OPINION: Attempt to blame ‘Juwes’ for every ill is telling

Until last week, the most famous misspelt double negative sentence in British Jewish history was written on the stairway of a tenement in Whitechapel. “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing,” wrote someone who may or may not have been Jack the Ripper, near a crime scene where two young women had been murdered.

To this day, no one is sure what the author meant: were they blaming the Jews for the murders? Was the Ripper a Yid? Or was it a tortured critique of antisemitism — stop blaming the poor Jews for everything?

Anyway, the mysterious Goulston Street author of 1888 now has a rival in the pantheon of grammatically confusing Jew-blaming: Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South. On Saturday, Lewis linked rising Islamophobia with, well, the Jewish state.

“The link between the daily inhumanity being metted [sic] out to Palestinians and rising Islamophobia in the UK, are not unconnected,” Lewis tweeted. “The inhumanity being shown to one is giving ‘permission’ for the other.”

Lewis is part of a trend; blaming Israel and/or Zionism for pretty much everything that’s going wrong in the world is very much in vogue at the moment. In Venezuela, under siege president Nicolás Maduro, the moustachioed kleptocrat of Caracas, has put opposition to him stealing yet another election down to the shadowy forces of “international Zionism”.

Meanwhile Yassine Arab, the director of Algeria’s Olympics committee, is furious with the Zios for orchestrating the objections to someone who could have male chromosomes winning a boxing gold medal by punching
a bunch of women. “The Zionist lobby, they want to break the mind of Imane [Khalif],” he said.

This is a time-honoured tradition of course. Recall the time the Egyptians blamed a shark attack on Mossad (though I wouldn’t put it past them). The American journalist Yair Rosenberg even has a name for this: the Goebbels gap, which is the amount of time it takes between something going wrong in the world and it being blamed on you know who.

And yet, before we dismiss Lewis for crimes against the English language, let’s take him seriously for a moment, because I think his attempt to make this argument tells us something quite important.

Modern progressivism often makes the mistake of wrapping everything up into a single omnicause: trans rights are climate rights are Palestinian rights are human rights. It’s a narrow and reductive way of seeing the world that often detracts from the individual causes in question (is addressing climate change really helped by tethering it to the gender wars?).

But if the oppressed all come under a single rainbow banner, then naturally the oppressors can be lumped together too. Capitalism is Zionism is Terfism. The good people of Finchley against Fascism tried this when organising their counter-protest against the far right last week. “Get Fascists, Racists, Nazis, Zionists and Islamophobes out of Finchley” was their flyer’s call to action.

Seen in a certain light, this is a call to ethnically cleanse almost all of the 28,000 Jews who live in Finchley and Golders Green. But really it’s that omnicausal thinking again, lumping people that believe in the continued existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East with those who think Jews are a global parasite. I’m afraid Lewis’ claim isn’t any more compelling.

His argument, I think, is that the brutality of Israel’s war is cheapening our sense of Muslim life, thus making it easier to imagine burning a migrant hotel or stoning a mosque. He’s suggesting that the depredations of the Zionist entity are stirring and legitimising something atavistic and cruel in the white Christian soul.

Is there any truth in this? It feels like an almighty stretch to me. It is true that both anti-Muslim hate and antisemitism have surged since 7 October, but that happened before Israel dropped a single bomb on Gaza. Most likely it is a response to British Muslims becoming far more vocal and politicised in reaction to the war, something that no doubt irks the knuckle-draggers of the far right.

For months now, city centres across the country have been the scene of large, proud and angry protests, driven in large part by Muslim communities. Politicians have been elected promising to represent the cause of Gaza. This has triggered a certain type of nativist, who lives in mortal fear of Britain falling under the sway of sharia law.

But there is simply no evidence that any of the hundreds of idiots who were arrested over the past few weeks watched a distressing dispatch from Khan Younis on Channel 4 News and thought, ‘you know what, if the Israel Defence Forces can do it why can’t I?’ In truth, I’m not sure British football hooligans really need inspiration from the Golani Brigade in order to get caned and kick some brown people’s heads in.

Lewis is dangerously close to subscribing to the Zionist theory of everything here, as promoted by our friends in Caracas, Algiers and Finchley. Such thinking can easily become antisemitic, a suggestion he will no doubt dismiss as the same old “smear” that was used against Jeremy Corbyn. But blaming Israel, without any evidence, for events on British streets that have numerous other clear and established causes (immigration, cocaine, booze, boredom, summer, social decay, racism), is wading into pretty prejudicial waters.

If you spend too much time on social media, the world begins to blend into one angry puddle of enemies and causes. But not everything is connected. Not everything is Israel’s fault. And the Juwes will not be blamed for nothing.