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| Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel | Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel |
| (10 days later) | |
| What a strange, Alice-through-the-looking-glass time it is to be a liberal American Jew in Britain. When I was growing up in New York, it was a given that one supported Israel. Israel, like America, was a country made from desperate immigrants. It was where my great-grandmother lived after seeing two of her sons go to the concentration camps, and where the memorial for my great-uncle Jakob, who was murdered in Auschwitz, was erected. Israel was the Holocaust’s happy ending, and you only have to look at Hollywood to know how much America loves simple happy endings. Israel = good, Israel’s enemies = evil antisemites. But to be honest, I always resented this. I dislike being told what to think, or people making lazy assumptions about where my loyalties should lie. | What a strange, Alice-through-the-looking-glass time it is to be a liberal American Jew in Britain. When I was growing up in New York, it was a given that one supported Israel. Israel, like America, was a country made from desperate immigrants. It was where my great-grandmother lived after seeing two of her sons go to the concentration camps, and where the memorial for my great-uncle Jakob, who was murdered in Auschwitz, was erected. Israel was the Holocaust’s happy ending, and you only have to look at Hollywood to know how much America loves simple happy endings. Israel = good, Israel’s enemies = evil antisemites. But to be honest, I always resented this. I dislike being told what to think, or people making lazy assumptions about where my loyalties should lie. |
| America’s devoted support for Israel is well known, and increasingly is regarded by Europe with the same kind of disgusted bafflement with which it views the US relationship with guns. This week it was reported in this paper that it’s “unthinkable” in Hollywood to criticise Israel (that pesky Jewish mafia – displease them and they’ll force-feed you matzos until you explode). The Jewish Journal chided high-profile Jews in Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg, for failing to make their feelings about the Gaza conflict known, as though anyone gives a flying hamantasch what Spielberg thinks about Gaza. | America’s devoted support for Israel is well known, and increasingly is regarded by Europe with the same kind of disgusted bafflement with which it views the US relationship with guns. This week it was reported in this paper that it’s “unthinkable” in Hollywood to criticise Israel (that pesky Jewish mafia – displease them and they’ll force-feed you matzos until you explode). The Jewish Journal chided high-profile Jews in Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg, for failing to make their feelings about the Gaza conflict known, as though anyone gives a flying hamantasch what Spielberg thinks about Gaza. |
| So that’s America. And now we turn to Britain, where I now live, and where, as Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times recently, “not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience”. This week’s most glaring example of this mentality comes courtesy of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, which demonstrated thinking so nervy and so potentially hypocritical that at least one legal expert said it “may well count as unlawful discrimination”. | So that’s America. And now we turn to Britain, where I now live, and where, as Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times recently, “not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience”. This week’s most glaring example of this mentality comes courtesy of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, which demonstrated thinking so nervy and so potentially hypocritical that at least one legal expert said it “may well count as unlawful discrimination”. |
| The Tricycle, which has hosted the Jewish Film Festival for the past eight years, told the festival’s organisers that they could not hold it this year if the festival accepted financing – of the token amount of £1,400 – from the Israeli embassy, as it always has done before. Fine – but if the theatre doesn’t want to risk accusations of bigotry, it needs to be consistent. Only two months ago, it hosted the London Asian Film Festival, partially financed by the Indian government, and this was apparently of no concern, despite India’s not exactly perfect human rights record. | The Tricycle, which has hosted the Jewish Film Festival for the past eight years, told the festival’s organisers that they could not hold it this year if the festival accepted financing – of the token amount of £1,400 – from the Israeli embassy, as it always has done before. Fine – but if the theatre doesn’t want to risk accusations of bigotry, it needs to be consistent. Only two months ago, it hosted the London Asian Film Festival, partially financed by the Indian government, and this was apparently of no concern, despite India’s not exactly perfect human rights record. |
