Bombarded
by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into
seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating
Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism menace
by
Jonathan Cook
End-of-year
polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and
political trends over the past year and predict where things are
heading in the next. But a recent poll of European Jews – the
largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply
misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a
new, left-wing form of anti-semitism.
Part
7 - Only ‘partial’ Jews
In fact,
Netanyahu’s views are widely shared in Israel. A few years ago the
celebrated liberal Israeli author A B Yehoshua outraged American Jews
by saying they could only ever be what he called “partial Jews”
outside Israel. Speaking of the divide between them and Israeli Jews,
he said: “In no way are we the same thing - we are total and
they are partial.” He called the refusal of all Jews to live in
Israel and become “complete Jews … a very deep failure of the
Jewish people”.
The high
levels of racism among Israelis towards non-Jews is highlighted in
every poll. According to one this month, more than half of Israeli
Jews – or those willing to admit it – believed that “most
Jews are better than most non-Jews because they were born Jews”.
Only a fifth rejected the statement outright. Some 74 percent were
disturbed by hearing Arabic, the mother tongue of the fifth of the
country’s population who are Palestinian citizens. And a further 88
percent did not want their son to befriend an Arab girl.
A
separate poll this month found that, apart from Greeks, Israelis hold
the most anti-immigrant views of 27 countries surveyed – more so
even than Hungarians.
By
immigrants, of course, Israelis mean non-Jews. They do not regard the
millions of Jews who have arrived in Israel from Europe and the
Americas over the past decades as immigrants. Instead they are viewed
as olim, or those who “ascend” to Israel, supposedly returning to
their Biblically ordained home.
It's
this ideological affinity – between a European ultra-nationalism
and the kind of Zionist ultra-nationalism dominant in Israel – that
explains why the far-right in Europe venerates Israel while despising
Jews, and why so many Israelis prefer an Orban to a Soros.
And it
is also, of course, explains why Netanyahu and most Israelis detest
Corbyn.
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