The ethnostate illusion
There’s been growing concern in America over the increasingly mainstream belief that Israel drags it into foreign wars, a belief given rocket fuel by the war against Iran.
Melanie Phillips
This belief not only ignores demonstrable reality—the thousands of Americans who have been killed by Iranian-backed terrorists or militias for almost half a century; the accelerated progress by Tehran towards nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could reach the United States; and the Iranian regime’s implacable goal of destroying America (the “Great Satan”) as well as Israel (the “Little Satan”).
It also channels the odious image of war-mongering Jews straight out of the ancient antisemitism playbook. It’s an image reflecting the belief embedded in Western culture of the demonic, cunning Jews acting covertly in their own interests to put others in danger.
This belief was formerly confined to cranks and nut jobs on the fringes of society. No longer. Mainstreamed by the Tucker Carlson faction, it’s cutting a swath across the ranks of conservatively minded, mainly young Americans.
Last week, Brian McGinnis, a veteran U.S. Marine, burst into a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, D.C., and yelled: “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!”
In the United States, this belief has been fueling a widening division in Republican circles over the nature of conservatism, a fissure that is remarkably being framed around the issue of Israel.
However, the claim that Iran is Israel’s war and that the Jews are risking World War III has erupted in Britain, too. As in the United States, it’s being expressed not just by dyed-in-the-wool antisemites and political activists on the far-right fringe, but also by apolitical, ordinary people.
It’s based on a refusal to accept that Jewish and British or American interests actually coincide. Partly, that’s caused by an ignorance of world events so great that such people settle on Israel as the one country in the Middle East about which they ever hear, unfortunately, picking up mainly lies and distortions.
But why has this trope of sinister Jewish power surfaced now in such volume and with such traction?
Those listening carefully to such people discover they are telling us the reason. They believe that their culture is being taken away from them. They see the defamation of all white people as “colonialist” and privileged, and all men as violent, abusive and predatory.
In Britain, they have watched mass immigration transform their neighbourhoods and their country out of all recognition on the basis that their own historic culture is racist and must be replaced by multiculturalism.
In both the United Kingdom and the United States, they have watched in horror the progressive destruction of social and moral norms, and the hijacking of language itself—producing the whole grisly gamut of intersectional bullying and Soviet-style denial of reason and reality.
And they view the Jews as being the cause of this because it’s the agenda of the left, and they see many prominent Jews on the left.
This is particularly so in America, where some 70% of Jews have embraced liberal ideologies. In Britain, too, Jews are disproportionately involved in public and political life.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that ideological leftism is a Jewish movement. It means that such people only see the Jews who are involved, ignoring the non-Jews who pump this stuff out in the universities and schools, the media, NGOs, the artistic world, the professions—in other words, the entire cultural elite.
There is, however, another element in this complaint that gives it an even more savage edge. The charge—and it’s toxic—is that the Jews who have destroyed the West are themselves immunised from the effects of this because they have the State of Israel to go to.
The Jews, say such people, maintain that it’s right and necessary for them to have a state for themselves, yet they are denying that privilege to the rest of us. They have a home of their own to go to; we don’t anymore.
This ignores the fact that most American or British Jews have no intention of living in Israel. It also fails to acknowledge those Jews who are not on the left, who are themselves American or British patriots and who support the idea that Americans and Brits are entitled to a national identity rooted in their history, culture and tradition.
But the complainants dismiss this because they say bitterly that the Jews have something they themselves aren’t allowed to have: an “ethnostate.” The left uses this to demonise Israel; the right wants one of its own.
This word is now as ubiquitous in these circles as it is absurd. An ethnostate restricts citizenship to members of a particular racial or ethnic group—in this case, defined as white people or born in the United Kingdom or the United States.
Britain was never an ethnostate. On the contrary, Britishness is an umbrella concept that allows immigrants to become equal citizens even if they don’t correspond to its white, Christian or dominant English culture.
America, the nation of immigrants with a large black African-heritage population, was never an ethnostate. And nor is Israel, where 20% of its citizens are Arabs, and a majority of Jews aren’t white-skinned Europeans but brown-skinned or black descendants of Jews from ancient Middle East communities.
Of course, it’s always the case that the deeper the trouble a society is in, the more it will turn on the Jews. And the charge of warmongering is inescapably and profoundly antisemitic.
Yet it’s impossible not to hear the genuine cry of pain—the justified sense of existential isolation, abandonment and betrayal shared by millions who haven’t gone down the antisemitism rabbit-hole, but simply want their nation and its historic culture back.
Jews of all people should be sympathetic to this. After all, the ancient Israelites were the earliest pioneers of the nation-state. More than any other people, Jews understand that in order to have a future, a people must connect to its past and maintain its historic culture.
Jews have benefited hugely from the civilised society that allowed them to prosper in America and Britain. So they have a duty to lend their voices to the defence of the West against Islamization and cultural takeover.
Unfortunately, virtually the only Jewish voices to be heard are those demonising this as “white supremacy,” racism and “Islamophobia.” In Britain, Jewish leaders have supported government proposals to introduce protection for Muslims that will have a chilling effect on necessary debate about Islamic extremism.
This is very wrong in itself. But it’s also guaranteed to make resentment of the Jews even worse by appearing to prove the charge that the Jews “don’t care about the rest of us.”
“So what?” many Jews would say in response; “antisemitism lies beyond reason and it’s eternal, so there’s no point even trying to fight it.”
This is simply wrong. As I say in my new book, published this week, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, there’s plenty that can and should be done to combat it.
True, antisemitism can never be defeated, but Jewish passivity makes it worse. Failing to produce arguments and evidence to show that claims of Jewish power over U.S. policy are groundless reinforces the belief that they are true.
Jews have to stand up for themselves in the right way. The Jewish world has consistently been doing so in the wrong way, and then wonders why it hasn’t gotten anywhere.
In my book, I set out a strategy for both individuals and community leaders that turns many of these flawed assumptions upside down. Community leaders should start speaking truths that Jews shy away from, such as the prevalence of Muslim antisemitism or Israel’s legally watertight claim to the land. Individuals should use difficult encounters about Israel as an opportunity to surprise their foes and so open their minds by at least a crack.
Even in today’s poisonous climate, this can have a remarkable effect. In any event, Jews—who have an obligation to stand up for truth against lies—should take on those foaming right now about “war-mongering for Israel” simply because it’s the right thing to do.
