“the
most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the
world.”
Winston Churchill on the Jews.
THE JEWS
USED TO HAVE FRIENDS ON THE Left, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has
turned those on the Left into anti-Zionists which means of course that they do
not believe in a Jewish homeland. They however may protest that they do not
object to such a Jewish state; but not one situated where it currently resides.
They have, however, no suggestions of how they would recompense the Israeli
Jews with a state of their own elsewhere in the region, or even in the world,
if they just up and left, at the beckoning of Hamas and the British Left.
Today
is the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust; an event that horrified
the world. I am 64 and was born and brought up in the shadow of this enormous and
horrendous slaughter that delivered in the 20th century the kind of
nightmare whose nature of cruelty, was familiar once only to those living in
the dark ages – but on an even bigger scale and by a country whose culture gave
the world Beethoven, Wagner, and Kant; and a whole dictionary of other
philosophical, literary, artistic, and musical greats.
I was
once on the Left in politics and continually voted Labour as did my brother,
mother and father, before me. It is the kind of family effect that leads to the
stereotypical traditional Labour voter, who, if they were presented with a monkey
wearing a red rosette, they would continue to vote Labour.
However there was an interregnum
that left me suckling from the breast of the Communist Party of Great Britain
for three years in my twenties. I was born in 1950 into a working class family
(when such a class still had meaning to the Labour Party). My father was a Norfolk
labourer who found himself in Burma fighting the Japanese during the Second
World War.
Belonging
to such a generation, I developed an instinctive sympathy for the Jewish people
– and I have always considered myself a Judeophile. Their persecution by the
Nazis and its horrendous outcome, was the mere tip of an anti-Semitic iceberg that covered 2,000 years of brutality, harassment, and singling out for
all kinds of punishment - living has
they had to do within a Diaspora and left struggling to survive in the best way
they knew how; often forced to live within walled-off compounds (the Pale of
Jewish settlement) within cities all over Europe; only to be allowed out during
the day and made to return at night.
If the
truth be known, the Jew's persecutors thought themselves inferior to them; and
distrusted them. The Jews have always been great survivalists. They never went
the way of the indigenous native population of what is now the USA; whose own
Holocaust has never been subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that the German
variant has been.
Jews
have traded in gold, diamonds, and been popularly seen as pawnbrokers and money lenders. Which has
added to their popular image among anti-Semites as Fagin's hooked-nosed, avaricious,
and considered repulsive to the sight, by their bigoted persecutors.
All the
Jews did within the Diaspora was what they were only allowed to do; and if all
they were allowed to do was to earn a living via money lending, pawning, and
latterly trading in diamonds; then this was what they had to do to survive; and
it is from these allowable employments that the Jews have been persecuted as
curmudgeonly misanthropes.
The
Jews were barred from many of the professions as well as from all forms of
legitimate business and enterprise. Anti-Semitic prejudice made them unwelcome
within whichever part of the Diaspora they were forced to settle; no doubt
because the inhabitants feared the competition. It was the impulse of survival ( not greed) that gifted the Jews with a
talent for business. It was the needs of survival that sharpened their skills
at making money.
Today
it is different. All enterprises are thankfully open to the Jewish people to
pursue within the West. But still it persists in the conscience of modern
anti-Semites that the Jews are ravenous collectors of wealth at any cost.
THE JEWISH PEOPLE have been forced through prejudice and the
Diaspora to explore their survival qualities. Qualities which Winston Churchill
applauded in his essay "Zionism
verses Bolshevism". The following tribute was written by the historian
Andrew Roberts; "Not all Churchill’s
racial characterizations were negative…He believed the Jews to be “the most
formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” He
felt an instinctive affinity for their genius as well as a historian’s respect
for their trials, and he supported Jewish aspirations wherever they did not
clash with those of the Empire. He may have inherited his philo-Semitism from
his father, but he certainly gave it new lustre in his own life.
This is how I look upon the Jews
(ignoring of course the reference to Empire) and would have felt myself
privileged to have been born among them. But the Jews today are now under more
pressure from not only their traditional persecutors on the Right; but also
from their one-time friends on the Left. The European Jews are being squeezed;
none more so than those living among us in the UK where the plight of the Palestinians has caught the
imagination of the Left, as well as the
traditional bigotry of the radical Right.
If the events that unfolded in
Paris earlier this month - as well as the countless other acts committed
against the Jews by Muslims all over Europe – does not put the icing on the
cake that justifies a Jewish homeland and bring an end to the wandering Jew - then
the Jews must make their final stand in Jerusalem. The world it seems has often
despised the Jewish people. So why should not such a people find a retreat from
persecution and be allowed to live among each other within a state as they
historically did?
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