Simon Said

My earlier article here, So Who Is Anti Semitic drew the predicted responses from religious right and neo-con commenters, most of whom entirely missed the point (no surprise there) which was that those who scream anti - Semitism in response to criticism of Israel should try to understand that the Hizbullah personnel, Lebanese Muslims and Christians and the Palestinians suffering at the quiet end of this outrage are Semites too. That does not mean their acts of violence are right of course.

Only a naïve writer would expose himself to the fury of the rabid right without making sure he was on safe ground, so before posting I had run my article past my old friend Simon Lipmann. Now Simon is an interesting guy, I first got to know him in 1971, we were wild young street traders schlepping around the north -west of England selling our goods, drinking and womanising. Through the long days (when you are working the street markets rainy days seem eternal) and wild nights I became very friendly with Si. and learned that his parents had come to Britain after World War 1 when their families had fled persecution Poland. I can't find any record of unrest so it must have been fairly localised. Anyway Simon's parents were both born in England but brought their own children up to believe in a Jewish homeland, the state of Israel.

Simon did believe in Israel, so much so that a couple of years after I met him, in 1973 he abandoned his business and went to fight in the Yom Kippur war.

On his return I asked him what prompted that decision.

"Ian, you will probably not understand but although I am English by nationality, by religion I am Jewish and that means first and foremost I am a Jew," he replied.

It would have been hard to find anyone more committed to the Israel project.

Three decades later he has changed his tune.

"Israel is rotten to the core, the entire nation is held together by hate, what is going on out there is nothing to do with the faith I was brought up in." he told me and several other people in the pub one night.

A change like that does not come about without reason. Simon's parents had sold up and retired some years earlier, bought a property in Israel and gone to enjoy their money in a wonderful climate. They were socially liberal, politically socialist but above all Jewish by faith and they believed they were supporting their faith and the long awaited homeland. After two years they had had enough and asked Simon to go out, help them sell up and arrange a return to the U.K. They could not stomach the way the Israeli authorities treated the Palestinians.

"People keep telling me they are filth," Simon Senior told my friend, "but they are flesh and blood like us, they worship the same god as us, only the name of the god is different."

Four weeks there were enough to convince Simon the Israel that evolved since the Yom Kippur war was not the Israel he had fought for, it was an authoritarian state where might was the only law and where being a non - Jew was enough to make somebody a second class citizen.

"We complain about the Holocaust but now we are behaving as the Nazis did," he told me when we met at my brother's birthday party last week.

Simon's experience is perhaps not in accord with everybody's, there are many who believe that Biblical prophecies must be made to appear true no matter how many people have to be killed or made homeless to achieve that, but this latest war has divided the U.K. Jewish community very deeply. On one of the talk shows in the last few days, Miriam Karlin, a veteran actor and civil rights campaigner and long time defender of the Jewish way of life and scourge of anti - Jewish bias said she was now actively supporting an Anglo-Jewish organisation working to overthrow the Israeli political right and help win back power for those who support the socialist ideals on which the state was built so that sensible resolutions of the Palestinian problem and border disputes with Lebanon, Syria and Jordan may be achieved. Miriam Karlin said that if the militaristic factions remain in power in Tel - Aviv then Israel will certainly cease to exist as an independent state.

So my contention that we cannot have informed debate on the conflict unless we refuse to let Israel and its supporters hide behind the anti - Semitism blanket. Israel's human rights violations and illegal acts of war must be judged by the same criteria as those of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Suharto's Indonesia, Mobutu's Congo or Pol Pot's Cambodia seems to strike a chord with some Britsh Jews at least. The thing is such people have realigned their thinking, they are now British first and Jewish second. Being part of the human race takes precedence over being a devotee of a religion. After all what is a Jew?

Hath not a Jew eyes, Hath not a Jew hands,
Organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the
same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
healed by the same means, warmed and cooled
by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.*

Simon and Shakespeare between them certainly demolish the Bush administration doctrine; "might is right - always and forever."

So if you are going to take up the gauntlet on this I will give you one commandment to supersede all others, whatever race nationality or religion you are... Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, American,

SAME RULES APPLY!

* From The Merchant of Venice, (Act 3 Scene 1) by William Shakespeare.