This anti-UK smear piece in Haaretz isn’t worth reading – at least not if you’ve read anything by Melanie Phillips, or any of the rants from the Decent Left (TM) about Ken Livingstone.
However, this quote from British Jewish TV producer Dan Patterson is interesting: "How can you be incandescent with fury about Israel, but not about what is going on in Sudan or with Syria in Lebanon? When you say you’ve just been in Israel, it’s like it used to be 20 years ago telling people you’d just been in South Africa". This is a very good analogy, especially as 20 years ago, there were a great many places worse than South Africa that didn’t attract the same opprobrium in the UK.
There are two possibilities at work here. One is that because of our country’s history, British people view colonial oppression by white people as something that we have a greater obligation to protest about than non-colonial oppression by non-white people. The other is that British people are not only antisemitic but also antisouthafricanic.
I wonder which is more likely?
I think there are a couple more factors at work. First, it’s an inbuilt racism thing: we automatically expect ‘white people’ like Israelis and S. Africans to conduct themselves ‘properly’, and hence are surprised and outraged when they don’t. Another tin-pot black African dictator or Arab despot just confirms our expectations, so we barely pass comment. Second, I think it’s a ‘democratic values’ thing. When a country calls itself a democracy, it is setting itself up to be measured against the highest standards. There’s far more room for failure and hence criticism. When a president like Bush eulogises at every opportunity about ‘freedom’, he’s asking to have every nook and cranny of his system peered into to see if the rhetoric matches the reality. Often it won’t. We expect a little less from less ‘vocal’ democracies like France and Old Europe, and hence complain a little less. We expect nothing of tyrants so hardly notice when that’s what they deliver. I’m not saying this is how it ought to be, just that’s how I think it is.
I’d also point out that there are both expatriate South Africans and expatriate Israelis (and non-Israeli Jews) in this country who are prominent in the media; many of them led and lead public opposition to the domestic policies of the state which they know about. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we hear much more about Israel and South Africa. I even have a test case for this; Togo and Equatorial Guinea are every bit as horrible as Zimbabwe, but which one do we hear about?
Leaving aside the old "colonial" canard, where do you get the idea that Israelis are "white people"? Most Israelis don’t look particularly "white" to me.
While I’m aware that a large proportion of the Israeli population is made up of Jews who would be classed as ‘Arabic’ or ‘black’ rather than ‘white’, it’s also fair to say that most of the politicians who are strongly associated with Israel look ‘white’ (eg Sharon, Barak, Rabin, Shamir).
Gene, why is it a "canard" to describe Isreal as a largely colonial society. Surely a majority of Israelis descend from people who migrated there during the 20th century. That makes them colonists in my book, like Americans, Australians and any number of others. There’s nothing necessarily derogatory in the term, although John’s point probably has a lot of truth in it.
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