Indeed, contemporary accounts of anti-Jewish racism bear little to no difference from descriptions of the phenomenon in the 1930s, when Jews were the primary representatives of ethnic difference in Europe. This should come as no surprise. Anti-Jewish racism is an ancient prejudice, one whose roots go back over two millennia. Its age guarantees a sense of continuity, of feeling as though nothing has changed, that when it comes to European Jewry, history always remains at a standstill.

The problem is that it never does, that time moves on irrespective of how it favors us. Take, for example, the fact that for nearly sixty years, Europe has been, comparatively speaking, ‘Jew-free’, even though in countries such as Germany, Jewish populations have begun to grow. Most significantly, during this time Muslim migrants have begun calling the continent their home. Frequently hailing from Arab countries and from Turkey, as well as east Africa and south Asia, Muslims have come to bear the same kind of difference for Europeans as Jews.

The irony of this change is its timing. Taking place at precisely the same moment that European Jewry was formally reestablishing itself in the Mideast, these migrants came to live in a Europe that had only recently emerged from the Holocaust, and was disengaging itself from its colonial holdings in many of these immigrants own home countries. Living in the shadow of both of these events, their European presence has always been a challenge, in turn creating relations between Muslims and Jews different than those impacted by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Reading the mountain of Jewish-authored op-eds last week about the Aftonbladet affair, I could not help but wonder why, if we were really dealing with a case of anti-Semitism, not a single charge ever sought to place itself within the context of greater trends in contemporary European xenophobia. Was it because of the political persuasions of the persons making the claims, who, even if they are not sympathetic to Arabs, cannot see the similar ideological mechanism that substitutes Muslim for Jew, and vice versa?

Or was it because the  critique of anti-Semitism took form before the advent of large scale Muslim immigration to Europe, and never had the opportunity to redefine itself to include both peoples? I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially considering the degree to which the critique of anti-Jewish racism became problematized in left circles following the Six Day War. ‘Anti-anti-Semitism’, as it is often called, came to be considered an ideology masking Israeli transgressions against Palestinians, not a critique of anti-Jewish racism.

To the post-1967 progressive mind, we had become Europeans, when, until Israel’s independence, we were considered neither fully white nor adequately oriental, even though it was not uncommon for Jews to be derided as ‘Muslim’. The problem is that the contemporary judgment of the left, committed as it is to the colonial critique of Zionism, oversimplifies this history, forgetting it, impeding the Arab connection. It also fails to acknowledge any other Jewish ethnicity than Ashkenazi, further severing any ties between Jews and the Levant. 

Anti-Arab racism had to unnecessarily get segregated, independent of European Muslims’ experience of the same basic prejudices as the continent’s former Jewish population. There would be no concentration camps, but there would be facsimiles of practically everything else: specifically a combination of ghettoization and integration. Muslims would be similarly treated as ‘outsiders within the bourgeoisie’, as Max Horkheimer once described Europe’s Jews, as well as icons of the global south, as perennially itinerant migrant laborers.

This is why the obsession over medieval blood libels and the like, in the case of Swedish allegations of organ harvesting, is so troubling. Its historic specificity repeats this act of segregating European racisms towards Jews and Arabs by unnecessarily privileging the archaic quality of the charge, in certain instances, contending that is also a product of outside influences, i.e. Arab agitation, if not representative of a coalescing of left-wing anti-Semitism and Palestinian-Muslim interests.

What if the accusation isn’t reflective of such influences, but, rather, is an attempt to harness the distress of the Mideast conflict for the purposes of staging anti-Semitic prejudices, writ large? Might we not see it as equally exploitative of the Palestinian victim alleged to be the embodiment of this macabre crime, that he is also being exploited in a racist fashion, just like we are? What would that teach us about the kind of prejudice being exercised here, particularly the company Jews and Arabs are forced to keep by it?

It is not that identification of the resurfacing of the blood libel narrative is wrong, though, in my view, there is an uncomfortably narcissistic quality to its emphasis. The problem is that the charge of blood libel is not tied to anything else, that it is decontextualized. That this might be, perchance, a reflection of the way that the Arab-Israeli conflict has determined how we talk about racism, such that we could misconstrue its breadth. Or for that matter, discourage us from asking why Europeans would indulge it now, in such a highly complex manner.

Joel Schalit is Zeek‘s online editor. His next book, Israel vs. Utopia, will be published this October by New York’s Akashic Books. Schalit lives and works in Milan, Italy.

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Logging onto Facebook recently, I received an invitation to join an initiative called Grassroots Jews, a project led by a small group of people working together to put on High Holy Day services in north west London this year.  Not within an existing synagogue, not even in partnership with an existing synagogue, but entirely independently.  They are flying in a guest cantor and teacher from Israel – a remarkable Jewish leader, musician and professor of medieval Jewish history at the University of Haifa – and are going it alone.  They are raising the funds by charging a £45 flat fee for all Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services (less if that is prohibitive), and they are not offering one service, but two – a traditional option and an alternative option. 

The somewhat curious fact that the traditional option is happening in an alternative setting isn’t really acknowledged, any more than the completely bewildering fact that the alternative option is, of course, an alternative to a traditional option that is, in and of itself, an alternative.  If that makes sense.  The organizing group includes some well-known characters in the 30-something age band – former senior players in the Union of Jewish Students, Bnei Akiva, Noam and RSY-Netzer, highly-involved Limmudniks, Moishe House activists, children of well-known rabbis, etc.  In short, people you would think the community would be bending over backwards to include within existing frameworks.

What they promise, in a funky, downloadable video produced to recruit participants, is “the most exciting autonomous & non-hierarchical Judaism ever to surface.”  The unstated and implicit critique is that the Judaism they find elsewhere in the community is rather dull, meaningless and stuffy, and that they are largely unwilling to buy into a model of community that implicitly, if not explicitly, demands that they sign-up for the whole synagogue package at considerable expense.  What they want is to go to services on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that touch them, inspire them, and speak to them.  They want to be part of a community – albeit just for three days – that wants to daven in a serious way, participate, sing, and engage in the underlying meaning that permeates the High Holy Day liturgy.  Perhaps most of all, they want to do it their way, on their terms, and with their people.  They’ll pay £45 for that.

