So it is interesting to me to see that many of those involved in the boycott campaign use “Zionist” as a term of abuse, not analysis. For example, Mr Mark Elf, a heroic correspondent to the letters page of this and any other journals, describes Tony Blair as a Zionist almost entirely because he doesn’t like the PM.
He tells another critical correspondent on his Jews Sans Frontieres blog “not to lie or evade, I know that as a Zionist you find thus difficult to impossible…”. Used in this way, Zionist is just another word for bad, like the apartheid regime in South Africa was bad, or fascists are bad. It is a word to be applied to people whether they believe themselves to be Zionists or not.
As deployed by some agency entirely external to the Jewish communities — an Egyptian newspaper, say, or an Iranian TV channel — such a demonology is to be regretted but can at least be understood as an attitude towards the “other”.
But when it is used in this way by people who go to such lengths as Mr Elf or his ubiquitous comrade, Mr Tony Greenstein, constantly and at every opportunity to stress their Jewish origins, something else would seem to be going on. Ah yes, say some readers, we are way ahead of you. Mr Elf and Mr Greenstein are archetypal “self-haters”. They are typical Jews who hate Jews (an organisation, come to think of it, which would complete the long, self-indulgent list of Jews For or Against This or That). They wish somehow to lose their unwanted Jewishness by currying favour with the goyische welt. They like the Nobel prizes and the comedy, but they don’t want to be associated with the big noses and loud behaviour in Waitrose.
There are Jews who hate Jewishness. In his excellent book about being brought up in a fascist household, Trevor Grundy describes his late discovery that his fiercely antisemitic mother was herself originally Jewish. Bad experiences at the hands of her step-father might have accounted for her pathological rejection of her own people. But the very extremeness of her example indicates why I distrust the “self-hating” diagnosis as much as I distrust the Elfian definition of Zionism. Both are impertinences. “I don’t hate myself,” Mr Elf might say with justice, “I just hate you.”
Trevor Grundy’s mother hid her Jewishness. Jews Against Zionism (or whatever) luxuriate in their superior version of theirs. Indeed, their profession of Jewishness is as excessive as anybody’s on their hate-list, though it seems to exist for the sole purpose of negative deployment. I knew Tony Greenstein many years ago, when he reminded me of John McEnroe in a kefiyeh.
The boycotters, and especially the Jews for Boycotts, are not self-hating Jews — they’re adolescents. It isn’t themselves they hate, but Daddy and Mummy. In fact, they’re so vain they probably think this piece is about them.
