Next Year in Jerusalem

The paperback of Everyday Hate comes out on 16 May, fully updated with two new chapters about October 7 and everything since. Pre-order your copy here for a bargain £9.99 https://amzn.eu/d/cAWTxi2

Don’t conflate Jews and Judaism with Israel. That’s the advice you’ll hear repeatedly from people warning against being antisemitic when you are debating Israel, Gaza, the war, and everything else related. Don’t hold Jews responsible for whatever Israel does and don’t confuse the two things.

If only things were that simple.

This weekend two different left wing journalists on opposite sides of the Atlantic wandered into this minefield, and both got it wrong - from completely opposite directions.

Michael White, the former political editor of the Guardian, came in for heavy and justified criticism when he posted on Twitter/X about “Jewish Brits” and “their own disreputable Netanyahu government”. Lots of people cried foul: Jewish Brits are British, not Israeli (the clue is in the name), and their government, disreputable or otherwise, is led by Rishi Sunak not Benjamin Netanyahu. Suggest otherwise and you are implying that Jews who are born in Britain, whose families may have been here for several generations, are not truly British. It’s a fairly standard racist trope, whether about Jews or any other minority of recent immigrant descent, and White was quickly called out on it.

On the same day, a continent away, Mehdi Hasan trod this line much more carefully. “Israel, a man-made nation-state, and Judaism, a great religion and ethnicity, are not the same thing”, he posted. “Some of us have spent years trying to make that clear to antisemites who conflate Israel with Judaism.” It’s what anti-Zionists say when they want to make clear that their opposition to Israel - even if it extends to wanting Israel to cease to exist - is not motivated by anti-Jewish animus.

Hasan is right that Israel and Judaism are not the same thing; but they are also not entirely separate either, and this is where it gets much more complicated. The land of Israel is woven into the fabric of the Jewish religion. Barely a Jewish prayer or festival goes by without Israel, Jerusalem or Zion being mentioned. This week is Passover, when Jews around the world gather to eat a festive meal and read the Seder service that recounts the exodus from slavery in Egypt, via the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea and the Ten Commandments, to freedom in the promised land.

This may or may not all be biblical myth, but it’s a myth on which the very idea of a Jewish people is built. Around 80% of British Jews usually attend a Passover Seder, including those who are not that religious at all, and at the end of the the night we traditionally declare together “Next Year In Jerusalem!” - as the Seder service has done for centuries. Zionism may be a modern political movement and Israel a modern nation-state, but the idea that the Jewish people are connected to the land of Israel is as ancient as the Jews themselves.

This is reflected in how Jews feel about Israel as a country. According to the latest polling from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (done before October 7), 73% of British Jews feel “emotionally attached” to Israel. Other polls have shown large majorities of Jews feel that Israel is part of their Jewish identity. This means that while it is wrong for Michael White to refer to British Jews as if they are no different from Israelis, it is also wrong for Mehdi Hasan to treat Israel and Jews as two completely different categories, never to be mixed. The truth is somewhere in between, but also something quite different.

This emotional attachment that Jews have for Israel often gets mistranslated into “support”, as if wanting Israel to do well at Eurovision means that diaspora Jews are fully signed up to the policies of the Israeli government or their latest military operation. From there, it’s a small step to the kind of ‘dual loyalty’ tropes that blame British or American Jews for the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza.

I think much of the confusion hangs on the word “support”, and it’s a word I’ve stopped using for this reason. If you think instead of Jews around the world feeling attached to Israel, it’s easier to avoid the assumption that they support its specific policies and actions. They might do, or they might not, and they often disagree amongst themselves about this (and much else), but it shouldn’t be presumed.

In fact - and this shouldn’t be a surprise - you get a wide range of views about Israeli politics amongst those Jews who feel an emotional attachment to Israel. According to one poll from August 2023, a whopping 79% of British Jews disapproved of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. I bet a large proportion of those Netanyahu-hating Jews have been on pro-Israel demonstrations since October 7, or have been posting on social media about the hostages in Gaza. Supporting Israel and supporting its government is not the same thing.

You even get Jews who feel a strong emotional attachment to Israel, have family and friends there, go on holiday there - and don’t pay much attention to its politics at all. And why should they? I don’t demand that my friends of Irish ancestry have an opinion about whatever the Irish government did last week.

Most importantly, a lot of Jews are only just working this out for ourselves. Our connection to Israel is complicated and fluid, and sometimes reveals itself to us at unexpected moments and in ways even we Jews don’t expect.

October 7 was definitely one of those moments, and the Hamas attack on Israel that day felt, for many Jews, like an attack on all of us. I was surprised to see how much this affected those Jews who previously weren’t very connected to Israel at all. Even David Baddiel, who for years was famously and proudly disinterested in Israel, found that he too had that same emotional attachment, buried deep within.

Consequently, while Michael White’s blunt conflation of Jews and Israelis is obviously wrong, Mehdi Hasan’s assertion that they are completely separate is not welcome either. Jewish identity and its relation to Israel - the place, the people, the land and the State - is intensely personal, highly individual, and complex enough without other people dictating the terms of that identity to us.