On closer examination, it turns out that Grassroots Jews is actually loosely associated with an informal Carlebach-style minyan which meets from time to time in Belsize Park or West Hampstead, and that suggests these Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services will be quite an experience.  I went along to the Carlebach minyan a few weeks ago, and participated in a kabbalat shabbat service that could proudly stand alongside the best of what Jerusalem or Tzfat has to offer.  There were 100 or so people present, packed into a small living room, overflowing out into the garden, singing so vibrantly and passionately that the room itself wasliterally reverberating with excitement.  This was grassroots, informal, non-ideological Judaism at its best and most vibrant.

Who can blame them for wanting Judaism this way?  It is possible to get anything we like “our way” nowadays.  When we buy a car or a computer, we choose the make, the model, the accessories, the financing plan.  When we buy a holiday, we have the possibility of building our own itinerary on our own terms – no one imposes anything on us unless we wish to choose from one of the numerous package options that are available to us (which is hardly an imposition).  When we buy a meal, we select our preference from the menu of options, and even then, are fully entitled – and expect – to be able to replace one side dish with another, or ask for our selected option with or without certain ingredients.  In such a social context, the very idea of a one-size fits all Judaism doesn’t exactly resonate.

But it’s actually more complex than that.  Grassroots Jews is also loosely connected to another similar initiative called Wandering Jews that currently meets to daven and to eat in a different home twice a month (“we never go to the same house twice”).  Describing itself as “a little bit Fight Club, a little bit minyan, almost 100% good,” the hosts determine the minhag at each meeting – they do it their way according to their style of Judaism.  Everyone brings some food to share.  There are no leaders controlling the agenda, just “custodians” who care forthe group’s continued existence.  Not indefinitely mind you; just for as long as there is demand.  If Wandering Jews wander off elsewhere, the entire initiative may disappear or morph into something else.  In the meantime, they are open to “all Jews and the people who love them” and they “do not ask questions in relation to people’s Jewish status or level of observance.”  And perhaps most intriguingly, they are “post-philanthropic” – that is they “eschew funding or offers of funding” as “asking for funding is akin to asking for permission to exist.”

In defining its philosophy thus, Wandering Jews actually goes a significant step further than Grassroots Jews.  It is not comprised of a clearly homogeneous group of Jews looking for a particularly type of shared religious experience.  It is more experimental, more open, more willing to accept– or at least explore – multiple versions of Judaism and Jewishness.  It is also more anti-establishment – whilst Grassroots Jews has neither requested nor soughtout communal approval, Wandering Jews actively shuns it.

Together, Grassroots Jews and Wandering Jews are being spearheaded by people in their 20s and 30s – predominantly single, unmarried or recently-married young adults who do not feel the need for the more concrete and stable versions of community that one typically finds within an existing synagogue framework. Yet some in the community mainstream tend to adopt a rather laissez faire attitude to these and other similar endeavours.  Their argument is that with the passage of time, as these people settle down and start families, their passion for Judaism will almost inevitably ensure that they slot into the mainstream and the structure and stability it offers.

But is this the case? I’m not so sure.  As Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have argued in their international bestseller Wikinomics, members of the “Net Generation” – those who have grown up with the Internet as a norm rather than a novelty – may well differ significantly from their forebears in terms of outlook, expectations and foundational conceptions of community.  They have little faith in the "authoritative” or “authentic” view – they scrutinize and sift through information at the click of a mouse, and figure out what makes sense to them on their own terms.  They are not content to be passive consumers – they increasingly satisfy their desire for choice, convenience, customization and control by designing and producing their own products and initiatives.  And they don’t retreat into an individualized, lonely and closed world behind their computer screen – they collaborate and network in the vast array of communities online. 

We can see all of these trends in the Jewish initiatives described above, and we shouldn’t be surprised if they continue to inform Jewish behaviour patterns asthe cohort enters its 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.  The likelihood is surely that, even if this generation does begin to gravitate towards the more established communal frameworks, they will do so with a set of assumptions that will demand and necessitate significant change.

Grassroots Jews may well be a small, fringe endeavour, that barely registers on the communal Richter Scale in 2009.  But the principles, attitudes and behavioursthat underpin it are likely to herald a whole range of changes to Jewish life in the coming decades that are almost impossible to predict.  Grassroots Americans recently elected the first African American president; who knows what Grassroots Jews might achieve?

Grassroots Jews is a co-publication of Zeek and the London-based New Jewish Thought

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But it seems that Shabi’s detractors might have missed the point.

The pivot that Shabi’s work revolves around is, perhaps, easy to miss. It is simple, a delicate foundation for hundreds of pages. Fortunately, Shabi has taken care to illuminate it in an old-fashioned thesis sentence. She writes: “This book is focused on the stifled, small-voice analysis seeking to break this stalemate formula.”  

The impasse is the sharp dichotomy of the “enemy”—the European, the West, pitted against the Oriental, the East. Adhering to this strict narrative allows Israel to depict violence against the state as an attack on the Western world; following this script, the Arab world can align the “European” country as a transplant that must be rooted out. Both sides conveniently ignore the Mizrahim, a group that has been rooted in the region for millennia, veiling the Middle Eastern face of Israel.

Just as Shabi is straightforward about the tight focus of Not the Enemy, she is also honest about her own background. From the first pages, we know that the Guardian contributor is an Iraqi Jew—albeit Israel-born and Britain-bred—and she doesn’t hide the fact that her politics lie on the left. “I visited Israel again as an adult,” she writes, “…by then I knew all about the bad Israel, the bully nation, the land thief and oppressor of Palestinians—no smiling and no mangoes in this version.”

