Yesterday I wrote that the US Democrats are in danger of going the way of the UK Labour party — that is, in danger of being totally overtaken by antisemitism. Democrats, Nick Cohen’s brutal honesty in (believe it or not) The Guardian is your ghost of Christmas future.
All I had [as a child, of being a Jew] was the “Cohen” name. I once asked my parents why they had not changed it. After saying, quite rightly, that you should never seek to appease racists, they confessed to thinking that antisemitism was over by the 1960s. After Hitler, humanity would surely see where the world’s most insane hatred led and resolve to put it to one side. . . .
Still there was no escaping the “Cohen”. When I first responded to the antisemitism that has spread so far from the extreme left into the mainstream that it now threatens to poison the Labour party, I am ashamed to say I considered two disgraceful replies.
I might, I thought, not stop at opposing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and pledging support to leftwing Israelis and Palestinians who wanted a just and peaceful settlement for both peoples, but go on to behave like a grotesque from a Howard Jacobson satire. I would reassure fanatics that their “anti-Zionism” (that is, their call for the total destruction of the world’s only Jewish state) was not remotely racist.
Fortunately for my self-respect, I never sank that low. Whenever I hear Jews announce their hatred of Israel’s very existence, I suspect that underneath their loud bombast lies a quiet plea to the Islamists and neo-Nazis who might harm them: “I’m not like the others. Don’t pick on me.”
Unfortunately, I assured anyone who asked (and some who did not) that, despite appearances to the contrary, I wasn’t Jewish. And that was as dishonourable. I sounded like a black man trying to pass as white or a German arguing with the Gestapo that there was a mistake in the paperwork.
I stopped and accepted that racism changes your perception of the world and yourself. You become what your enemies say you are. And unless I wanted to shame myself, I had to become a Jew. A rather odd Jew, no doubt: a militant atheist who had to phone a friend to ask what on earth “mazel tov” meant. But a Jew nonetheless.
Wow. The rest of his denunciation of the Labour party is well-worth reading in full.
