” that was Israel.
More than 30 years after Levin’s essay, my book on Zionism was praised with remarkable generosity in the Jewish Chronicle and elsewhere by Jewish critics, in a way which I must admit gratified me, since I had been conscious of my impudence in intruding on a Jewish debate. Going to New York to receive a National Jewish Book Award seemed a final kashrut. Since then I have learned more about the question, and have grown a thicker skin, as anyone must who writes about the tragic and intractable conflict in the Holy Land. As Judt put it in 2006, “The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in Israeli political instincts.” And he added in still more prescient words that “Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic… in many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behaviour, and its insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism, is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in western Europe and much of Asia… This is bad for Jews – since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby’s abuse of the term.”
It might not seem easy to give an honest and exact definition of “anti-Semitism” but one of the best was by WH Auden. He was writing about GK Chesterton, whom he admired, but whose anti-Semitism he deplored. Chesterton had tried to explain this away by saying that it was perfectly natural to criticise certain characteristics in “any other nation”, such as the French, and there was no reason not to do so with “members of a race persecuted for other reasons”. But, as Auden said, there was a sly shift from the term nation to the term race. “It is always permissible to criticise a nation (including Israel), a religion (including orthodox Judaism), or a culture, because these are the creations of human thought and will: a nation, a religion, a culture can always reform themselves, if they so choose. A man’s ethnic heritage, on the other hand, is not in his power to alter.” That should be unanswerable – and it cuts both ways: criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic. I might add that when Jonathan Greenblatt, the indefatigable head of the Anti-Defamation League and one of the most forthright American cheerleaders for Israel, says that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”, he is simply wrong in historical terms. Plenty of Jews past and present have been anti-Zionists, that did not make them anti-Semitic or “self-hating”.
Today Levin’s essay seems a period piece. More people are aware of the original “crime” of dispossession. It might almost be argued that Israel has been criticised too severely in later years, having not been criticised severely enough in its early years when it basked in Western approval. But it’s a plain fact that many people have drastically revised their view of Israel, and the latest carnage in Gaza, and Lebanon as well, has merely accelerated this change. I now realise that, as Levin’s “Gentile of similar political outlook”, I was grateful that this question did not formerly divide left and right, nor Jew and Gentile. But today many people in the Jewish diaspora feel isolated, alienated and bewildered by what they see as the shocking lack of sympathy for Israel in its plight: see the symposium “What it means to be Jewish now” from the New Statesman of last December. One distressing consequence of the present bloodshed has been exacerbated divisions between Jew and Gentile, as illustrated by the latest call for a writers’ boycott of Israel supported by Sally Rooney and Percival Everett, and the contrary letter of protest against such a boycott signed by Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Reading the very interesting essay in these pages in October by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis also took me back to Levin. Without going into a detailed scrutiny of that article, Mirvis must know that there were and are many like Levin who did not want to be categorised as Jews in national terms. But he must know also that many rabbis utterly condemned political Zionism and a Jewish state on theological grounds. As it happens, the question of religion is one of the areas where Levin’s predictions have been falsified by events. Israel was then, he wrote, “still heavily influenced by theocracy; but the ultimately inevitable Kulturkampf must break the rabbinical power and turn Israel into a modern secular state”. So far from that, the religious Zionists – a phrase that would have once seemed almost oxymoronic – are more powerful than ever in Israel, notably among the settlers on the West Bank, and in the present government. Levin also foresaw that “while the Jews of the Diaspora become more completely assimilated – the rate of intermarriage continues to grow, generation by generation – Israel will become more and more remote from any of the traditional concepts of Jewishness”. That might be thought true enough, but it’s far from the full story.
Since he was writing two years before the Six-Day War which so drastically altered the story of Israel, Levin understandably failed to see beyond that war and its larger consequences. Israel has gradually drifted away from the West in political and other ways, and that includes the Jewish diaspora, which finds itself in an agonising dilemma. David Baddiel may complain sarcastically that Jews Don’t Count, and Maureen Lipman may call the response of some of the critics of Israel “close to fascism”. But it seems unlikely that he or she feel much more affinity than the rest of us do with such ministers in the present Israeli government as Bezalel Smotrich, who once organised a “Beast Parade” as a protest against a gay pride parade in Jerusalem, or Itamar Ben-Gvir, who used to keep a portrait on his wall of Baruch Goldstein, the settler who massacred 29 worshippers in a Hebron mosque. As to the excruciating tension between the two largest Jewish communities, in Israel and the US, it was summed up by an Israeli executive quoted by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times: “Eighty per cent of American Jews will vote for Harris. But 80 per cent of Israelis would vote for Trump.”
“Has it come to this?” Levin concluded. “Has an idea so old and tenacious, so provocative of generosity and malice, good and evil, responsible for such prodigious outpourings of words and deeds ceased to have any meaning at all?” The answer would seem to be not, and the “idea” of being Jewish still has plenty of meaning for many people. “If you do not consider yourself Jewish enough to go to Israel,” Levin wrote, “or Judaistic enough to go to the synagogue, what is left but a vague necessity to belong? And this will disappear.” Nearly 60 years on, it has not disappeared. But, much as Israel’s course has differed from Levin’s predictions, the “answer to the Jewish question” which Theodor Herzl sought when he published his little book The Jewish State in 1896 has turned out to be different from anything he could have imagined.
[See also: The revenge of Donald Trump]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World