Smiling and mangoes came earlier, during the childhood years spent in the embrace of her large Mizrahi family, exiled from the banks of Babylon to Israel—a land that proved, according to Shabi, much harsher. Long before the state of Israel was established, Mizrahi immigrants were already facing difficulties. Shabi recounts, for instance, the story of Kibbutz Kinneret. The land was initially settled in 1912 by a group of Yemeni families. When Ashkenazim arrived in 1921 and formed a kibbutz on the same property, a handful of the newcomers went to work—not at farming, but at driving the Yemenis away.

Many of the Mizrahim who migrated to Israel after 1948 were stuck in development towns—some, Shabi recounts, were literally dumped there at night. Today, development towns remain mired in trouble. They tend to be poorer and, located on the periphery, they suffer from more security threats—Shabi points to Sderot, economically and emotionally depressed by a rain of rockets from Gaza, as an extreme example.

Not only were the Mizrahim literally ghettoized, Shabi argues, they were culturally ghettoized as well. In a twist of irony, their regional accent was derided as inferior to Ashkenazi intonations. Radio stations refused to give Oriental music any airtime. Though that has changed in recent years, Mizrahi music is referred to as just that. Despite its mainstream acceptance, it bears a label that marks it as something less than Israeli.

Shabi isn’t simply making a laundry list of the historical and contemporary problems of Mizrahim. She is highlighting the ways that Mizrahim, and Israel, have been severed from their Middle Eastern roots. But the Mizrahim—a majority of whom are right-leaning today—also had a hand in the cutting. Shabi writes, “After so many years of learning to hate their own rejected features and having to hide them, the Mizrahis simply projected all that revulsion onto the neighboring Arab community—because self-loathing is hard to maintain and because, there, in the enemy was a perfect outlet for it.”

We have returned to the stalemate, the dichotomy. How to break it? Return to the rejected culture.  The Arab Jew can serve as “a bridge… an embodiment how two seemingly contrary identities can coexist in the same body, in the same space.”

Shabi herself mirrors this return, in a way. Though she seems to identify more as a British-Iraqi and despite her obvious ambivalence about her birthplace, “I go back to Israel to research this book,” she writes, “but also, I just go back there after all."

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Rachel about her book in Tel Aviv this summer. The following conversation, full of equally fascinating insights, is what transpired.

ZEEK: So is a memoir next?

RS: (Laughs). No. I’m an old school journalist. I hate the “I.” But when I discussed the book idea with my agent and publishers, they said, ‘OK, you’re a British journalist, but actually you’re Israeli and you have Iraqi parents – so aren’t you a part of the story?’ The “I” that does feature in the book is really the most I could handle without feeling totally self-absorbed. And I do think that my editors were right, that I needed to be present there—the tension in the book is the result of the first person narration versus the journalist.

ZEEK: Why Mizrahim and why now?

RS: This is a fault line in Israeli society that is not being picked up by international media because they’re so focused on the conflict. But as an Iraqi-Jew, I was attuned to it. When I pitched the idea, people would say, “What do you mean? Arab Jews?” There’s a big knowledge gap. The Arab Jews break a binary—they’re not located in a clear area and so they are often overlooked, because they complicate the story and interfere with people’s hard-wired assumptions about what the story is.

ZEEK: By writing this book, were you negotiating your own identity at all?

RS: I grew up with this [Iraqi] culture in my home, and this exposure caused me to understand the culture to be both rich and enriching.  But I was a migrant kid, so I didn’t want any part of it – you know, I just wanted to be British like all the other kids in monotone 1970s England. Ironically, writing a book about how Arab Jews were discriminated against here brought me back to it.

The musician Yair Dalal said that when he teaches a Mizrahi kid an Arabic song and they go home and play it, and their dad sings along and then they start to talk about the dad’s life in Iraq, it’s like this awakening.  Dalal says that at this point, the kid is back on track. And it seems like so many Mizrahim are off track, that they’ve buried their roots and discarded their home cultures because that’s what is socially received as the right thing to do, in order to be accepted and to get ahead.

ZEEK: In the UK, this is published under the title Not the Enemy. It’s a clever title that seems intended to provoke the reader into immediately questioning who the enemy is. Were you playing with this?

RS: Absolutely. Mizrahim have an awareness that they’re being received in a certain way because they look like the enemy. But what is the enemy? The Arab world? The Arab within the Jew? The oriental was made the enemy. And I’m not sure that Israel can handle this supposed “enemy” surrounding its borders, when it doesn’t even know how to deal with this “enemy” within its own country, within its own Jewish people.

ZEEK: Rather than being the enemy, do Mizrahim have the potential to be a bridge?

RS: There’s always that potential, but it’s difficult because the national script holds sway. And the national script is based on differences and perpetual enmity, not on similarities, bridges or hybrid identities. Moroccans in Sderot, in the midst of (Operation) Cast Lead—while they were getting all these nationalistic messages—were reminiscing about the days they visited with their friends in Gaza, years before the borders and the siege on the strip. Gaza City is nearer to them culturally, physically, geographically then the rest of Israel is, in some ways.

ZEEK: How does Not the Enemy contribute to the narratives of Israel and Palestine?

RS: I was trying to break the polarity… The book shows a population, once a majority, whose existence is barely acknowledged outside of Israel. I don’t think you can understand Israel’s relationship to the region, to the Middle East, unless you understand Israel’s internal relationships.

ZEEK: Was this an attempt to deconstruct Zionism?

RS: I’m not really dealing in labels, especially ones that are so loaded! But, that said, Zionism was conceived in Europe and was premised on bringing a European Jewish society to the region. Those European Jews arrive with a set of assumptions about the Middle East, that it was backwards, uncivilized and inferior to the Western world – and they interacted with the Palestinians and Mizrahim on the basis of such assumptions. But many Mizrahim feel that the Europeans didn’t have a clue about what their lived had been like in the Arab world and are still stunned by the levels of prejudice and ignorance. And these assumptions, this ignorance, was what allowed the Europeans to discriminate against them.

