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David Horovitz: Not Just Anti-Semitism

Back in 1978, when Michael Howard, a brilliant Cambridge graduate and lawyer, was seeking a seat in the House of Commons, he found himself repeatedly rejected as a Conservative candidate. In some cases, it was said, constituency officials deemed him slippery or overly intellectual. But in the battle he narrowly lost to represent the safe Conservative district of West Derbyshire, his Jewishness counted against him, too. As Matthew Parris, who surprisingly prevailed over Howard and was West Derbyshire�s MP for seven years before entering a career in journalism, would later recall, a handful of the selection officers "had been muttering about his being Jewish."

This was the dawn of the Thatcher era, itself a time when most Conservative voters, indeed most Britons, would have been amazed to learn that the Iron Lady�s government was overflowing with Jews -- Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, Leon Brittan and Malcolm Rifkind, to name only the most prominent quartet. They kept their religion close to the chest, for fear that it would count against them with voters. Indeed when Brittan lost his cabinet post, it was widely suggested he blamed anti-Semitism for his downfall, and not as widely disputed.

Flash forward a generation and the same Michael Howard, now 62 and the last of the Thatcherite heavyweights, has just been selected unopposed to lead the Conservatives, now in opposition disarray. Howard�s Jewishness -- his grandmother perished at Auschwitz, his mother attends an Orthodox synagogue in north London and he is a rarer presence at a Liberal congregation -- has been reported in the British media, but in non-dramatic terms. It has been discussed at length mainly by columnists musing upon its implications, should he replace Tony Blair, for the prime minister�s traditional role as adviser to the Crown in appointing senior church officials.

This unremarkable treatment of a British Jew�s unique rise -- the Victorian-era prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, though born to Italian-Jewish parents, was baptized as a child -- does not mean that Britain has shed its anti-Semitic instincts. But in today�s proudly multicultural United Kingdom, the disease is plainly less pervasive than just a generation ago, when Howard was struggling to get his political start.

Despite this shift, Israel�s minister for Diaspora affairs, Natan Sharansky, insists on interpreting the recent European Union poll, which notoriously found Israel to be the nation most widely regarded as a threat to world peace, as the consequence almost solely of widespread anti-Semitism in the U.K. and other polled countries. Even though the Dutch, long Israel�s best friends in Europe, also placed the Jewish state at the top of their worry chart, the minister will accept no other explanation.

His stance is not completely wild. There has been a horrifying rise in anti-Semitic incidents across Europe and despicable tolerance of Arab anti-Semitism. And anti-Semitism is a factor in some Europeans� critical attitude to Israel. But to insist that this is essentially the only cause, and that overwhelmingly negative attitudes to Israel would evaporate if anti-Semitism could be more effectively countered, is wrongheaded and unhelpful. It implies that had a similar poll been taken three years ago, it would have produced comparable results, and that is not the case. Israel�s unhappy chart-topping is a consequence of other factors, too, including real misgivings in Europe over our policies, and the unrelentingly pitiful failure of Israeli officials to convey their sense of what is going on here.

On the first of these factors, Europe, and the rest of the world for that matter, might hardly be blamed. After all, Israel�s own opposition parties and activist groups -- from right and, mainly, left -- continuously criticize the government for its purported exaggerated or insufficient use of force against the Palestinians, counterproductive settlement-building policies, misrouting of security-barriers, general stupidity, bloody-mindedness and worse. And never mind the outsiders. When the chief of staff agonized recently over whether the ongoing "collective punishment" of the Palestinians was playing into the hands of the terror recruiters, and whether the government might have done more to bolster the credibility of the former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas, this was headline news the world over.

What Europeans may not understand, however, is that these are the voices of a liberal democracy, freely, frankly and passionately airing their most profound concerns. Israel agonizes because our dilemmas are acute -- because our leaders, for instance, are trying to find a balance between thwarting bombers on the one hand, and minimizing the hostility we engender among innocent Palestinians on the other, when such a balance may, in fact, be impossible to achieve. And Europeans, like Middle East-watchers the world over, may not recognize the context in which we are publicly vexing ourselves because, as ever, of that failure to explain -- the aggressive government spokespeople, the ongoing official boycott of the BBC, the foolish alienation of many Israel-based foreign correspondents by the Government Press Office, the poorly chosen or absent envoys (there is no Israeli ambassador to the U.K. right now, for instance), etc.

Sharansky recently visited Britain and the U.S., and spent several days speaking on

campuses. He was shocked to learn, he acknowledged at a lunch for journalists on his return, that the worldwide battle these days is no longer about right and wrong in the intifada, but over whether Israel has a right to exist.

Sharansky allowed that, "of course, Israel is failing in its PR campaign." But he ascribed that failure to the Rabin government�s scrapping of public awareness programs a decade ago, pleaded budgetary impediments today, said he couldn�t speak for the Foreign Ministry anyway, and quickly returned to his prime hobby-horse: anti-Semitism as the source of all our ills.

But then he remembered he did have something to add. Hearing Sharansky�s account of anti-Israeli sentiment among students, the prime minister has issued a directive: On visits to the U.S., Israel�s ministers must now include on their itinerary at least one university speaking engagement. It�s a prospect that makes the blood run cold. For the sorry truth is that, with too few exceptions, our ministers, unsubtle, inarticulate, often extreme, are among the people least equipped to persuade skeptical outsiders that Israel is no threat to world peace.