Blaming Israel for killing Palestinian children is not antisemitic

I wonder if Howard Jacobson knows that only one baby was killed on October 7th, and that the 40 beheaded babies claim was a falsehood and as such atrocity propaganda. As were many other such claims. By contrast over 700 babies have been killed in Gaza during the past year, and there are undoubtedly hundreds more dead under the rubble and an unknown number who have been maimed. And the slaughter and carnage continues day after day, with no end in sight.

And all this time we thought one main purpose of literature was to enlist our humanity in contemplating our fellow creatures in their joys and sorrows, to enhance our sensitivity, above all to keep us honest when trying to make sense of the world. I once had a boss (and trainer) in psychiatry who occasionally would ask, ‘Do psychiatrists find novels boring?’ I suppose he was thinking of all those life stories, the bread and butter of every interview, that got turned into casenotes. Perhaps one reason so many medics turned to story-telling.

But another view was always that voracious readers of fiction were considered to better understand and empathise with others. Some have asked, Does reading great literature make us more *moral*?, to which one depressingly emphatic negative answer was, All those well-read, highly cultured Nazis exulting in Wagner operas at Bayreuth.

We all know that cultural loyalties taken to extremes make people defend indefensible things when our culture does them, while simultaneously condemning the same things when others do them. Maybe Philip Larking was right https://allpoetry.com/A-Study-Of-Reading-Habits

I posted my unpublished letter on the end of an earlier article here, but perhaps it would fit better on this page, alongside Dave Rosenberg’s.
Dear Editor
Howard Jacobson writes, ‘I don’t accuse the BBC and other news outlets of wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages’, and yet, he suggests, this is indeed what these news outlets are doing by showing those who are, in his words, the ‘innocent victims of war’. Rich in suggestion as Jacobson’s article is, it’s short on suggestions as to what he thinks might be a way of solving this problem. Fortunately, the Israeli authorities have done all they can to help: they keep the world’s press photographers out of Gaza, but more work is needed. Surely, it should be to ban all images of dead and maimed Palestinian children, for only then can we western Jews be safe.
Yours
Michael Rosen

What does Howard Jacobson’s wretched piece indicate? It is that large sections of British Jewry are content to turn their backs on reality and engage in self-absorbed, self-justifying victimhood. Their fixed focus on self-pity serves not to draw lessons from past persecution but to exploit it to exonerate Zionism and shield it from criticism.
While Israel’s founding and its subsequent evolution were once the object of admiration in the broadly accepted public view, Jews enjoyed the balm of sympathy. Now, as the public view of Israel begins to change in the light of the Israel’s ferocious attacks on Palestinians and tits aggression in Lebanon, the mass of British Jews feel abandoned and discomforted. Meanwhile their representatives react by spinning a defensive web of imaginary tropes, hoping the cries of “antisemitism!” will drown out the voices of criticism and the cries of the dying.
I agree basically with what Martin Wallis says, but would like to point out that Curzon was wrong with respect to the character of Zionism. Zionist colonialism, while it does use Palestinians as cheap labour, aims fundamentally to displace Palestinians and create an exclusively “Jewish” state.