ZEEK: Does Israel need to heal its internal rifts first?

RS: Absolutely. Weak societies can’t make peace. And weak societies are the perfect breeding ground for the far right, for ultra-nationalism and racism – of the sort that we see flourishing in Israel today.  I don’t think Israel is capable of making peace with its neighbors until it makes peace with itself. Israel has to make itself genuinely strong, equal and accepting of other cultures before it can integrate into the region.

ZEEK: In your opinion, how aware is the Israeli public of the issues of discrimination—historical and contemporary—against Mizrahi Jews?

RS: I think Israelis want to put it behind them. When it is acknowledged, it is only acknowledged historically, not as something that continues to happen today. Israelis want to believe that they are an integrated society. But injustice happened, it continues, and it goes unacknowledged and unnoticed—it’s a head in the sand approach. I understand it, but I think Israel needs to look at its painful past to move forward.

ZEEK: In recent years, Mizrahi culture has been incorporated into the mainstream, to some extent, via pop culture. Does this represent integration or fetishization?

RS: Why is it that so much Mizrahi music is put into an ethnic ghetto – why does it even have this sub-label of “Mizrahi” music rather than just being “Israeli”? It says so much about what Israel wants its identity to be. We’ll give the Mizrahim pop culture, we’ll give them their music – which we’ll deem is cheap, populist and low quality. But high culture is left to the Europeans – classical music, quality music, that’s European. So while, yes, things have come a long way, what shape have they taken? Mizrahim are on TV, but they’re hosting cookery programs, they’re advertising the national lottery…

Things should look better by now. If the Mizrahim were truly integrated, they would make up 50% of the supreme court, rather than the tiny percent than they do. They would be presenting intelligent TV programs, reading the news, they would comprise half the Jewish population at Israeli universities…They are not reaching the same levels of professional and educational attainment as Ashkenazim do. But people want to believe that there is equality.

ZEEK: Did your views change as you were working on this book?

RS: When I started researching the book and talking with campaigners and academics I did often wonder if it was really as bad as they described. But you only have to look around you in Israel to see that it is bad. And when I went to the slums and development towns that are home to majority Mizrahi populations, I was shocked by how much people still feel like they’re discriminated against. I was shocked by how much this script still holds sway.  It’s so obviously still an issue – and the fact that it continues to be ignored and swept away just makes it worse.

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The portrait of the country that emerges from this activity is clearly not flattering. Italy is increasingly regarded as paradigmatic of anti-immigrant and racist politics in Europe. As outspoken as rightists in Italy’s government might be, however, this sentiment is not neccessarily generalized. As many Italians find themselves opposed to this kind of politics as are supposed to support it. Even Gianfranco Fini, the ex-leader of the now-defunct, neo-fascist National Alliance, (now a part of Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party), has been increasingly cited as being uncomfortable with the rise in ethnic chauvinism  on Italy’s right. Indeed, the picture is complex, made even more so by how commonplace pro-immigration, anti-racist street art is in the country.

The following pictures, of flyers and posters in Milan, give a good example of how decidedly heated, and undetermined, Italy’s debate on race remains. As an Israeli-American Jew whose background is partially Italian (my father’s family originally hails from Venice), I savor the ideological contradictions that these visual artifacts communicate about my ancestral (and literal) home.

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In our defence though, the questions we are grappling with are important ones in global Jewish terms. Who should represent Jews, what Jewish politics should consist of, how we should relate to Israel: these issues recur throughout the Jewish world.

The first thing I should say in my response to Diana is that her piece appears to conflate two public statements I have made. The first, my piece for Zeek, only mentions Jews for Justice for Palestinians in one paragraph as part of a wider (and generally rather abstract) discussion of British Jewish politics. The second is an invited speech I made at the Annual General Meeting of JFJFP a few weeks before the Zeek article was published. In my speech I described myself as a ‘critical friend’ of the organisation and suggested ways in which JFJFP might build a closer relationship to the UK Jewish community. This speech was for the most part received respectfully but it was also clear that most (but by no means all) participants at the AGM disagreed with what I had to say.

In what follows I will respond briefly to some of Diana’s points. Some things we will have to agree to differ on; other criticisms that Diana made are based perhaps on a misunderstanding of my intentions in writing the Zeek piece and conflating what I said at the AGM and what I wrote in the article.

First of all, I should say that I share many of Diana’s historical criticisms of the Board of Deputies. In its long history it has a shameful history of quietism and accommodation with power. However, while some of the basic problems with the Board remain, I do think that there are grounds for working with the organisation. First, it provides an umbrella for a lot of uncontroversial and necessary work, such as statistical research. Some of its representative work attracts little criticism, as in its defense of Kashrut. The Board is also involved in important inter faith work (although arguably some of its public positions on Israel may undermine this at times) and I had absolutely no reticence in completing a research report on inter faith work for them earlier this year.

Second, the Board no longer has the kind of unquestioned power it used to. The fast-growing UK Haredi community is not affiliated to it and power has shifted to the Jewish Leadership Council and other ad hoc groupings. Third, the recent election of Vivian Wineman, a former chair of British Friends of Peace Now, as President, does suggest that there is more room for movement among the Deputies than has often been supposed. Indeed, Diana herself notes that the Board’s unquestioned support for Israeli actions may finally be waning.

Diana represents my views regarding the Board as follows:

He suggests, as perhaps a modernising response, that like the British democratic parliament, there should be a parliamentary opposition which would allow the safety valve of open debate and thus draw the sting from those who feel excluded from Jewish life, because they happen to have fundamentally different conceptions of what the Board should be doing, particularly with respect to Israel.

