UK: "The criticism of Israel is of such a pitch that it does feel like a kind of persecution"

Via Tablet Magazine, interviewing Howard Jacobson:

“Israel has become the pretext [for anti-Semitism] not because I choose it to be, but because they have,” he says in his gruff but melodious north Manchester accent, still with him despite decades of living in London. “All the unsayable things, all the things they know they can’t say about Jews in a post-Holocaust liberal society, they can say again now. Israel has desacralized the subject. It’s a space in which everything is allowed again.”

(...)

Jacobson has become obsessed with anti-Zionism because inside it he sees a linguistic mutation hiding something much darker. “The criticism of Israel is of such a pitch that it does feel like a kind of persecution,” he says. “Israel’s not my country. This is my country. It’s not my war. But I just feel the dinning of it, the dinning of it. I can’t claim I am persecuted because of that. But it affects the mental music, the mood music around. It’s ugly. It’s ugly to be a Jew living in any country when that is what people are talking about all the time.”

He is “utterly convinced” that there is a certain tone in anti-Zionism that can only be explained by Jew-hating of some kind. “I don’t mean when people say ‘we don’t like Netanyahu’ or ‘we don’t like settlements.’ I mean the thing about Zionism itself. What is it that adds that fervor, that makes some of those English commentators so hysterical about it?” His fear is that the combination of this sentiment with Muslim anti-Semitism, which in the words of prominent Muslim commentator Mehdi Hasan is “routine and commonplace” in some sections of that community, could one day become “lethal.”