The need to split hairs

Howard Jacobson has been writing lately of the distinctions to be made between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, a crucial issue for what he views in this New Republic article as a 'Pox Britannia', an infection, or in other words the anti-Semitism stealthily making its way through English society in general and the liberal intelligentsia in particular.

It is difficult to think clearly about the question of Israel/Palestine; even more difficult to know what to think of what has now come to be known as 'Gaza', the shorthand expression for Israel's recent offensive. But take the kind of brilliant analysis, demonstrated here by Jacobson, and the point of knowing how to differentiate between being properly analytical and naively emotive, is made ultimately clear:

The premise of Seven Jewish Children is a fine piece of fashionable psychobabble that understands Zionism as the collective nervous breakdown of the Jewish people; instead of learning the humanizing lesson of the Holocaust--whatever that might be, and whatever the even greater obligation on non-Jews to learn it too--Jews vent their instability on the Palestinians in imitation of what the Nazis vented on them. This is a theory that assumes what it offers to prove, namely how like Nazis Israelis have become. Furthermore, it dispossesses Jews of their own history, turning the Holocaust into a sort of retrospective retribution, Jews being made to pay the price then for what Israelis are doing now. Clearly, this exists at a more extreme end of the continuum of willed forgetting than Holocaust denial itself, its ultimate object being to break the Jew-Holocaust nexus altogether. Let us no longer deny the Holocaust, let us rather redistribute the pity. If there is a victim of the Holocaust today, it is the people of Gaza.

Given how hard it is to distinguish Jew from Israeli in all this, the mantra "It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel" looks increasingly disingenuous. But there is no challenging it, not even with such eminently reasonable responses as, "That surely depends on the criticism," or "Calling into question an entire nation's right to exist is not exactly 'criticism.'" Nor is the distinction between Israeli and Jew much respected where the graffitists and the baby bullies of the schoolyard do their work. But, in the end, it is frankly immaterial how much of this is Jewhating or not. The inordinacy of English Israel-loathing--ascribing to a country the same disproportionate responsibility for the world's ills that was once ascribed to a people--is toxic enough in itself. The language of extremism has a malarious dynamic of its own, passing effortlessly from the mischievous to the unwary, and from there into the bloodstream of society. And that's what one can smell here. Infection.

This concludes his article. It's helpful to quote it before reminding ourselves of the frankly shocking comments that are being made these days in certain corners of English liberal intelligentsia, Ken Loach apparently the model in this respect:

The distinguished British film director Ken Loach dismissed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe as designed merely to "distract attention" from Israel's military crimes. An increase in anti-Semitism is "perfectly understandable," Loach said, "because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism."

Locating the source text in which these statements were made would assist in working out how such a distinguished individual can allow the phrase 'perfectly understandable' to elide the core point of how increasing anti-Semitism is always already indefensible.