I wasn’t actually suggesting that the Board needed to have an official opposition as a practical policy suggestion. Rather, I was trying to demonstrate that the parliamentary model on which the Board is based is imperfect as it fails to allow for an organised but respected opposition. I certainly would not want people who have different conceptions of the Board to be incorporated and neutered through some cynical ‘safety valve’. In fact, my suggestion, perhaps an overly subtle one, was much more radical: that we rethink what it is to ‘represent’ a community.

On to my views of JFJFP, Diana argues that I did not ‘do justice to the actions of JFJFP’ in my article and that the organisation has ‘made strenuous efforts to bridge the gap between ourselves and mainstream Jewry’.  Diana quite rightly points out that JFJFP are often viewed with great hostility and that attempts to reach out are often rebuffed. Where I would differ from her is in her argument that ‘It is not us who shun the community but the mainstream community who seem to find our message difficult to digest’.

Now I have absolutely no hesitation in recognising and condemning the hostility that JFJFP engenders. I acknowledge that JFJFP have, in their public statements at least made efforts to use moderate language most of the time. I also acknowledge that in their current process of consultation about whether to support boycotts of Israel there is a real internal debate going on as to how to engage with the Jewish community and how to bridge the divides on the boycott question within JFJFP itself.

The problem is that there are many signatories to JFJFP that I met at the AGM and at other occasions that are incredibly angry at the ‘mainstream’ community, have very little involvement with it and have no hesitation in attacking it rather than working with it. Now much of this attitude does indeed stem from the historic conformism and conservatism of Anglo-Jewry. Until very recently the only choice for the leftist Jew with concerns about Israel was ‘put up or shut up’. Understandably, many rejected this choice and chose to leave the community, while often still identifying as secular Jews. 

But while I understand where the hostility comes from, I also think that it is ultimately self-defeating and increasingly anachronistic.  In the last decade or two, things have moved on in Anglo-Jewry. Among a younger generation, brought up with Limmud, Jewdas, the JCC for London and the Moishe House, the old choice to put up or shut up no longer has to be made. There are spaces now to be a leftist, critical Jew and still be religious to some degree and to be part of the Jewish community. I have no illusions as to the limits of this trend and that many mainstream institutions are unreformed. But – for the first time in decades, perhaps even ever – there is now something to play for.

There is a real chance to change the Jewish community, to create more spaces to be Jewish and progressive, without the need for hostility and anger.

The biggest difference between Diana and myself probably lies in my attitude to the Palestinians. She claims that

‘It is difficult to understand how to equate the brutality of a military occupation together with its denial of human rights, with injustice to Jews.  Indeed it is difficult to know how, when Jewish life has never been less constricted, what injustice is being perpetrated.’

I do not for a moment deny that the more powerful party in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is the Israeli one. I do not for a moment seek to minimise the brutality of the occupation and the injustices heaped on the Palestinians. However, none of this is to say that Israelis/Jews do not suffer terribly from the conflict. Suicide bombings are horrific and cause huge pain. The spasmodic bombardment of Sderot – however amateurish and however few it kills – causes terrible fear and trauma. No of course I would rather live in Sderot than Gaza, but pain is pain, anguish is anguish, post-traumatic stress is post-traumatic stress.

There’s a bigger issues here. Diana argues:

There is also the question raised by those of us who are schooled in the anti-colonialist struggles of the last century.  This is that those from the dominant side have a responsibility to challenge our own side and to expect the challenge to the oppressed side, to come from within.  Anything else is paternalism.

Absolutely, those of us who are attached to the most powerful side in such conflicts have a duty to challenge our own side. But things don’t stop there. There are fundamental questions of morality and ethics. To give a ‘free pass’ to the ‘oppressed side’ in a conflict is immoral and ultimately self-defeating. One of the main problems in liberation struggles is that when the oppressed side eventually wins, they frequently themselves end up as oppressors. Look at Mugabe!

It is utterly wrong to suspend moral judgements until the far-off day when victory is won. The liberated state is always formed in embryo in the struggle. Do you really want to see a Hamas style government in the occupied territories? In any case, it is pointless to remain silent if the tactics of the oppressed will only increase their suffering and make liberation less likely. Bombarding Sderot was a gift to the right-wing in Israel. It has probably put paid to any chance of a just peace for decades. Hamas and the Israeli right are both happy that they can continue their sordid little conflict indefinitely.

I should state here what it is that I would like to see: a real peace movement that makes excuses for NO ONE. A movement that rejects violence on both sides. At the moment there is no peace movement – just people who are happier to excuse one sides crimes that the other’s.

This is the problem with single –issue politics. In focusing ire on just one group, institution or issue, any kind of holistic vision is lost. The argument I have with Engage is similar to the one I have with you. I am frustrated that in their justifiable desire to oppose anti-Semitism, a leftist group most of whose members hold views on Israel are not to different from JFJFP have essentially sidelined activism against the occupation. I am equally frustrated by JFJFP’s lack of enthusiasm at fighting anti-Semitism (and yes I recognise that the issue is controversial and different definitions abound) which is sidelined in the fight against the occupation. I recognise that JFJFP do important quiet work on anti-Semitism in the pro-Palestinian movement and that Engage do restate their opposition to the occupation regularly, but there is no question that these activities come a very distant second to the main activities.

As I have stated before, there is a real opportunity for a broad-based progressive Jewish organisation that is critical about Israel. At the moment though, the internecine warfare that bedevils the Jewish community and the Jewish left makes this a dim possibility.

But perhaps Diana and I are both wrong: me in my call for a more politicised Jewish community and Diana in her defence of the integrity of her organisation. Maybe, just maybe, the new generation that is emerging will build a Jewish community that is less limited by the (non)-politics that those of us who grew up in the pre-Noughties community have experienced. Perhaps there is more respect for difference – on Israel and on other things. Perhaps there is less tolerance for puerile ‘Judean People’s Front’ politics and a greater desire for grassroots coalition building. Perhaps there is a willingness to see love of Jews, love of Israelis, love of Palestinians, hatred of violence, hatred of racism and hatred of anti-Semitism as non-contradictory values.