| Pointing out that the theatre accepted a £725,000 grant from the Arts Council – which in turn comes from a government whose stance on Israel was described this week as “morally indefensible” by one of its own ministers – is almost too easy. A person connected to the theatre told me the difference is that these grants, the Indian and British ones, came from the cultural arm of the governments concerned, whereas the Israeli one is very much connected to Israel’s embassy – plus India is not at this time engaged in a conflict (though this argument works less well with regard to the British money). | |
| But more complex issues were to come. The theatre asked to view all the festival’s films in advance “to approve their content”, a request that even it conceded was tantamount to censorship. The theatre also told the organisers that it would happily host the festival – if they refused the embassy’s money and accepted reimbursement from the theatre, as though money was ever the issue. That the theatre’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, said she made this offer to keep the Tricycle “politically neutral” – as though asking Jews to renounce Israel could ever be a neutral act – reminds me how very far away I am from the States. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. | But more complex issues were to come. The theatre asked to view all the festival’s films in advance “to approve their content”, a request that even it conceded was tantamount to censorship. The theatre also told the organisers that it would happily host the festival – if they refused the embassy’s money and accepted reimbursement from the theatre, as though money was ever the issue. That the theatre’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, said she made this offer to keep the Tricycle “politically neutral” – as though asking Jews to renounce Israel could ever be a neutral act – reminds me how very far away I am from the States. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. |
| Clearly, a film festival being cancelled is not on a par with civilian deaths. But it says something very telling about certain lazily left-ish attitudes towards Israel in this country, not least because the Tricycle is not the only theatre in Britain to cancel a Jewish event: a theatre company from Jerusalem was forced not to perform in Edinburgh after protests, and a show featuring dancers from Ben Gurion University is also being targeted. Meanwhile, the London Palestine Action group protests outside factories in this country that allegedly manufacture weapons for drones for Israel. At least that protest is logical, unlike those who congratulate themselves for shutting down Jewish cultural events. Things have come to a pretty pass when a liberal American Jew finds clearer thinking among a Palestinian liberation group than those who run theatres a few miles from her home. | Clearly, a film festival being cancelled is not on a par with civilian deaths. But it says something very telling about certain lazily left-ish attitudes towards Israel in this country, not least because the Tricycle is not the only theatre in Britain to cancel a Jewish event: a theatre company from Jerusalem was forced not to perform in Edinburgh after protests, and a show featuring dancers from Ben Gurion University is also being targeted. Meanwhile, the London Palestine Action group protests outside factories in this country that allegedly manufacture weapons for drones for Israel. At least that protest is logical, unlike those who congratulate themselves for shutting down Jewish cultural events. Things have come to a pretty pass when a liberal American Jew finds clearer thinking among a Palestinian liberation group than those who run theatres a few miles from her home. |
| Jon Henley wrote beautifully in the Guardian on Friday about the rise in antisemitic attacks in Europe. Proud as I am to work for a paper that covers the atrocities in Palestine so diligently, it is outrageous that it took this country’s liberal media so long to report on this issue. It is infuriating that the liberal factions in both countries in which I have nationality insist on taking such a slanted, kneejerk view of Israel. Just as the pro-Israel sentiment in the US so often shades into prejudice against Muslims, so the anti-Israel one in Britain slips all too quickly into antisemitism. | Jon Henley wrote beautifully in the Guardian on Friday about the rise in antisemitic attacks in Europe. Proud as I am to work for a paper that covers the atrocities in Palestine so diligently, it is outrageous that it took this country’s liberal media so long to report on this issue. It is infuriating that the liberal factions in both countries in which I have nationality insist on taking such a slanted, kneejerk view of Israel. Just as the pro-Israel sentiment in the US so often shades into prejudice against Muslims, so the anti-Israel one in Britain slips all too quickly into antisemitism. |
| Jews are not Israel (something liberal Jews have been saying for years) but nobody – not a London theatre, not even Steven Spielberg – has the right to tell them what to think about it, or to ask them to prove their good Jewish credentials by either supporting or condemning it. Watch yourself, Europe. Some of your roots are showing. | Jews are not Israel (something liberal Jews have been saying for years) but nobody – not a London theatre, not even Steven Spielberg – has the right to tell them what to think about it, or to ask them to prove their good Jewish credentials by either supporting or condemning it. Watch yourself, Europe. Some of your roots are showing. |
| Twitter: @HadleyFreeman | Twitter: @HadleyFreeman |