The obsession

The Guardian’s hatred of Israel and the Jews truly is a fathomless — and unfathomable — well. The last few days around Israel’s 60^th anniversary have seen a further escalation of its obsessive verbal pogrom. Today it published a piece by Samir el Youssef which turned the Arab attempt to exterminate Israel in 1948 into an attempt by Israel to exterminate Palestinian society (which did not then exist, as many Arabs have attested) but for which he magnanimously suggests Israel should be forgiven.

Today also saw an interview with Daniel Barenboim, who in his moral and intellectual confusion sadly offers himself up as that most prized gift of all to Jew-haters: an Israeli Jew who attacks Israel, thus conferring immunity against the charge of prejudice. Barenboim is convinced that the golden innocence of the Israel of his youth has been replaced by Jewish imperialism and hate-fuelled belligerence which has erased the ‘fabled Jewish intellect’ and created the Palestinian misery of Nablus. No acknowledgement of the fact that the Palestinians of Nablus and elsewhere are the architects of their own misery on account of their hatred of Israel, and that even the ‘fabled Jewish intellect’ needs to defend itself against their unending murderous attacks. No, for Barenboim what eats away at him is this:

We wanted to own land that had never belonged to Jews and build settlements there. The Palestinians see this as imperialistic provocation, and rightly so. Their resistance is absolutely understandable - not the means they use to this end, not the violence nor the wanton inhumanity - but their ‘no’. We Israelis must finally find the courage to not react to this violence, the courage to stand by our history.

The tragedy is that Barenboim himself is falsifying that history, of which he seems to be totally unaware. Whatever one thinks should now happen to the disputed territories, the idea that in the ‘West Bank’ the Jews are building on land that never belonged to them is preposterous. Much of the land in question did indeed belong to them; indeed, some of Judaism’s holiest sites are in Judea and Samaria. Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism, is the site of the oldest Jewish community in the world where Jews lived continuously until the Arab pogrom of 1929, when 69 were murdered and the rest forced to flee. That is why the international community concluded in 1922 that the Jews were entitled to re-establish their national home within territory that included this ‘West Bank’ land.

So the Arab ‘no’ is absolutely not understandable. Indeed, even if Hebron and Nablus and the rest of Judea and Samaria were to become a state of Palestine, why should there be no Jews living in such a state? Why does Barenboim agree that Jews must be ethnically cleansed from within it as a condition of its establishment? Why does he, and the legions of the left who agree with him, think that this is a moral position?

The Guardian’s frenzy of hatred is now so great that it is getting quite careless about concealing its deeper prejudices against the Jews. On Tuesday, readers may have been a trifle puzzled by the prominence it gave to a story about the discovery of a letter written by Albert Einstein. An interesting story, certainly — but not interesting enough, surely, to justify the full-page display it was given towards the front of the paper. Half way down, we got to the reason why a minor historical curiosity had got the Guardian so excited:

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people. ‘For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.’

Aha! So even Einstein himself said the Jews were nothing other than a jumped-up bunch of knuckle-draggers — and who were only prevented from being a global disease by their absence of political power ! No wonder the Guardian gave this story pride of place. In fact Einstein’s sense of his Jewish identity and his views about Judaism and Zionism, to which he showed consistent respect, were immensely complex. For this complicated but passionately felt affinity to be reduced to an insulting slight to his own people is a disgusting and malicious travesty.

Such prejudice is repeated today in the picture accompanying a characteristically absurd piece by Jonathan Steele,who finds it deeply alarming that the US presidential candidates — including Princess Obama —should suggest that the Middle East crisis is

one in which Israel is an innocent victim of outside forces.

Good heavens, no! Jews as victims? How could that possibly be the case when, as the illustration to his piece (shown above) so brazenly suggests through its replacement of the stars on the US flag by the Star of David, the Jews control America?

Yup, it’s those Protocols yet again. The infamous Tsarist forgery may have been discredited, but the eternal lie it proclaimed of the global Jewish conspiracy is now an article of faith that unites neo-Nazis, Islamists and the western left.