In short, maybe Diana and I are dinosaurs.

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Kahn-Harris identifies the antipathy of the Board to open dissension within the Jewish community.  He suggests, as perhaps a modernising response, that like the British democratic parliament, there should be a parliamentary opposition which would allow the safety valve of open debate and thus draw the sting from those who feel excluded from Jewish life, because they happen to have fundamentally different conceptions of what the Board should be doing, particularly with respect to Israel.

The Board of Deputies behaves in this way, Kahn-Harris posits, as a coping strategy by a group infused with anxiety.  He traces this to years of persecution and the necessity of showing a harmonious face to the outside world, which otherwise could divide and destroy it. Its a familiar argument, often used to rationalise reactionary Jewish political behaviour. Unfortunately, in this instance, this account is not applicable.

The Board is only copying a tactic used over the centuries by Jewish communities, where Jewish male elders negotiated for their communities in arenas often hostile to them.  It kept the communities safe, enabled them to live according to Jewish precepts, allowed for the  advancement of the leadership and maintained social control. But this depended above all on the fact that no party rocked the boat.  This precluded of course negotiating with those  from within the communities, who could be seen to challenge powerful interests.

The Board of Deputies has tried on the whole to maintain good relationships with those in power and has usually been on the side of reaction. Although according to William Rubinstein’s A History of Jews in the English Speaking World, the Board initially campaigned against the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain’s first anti-immigration law, passed to limit the number of Jews settling in the country, they soon adapted to it, as the implementation was not strict.  The Board of Deputies argued against confronting Fascists during the 1930s.  The Board were similarly hostile to the pre-war effort to boycott Nazi Germany, a tactic demanded by many Jewish communities throughout the world, but not by the Yishuv in Palestine. It also argued strongly against working with the left wing Anti-Nazi league against British Fascists in the late 1970s.

Although initially an anti-Zionist organisation, seeing themselves as Jews and not as nationalists, this changed in 1937, according to Geoffrey Alderman in Modern British Jewry, with the election onto the Board of an organised group of Zionists .  Since then, the board has maintained a consistent pattern of open defence of Israel’s actions and of organising solidarity events whenever there is major criticism of Israel’s behaviour.  Thus, in spite of the fact that the Zionist Federation is Israel’s main supporting organisation in this country, it is the Board, whose remit is British Jewry, not Israeli politics, that will publicly defend Israel’s actions.

It would seem that the Board actually follows the communal lead by identifying the changing opinions within the community and harnessing them in its public pronouncements.  This is fine when there is a degree of homogeneity within the community and when the board is able to co-opt its critics into the big tent, but fails comprehensively once there is real dissent. 

As Keith Kahn-Harris correctly points out, the major source of dissent now is the behaviour of the state of Israel and the fact that among thinking Jews, the idea of blind support of Israeli actions is no longer acceptable.  In his presentation to the annual general meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians,  Kahn-Harris outlined what he sees as a significant change in Jewish responses to Israel’s actions and his view that there are many Jews thirsty for fresh streams.  He identifies the Gaza attack as perhaps the trigger for a sense of discomfort in the Jewish community about the direction down which Israel is travelling.  This together with the new extreme government in Israel has made Jewish people in Britain start to question their allegiances. 

A group who have been active since the beginning of the second intifada, campaigning against the occupation and for a just peace, namely Jews for Justice for Palestinians may be well placed to pick up those increasingly disillusioned with undiscerning mainstream support. 

Kahn-Harris came to address our annual general meeting and was unhappy with what he found:

‘Many of those attending were extremely bitter with the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community, and most were uninterested in working to bring Jews who were more involved in the community on board. As much as the mainstream community shuns leftist critics of Israel, many of them effectively shun themselves’.

In my view, this bald statement does not do justice to the actions of JFJFP.  It is important to recognise that JFJFP has made strenuous efforts to bridge the gap between ourselves and mainstream Jewry.  We find it extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain access to mainstream synagogues, or community facilities. In fact only recently we were well on the way to mounting an uncontroversial event in a synagogue. But the event was cancelled perhaps because of concerns expressed by some that JFJFP were sponsoring it.  Recently we offered to talk to a community in the home counties, after they expressed anger at a meeting arranged by humanitarian activists to highlight injustices suffered by Palestinians.    The response was a public letter of uncontrolled venom.  And indeed JFJFP has met with the Board on at least two occasions.  It is not us who shun the community but the mainstream community who seem to find our message difficult to digest.

In his presentation, Keith Kahn-Harris made a number of suggestions as to how JFJFP could change to harness this disquiet.  He made it clear that our approach is not calculated to appeal to Jews who ‘love Israel’.  These Jews, according to Kahn-Harris, ask ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians, what about Jews for Justice for Jews?’  They ask why we do not criticise Palestinians who deserve criticism as much as Israelis do and why we are silent on the issue of anti-Semitism and of Hamas.  He believed that this would encourage those Jews now looking for an alternative to take the plunge and join with JFJFP.

Each area mapped out by Keith Kahn-Harris is highly contentious.  It is difficult to understand how to equate the brutality of a military occupation together with its denial of human rights, with injustice to Jews.  Indeed it is difficult to know how, when Jewish life has never been less constricted, what injustice is being perpetrated.  There is also the question raised by those of us who are schooled in  the anti-colonialist struggles of the last century.  This is that those from the dominant side have a responsibility to challenge our own side and to expect the challenge to the oppressed side, to come from within.  Anything else is paternalism.  And indeed while Israel’s supporters continue to maintain a silence about its offences, they take every opportunity to criticise the Palestinians, and often peddle lies. 

