Letters - 21 October 2022
From Antisemitism to Mental health
Antisemitism
Thanks to Ol Rappaport (30 September) for a careful, focused analysis of the question ‘Is the Religious Society of Friends antisemitic?’ The answer is clearly, and sadly, ‘yes’.
Antisemitism is racism, and an anti-racist church should work against it, as much as it should against racism targeting any other group. In what ways might the Religious Society of Friends’ (RSoF) institutional beliefs about Israel and Jews be shaped by the kind of thinking that permeates left-wing politics in the UK?
Our Society perhaps exhibits the same sort of meandering, take-the-long-way-round antisemitism that we’ve see in the Labour Party and other organs of the left. And the response of Quakers to the charge tends to be similar: ‘We are an anti-racist organisation, and I’m an anti-racist individual, so that can’t be true.’ But it can. Ol has gathered the data to show how we can tell.
I suspect that this is a generational issue. Without knowing exactly what the overlap is in membership between the RSoF and the political parties I do sometimes feel as if the Society is treated like some sort of ancestral think-tank, currently being handed over from overwhelmingly Labour-supporting boomers to Green-supporting millennials and Zoomers. How much of the institutional knowledge of the Society has emerged from the left-wing sympathies of the large influx of members in the 1980s? Perhaps from a general tendency to assume that scrappy underdogs are virtuous and admirable by definition and to assume that any technocratic, industrialised, western-backed (and especially US-backed) adversaries they might have are bad and wrong, likewise. And how long of a shadow is cast in a western left-wing mind which reached maturity at the height of the cold war by communist tropes of Jews as inherently untrustworthy ‘rootless cosmopolitans’?
It was reported that [Jeremy Corbyn advisor] Andrew Murray sought to defend Jeremy Corbyn against claims that he fostered an antisemitic sentiment within the Labour Party by saying that he is ‘empathetic with the poor, the disadvantaged, the migrant, the marginalised’ and then claiming that British Jews are none of those things, but are ‘prosperous’. A claim that is itself close to an antisemitic trope. And which might give anyone in any ethnic group currently being supported by Labour pause to wonder how deep that support really goes. Is that kind of thinking to be found in the RSoF too?
Well, if that is a significant part of the explanation for how the Society has ended up exhibiting these antisemitic behaviours the problem may fix itself as the generations dominating the Society turn over naturally. And maybe not, depending on how ingrained is this institutional belief that Israel is uniquely bad and no Jew quite has clean hands from that. We should understand to what degree it is, and act accordingly.
Keith Braithwaite
Is the Religious Society of Friends antisemitic?
When letters are written in the Friend in opposition to Quaker critics of Israel, it provokes letters in response, as this one. So there may be more such references in the Friend than for other unpleasant regimes. In any case criticism of governmental behaviour is not regulated by some equalities legislation. Being a student of French I focused on French atrocities in Algeria at one time. Because of the connection to the British colonialist past I focused on South Africa later on. And the responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian people is just as directly ours.
There are, of course, evils perpetrated by countries which do not receive as much concerned coverage as they deserve: Indonesia for the massacre of communists (with British support) might be one; our own country over its atrocities in Kenya might be another. There’s no shortage.
If I am to be accused of antisemitism under the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition, so be it. I will not modify my criticism of Israel’s appalling impact over many decades on the people of Palestine.
Antisemitism is an awful reality. Sometimes, however, its use to denigrate people may be dangerously politicised, as we have seen through Al Jazeera’s revelations of some of the skulduggery that was involved in the campaign to oust Jeremy Corbyn.
Jonathan Dale
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