In this week’s column, shoved in underneath some musings about comedy and refried beans, the Independent rentagob Julie Burchill takes a detour into the sort of stuttering imperialist froth that Russell Brand might refer to as the Bad Zionism.
Burchill denounces the latest popular explorations of Israeli politics – Channel 4’s drama The Promise and Louis Theroux’s documentary exposé of ultra-Zionist lifestyles in Jerusalem and the West Bank – as foaming anti-Semitism, borne out of Gentile resentment that Jewish people are good at science.
No, really. Burchill really does argue that discussing the most fraught, difficult and painful topic in modern international relations in any terms that do not automatically grant the Jewish people every disputed square mile of moral high ground, because they “built the country we call Israel centuries before Islam even existed”, is just bitchy bitterness about so many “Jews winning the Nobel Prize”.
Yes, it’s bonkers, but there’s bile behind it. Burchill stubbornly fails to draw any distinction between the blithely racist, imperialist ultra-Zionists in Theroux’s documentary and the more reflective and compassionate politics of the vast majority of Jewish people. In fact, most Jews feel about as much kinship with ultra-Zionists as most Christians feel with the more fundamentalist members of the Westboro Baptist Church.
In Burchill’s eyes, though, it’s all just “Jew-baiting”. Showing Israeli soldiers firing tear gas canisters at Palestinian children in Hebron is “Jew-baiting’. Dramatising the agonising conflict between Jewish war refugees searching for a home and Palestinian families being violently evicted from their land is “Jew-baiting” and nothing more.
I know it’s not about me, but as a woman of Jewish descent with many family members living in Israel, I find this sort of reductive bollocks personally offensive. In point of fact, The Promise is not a piece of propaganda. Rather, it is a reflective and excruciatingly well-researched series that throws light on a segment of British wartime history that most Brits prefer to ignore – namely, our own involvement in the creation of the state of Israel and our complicity in the decades of bloody conflict that followed.
It’s hard to understand how anyone can accuse a drama that opens with five gruelling minutes set in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, cutting in segments of real footage from the mass graves, of ignoring the tragic nuances of Jewish history. For Burchill, though, since the series stops short of declaring all Palestinians criminal trespassers, it’s just more “Jew-baiting”.
For some people, history is just a creative space for redrawing the bloody map of the moral high ground to suit your own dogma. For others, history drives right up to your front door on a daily basis in armoured tanks, penning your family behind gun-bristling checkpoints, cramming your friends and neighbours behind an “apartheid wall”, bombing your home, machine-gunning your grandchildren.
Dragging all discussion of the suffering of the Palestinian people back to a dry debate over whose tribal deity promised them the land most flamboyantly is a wilfully clod-headed rehearsal of what George Orwell called transferred nationalism – “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”.
Ultimately, if we’re really going to play the who-got-here-first game, someone really needs to put in a word for the poor old Philistines. And the Caananites. And the Midianites. And the Amalekites. And the followers of Ba’al, all of whom have some prior historical claim on the land by virtue of being slaughtered or enslaved or driven out over the course of three millennia of gory religious tribal wars – it’s all there in the Torah. The sort of self-deception that calls all temperate inquiry “Jew-baiting” is just dogged, ahistorical worship of the politics of bullying.
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