Anti-Semitism today has become a much more contested arena.  There are those who would call it anti-Semitism to ‘deny Jews the right to self-determination’, as the EU Monitoring Commission seemed to suggest, taken up with alacrity by the Parliamentary committee on anti-Semitism.  This definition faces challenges from the European Jews for a Just Peace and from JFJP as it seems to be a stalking horse for a declaration that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.  True anti-Semitism is always challenged by members of our group, when on marches or when working with other solidarity movements, and we have managed to change behaviour.  We regard anti-Semitism as the enemy of the Palestinian cause, as much as it is the enemy of Jewish people.  However in talking about anti-Semitism, we need clarity to know exactly what people mean.

At the annual general meeting, signatories suggested that it is not for JFJFP to change, in  reaching out to the anxious, but rather for another organisation, a sort of half way house to be established, something like the almost moribund Peace Now. This would be able to net the unhappy in a way they would find amenable.  Sadly this organisation seems to have gone into hibernation following the ‘War on Terror’.  Now that this strange period is on the wane, perhaps the luminaries of this organisation both in Israel and in the UK might begin to emerge again and take their place in the peace pantheon as a half way house for those beginning at last to feel discomfort  caused by uncritical support for Israel’s actions.

It is strange that Kahn-Harris should be trying to disinter the bones of the British parliamentary system, one that the British public is finding increasingly unsatisfactory.  Maybe it would be more apt to look at the survival tactics of the board over the years.  The board identifies with powerful interests and tries to modify its stance in accordance with perceived changes in the Jewish community itself.  It is now apparent that powerful interests in the United States, in the European Union and in Britain are no longer willing to give Israel the free pass to disregard all international legal frameworks in its endeavour to achieve dominion in the Middle East.  This change is reflected in the more thoughtful approaches of many in the Jewish community that Kahn Harris at the annual general meeting, and Anthony Lerman have sketched out.

This wind of change seems even to be blowing in the direction of the Board itself, perhaps responding to perceived changes in the community. A quick peak at the Board of Deputies’ website shows a complete lack of any activity on behalf of Israel, other than prayers for the family of Gilad Shalit. Maybe the Board itself is beginning to adapt to the new environment in which it now needs to operate. What organisations like Jews for Justice for Palestinians can do is maintain their integrity.  Our goal is ultimately to be accepted by mainstream Jewish organisations, but not to destroy our own values in the process.  

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Home to African refugees, foreign workers, and economically disadvantaged Israelis, South Tel Aviv was once a picture of pluralism and coexistence. Indian, Nepali, Chinese, and Filipino workers gathered in tight clusters, chattering in their mother tongues. Refugees from Darfur, Sudan, and Eritrea lined South Tel Aviv’s parks, their children sharing brightly colored swings and slides with Hebrew-speaking Filipino kids, many of whom were born and raised in Israel.

And then came Operation Oz.

On July 1, hundreds of refugees and foreign workers were detainedin a massive South Tel Aviv raid that marked the beginning of Operation Oz. Waves of arrests continued in the following days. Legal foreign workers and asylum seekers were not immune—they were rounded upand warned to keep out of Tel Aviv. The next time they were caught, the police cautioned them, they would be imprisoned—with their papers in hand.

One of Operation Oz’s goals is to enforce the hitherto ignored Hadera-Gedera law, which states that foreign workers and African refugees—legal or not—must live outside of the central area bound by Hadera in the north and Gedera in the south. The fragile community of African refugees—struggling to get on its feet, dependent on local services, and eager to work—will find itself uprooted and relocated to the economically-depressed periphery of the country.

Operation Oz also seeks to deport illegal foreign workers, including families with children born and raised in Israel. In the past, minors were not eligible for deportation, regardless of their legal status. Now, under the newly formed Population, Immigration, and Border authority, led by Yaakov Ganot, these children who speak Hebrew, who attend Israeli schools and observe Jewish holidays—children who are, arguably, Israeli—can be expelled from the only country they’ve called home.

Why the harsh measures? The Jewish majorityis at risk. Speaking of the African refugees, Ganot said, “…we’ve reached a situation in which 1,680 people arrived in one month alone, when our entire aliya [Jewish immigration to Israel] is 14,000 people per year. As soon as we decided…to legally prohibit them from the area between Gedera and Hadera, an amazing thing happened: Within two months, the number fell to just 300-400 a month.”

More disturbing than Ganot’s focus on demographics at the expense of aiding African refugees is his depiction of these people, which borders on animalistic. Speaking of the refugees’ behavior in government offices, he said: “There are people who defecate in the waiting rooms, who attack and bite.”

How a nation treats those within its borders has implications for how it will treat those outside. Coming just six months after Operation Cast Lead, Operation Oz is disheartening—it seems that when Israel is not raging against those around it, it is raging against those within.

Despite its surface differences, Operation Oz bears a remarkable similarity to Israel’s wars—the “enemies” are non-Jews who, in the minds of Israeli bureaucrats, threaten the existence of the Jewish state. And Operation Oz seems to aim to purge Israel of as many non-Jews as possible—reminiscent of the accusations of ethnic cleansing that have been leveled against Israel by its harshest critics.

I have on many occasions asked myself who, exactly, Israel seeks to defeat. When I look at the collective punishment of Gazans viathe Israeli blockade; when I think of the inhumane treatment of African refugees and the children of foreign workers; when I consider Ganot, who likens refugees to animals, I wonder if Israel seeks to defeat itself.

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However, get on the subject of politics, and Antonello is a completely different beast. Spying my camera the other day, he asked if he could take a look. Not realizing it was still on, I handed it to him, displaying this campaign poster. “I am Lega Nord,” he said rather nervously.

One of Italy’s biggest rightist parties, and a member of the present governing coalition, the Lega Nord (Northern League, in English), is well-known for its anti-immigrant platform. “What interests you about this poster?” Not knowing how to put it, I replied “I’m Jewish. The refugee ship evokes memories.”

Antonello cleared his throat. Then, after a moment’s silence, he began to speak again. “You Jews are alright,” he stated, looking me right in the eye. “You people work hard, you study, you obviously have money. But these Africans and Muslims, they’re lazy and they’re poor. The come to Italy and cause lots of problems.”

I don’t know why I expected otherwise. By the time I figured out how to formulate a proper response in Italian, Antonello was gone, headed down the hallway towards Viale Andrea Dorea. If only I’d worked a little faster, to remind him that in Italy Jews aren’t foreigners, that we’ve been here for well over 2000 years.

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Thus, when we don’t see the bodies of our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, when the terrorist who blows him or herself up has no name or face, when we’re told children are starving but we never see them, apprehension, recognizability, recognition, are all steps needed to get to the point of responsibility, which is what Judith Butler would claim is at least one way into the frames that keep us from recognizing the “other” as being like ourselves. “So just as norms of recognizability prepare the way for recognition," she argues, "so schemas of intelligibility condition and produce norms of recognizability.” How then, do we take the idea of recognizing the other in ourselves, which will lead us to taking personal responsibility (a la Antigone), and bring it into the public sphere? Butler claims that, “Although it is not possible to singularize every life destroyed in war, there are surely ways to register the populations injured and destroyed without fully assimilating to the iconic function of the image.” When we hurt, it is more difficult for us to acknowledge, apprehend, and recognize the pain of others as something equal to our own pain.  And yet that very thing may well be what it is necessary for us to do in order to level the playing field, so to speak.  If we’re all willing to live in a place of precarity, precarity can save us from our own worst selves, for “to call into question this frame by which injurability is falsely and unequally distributed is precisely to call into question one of the dominant frames sustaining the current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, but also in the Middle East.” Judith Butler’s argument is that some form of radical precarity can possibly lead us to a path of non-violence. Where traditional non-violence is a reactive position, what Butler is talking about is active non-violence.  A willingness to risk violence from the other by not acting violently ourselves, first.  Everyone has to, however, be willing to risk this violence simultaneously, in order for this set of non-frames to work.  Grievability is precisely that egalitarian radical notion that is outside the frame of ordinary discourse.

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In much of the British Jewish community, politics is in ‘bad taste’. In synagogues a macher that is too overt in political scheming is likely to be viewed with suspicion. On a community-wide level, inter-denominational politicking is widely practiced, but often looked down on. In the oldest and most influential UK Jewish representative organization, the Board of Deputies, which has a quasi-parliamentary structure and whose deputies elect a president and vice-president, there is nothing resembling parties and deputies rarely face election fights in their own communities. Even those few organisations that are openly political, such as the UK branches of Israeli political parties, tend to be low-key and poorly supported.

In short, there is a disparity between the de facto inevitability and ubiquity of British Jewish communal politics and the degree to which this politics is openly recognised. British Jewish politics is largely a matter for quiet, behind-the-scenes activity.

This reticence is perhaps a function of a tacit assumption that politics is antithetical to community. To be openly political is seen to be to seek to divide, to create strife and discord that threatens to rupture communal harmony. In part this may derive from long-held feelings of insecurity that as a minority in British society, the Jewish community must show a united front and that division can only equal weakness. In terms of Israel, one of the most contentious issues in British Jewish life, public campaigning against Israeli policies (from both a right and a left perspective) or open support for Israeli political parties, are marginal activities – viewed by much of the community as bad form and potentially dangerous. 

The assumption that small minorities need to present a united front is not necessarily illegitimate. The problem is that the lack of politics can create problems more serious than those it is designed to combat. If Jewish communal politics is not acknowledged, politics will still continue, but it will continue in ways that can be corrosive. If those who disagree with a particular direction the community takes can only been seen to legitimately disagree if they do so privately, this increases the likelihood that rather than accept their marginality they will resort to attacking the community.

I am thinking here about the position of those who disagree with communal support for Israel. Contrary to the commonly made accusation that the community ‘suppresses’ debate, it is more the case that debate is possible if it is done quietly and behind the scenes. The trouble is that some will not accept only being able to disagree privately while in public maintaining a facade of unity. Without a legitimate political process through which to debate communal policies, those British Jews who are critical of Israel have often resorted to attacking the community from the outside.

I recently attended the annual general meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, an organization whose aims I broadly support. Many of those attending were extremely bitter with the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community, and most were uninterested in working to bring Jews who were more involved in the community on board. As much as the mainstream community shuns leftist critics of Israel, many of them effectively shun themselves.

It is essential to begin the process of rethinking British Jewish politics. The tacit assumption that politics and community are antithetical needs to be questioned. In any but the tiniest, most homogeneous community, differences of opinion are inevitable and there has to be a way of dealing with these differences without the dissolution of the community. What models might there be for a community whose political system could allow for the mediation of difference? What kind of political language do British Jews need to embrace in order to function without undue rancor?

One source of inspiration might be parliamentary democracy itself. The Board of Deputies is structured as a kind of parliament, but it lacks one crucial element of parliamentary democracy – an official opposition. When a politician who has been democratically elected speaks for a country, region or locality, it is clear that even if they govern for all, they were only elected by some. To be a leader in a democracy is to publicly affirm that not everyone agrees. Indeed, when democracies work best (and admittedly they often do not) the opposition plays an important role in the democratic process, scrutinising the executive and acting as a constant rebuke to delusions of unanimity. Political opponents may disagree vehemently but in the best parliamentary democracies, this does not stop them respecting each other as individuals, nor does the fact of divided political loyalties necessarily prevent the cohesiveness of the nation.

The parliamentary model is of course not applicable in its entirety in the British Jewish community. It is hard to envisage a truly representative Jewish parliament – who decides who is a Jew and who can vote? But the parliamentary model teaches us that it does suggest that politics can overt politics can not only allow community and difference to be balanced, it can also improve the quality of the leadership within of the Jewish community. Above all, it suggests that we should not fear politics but embrace it.

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