UK: The hateful whispers that make me want to move from London to Tel Aviv

Simon Wilder @ The Spectator:

The referendum result didn’t make me decide to leave, but it was a penny on the scales. This no longer feels like home. I may spend too much time on Twitter, but the things people say about Jews and Israel there make me tremble. They feel safe in their hatred, and, scarier still, probably are.

There’s a train of thought among right-thinking people in London at the moment that Israel is culpable; that it is responsible for all the ills of the Palestinians, all the woes of the Middle East. If it weren’t for Israel, they say, the world would be a better place. If you go to a dinner party you can hear things that wouldn’t have sounded unfamiliar in 1930s Germany. They say they’re just ‘anti-Zionist’ but to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic. No one is anti- any other country. No one questions, say, Iran’s right to exist.

I’ve voted Labour in the past, but these days people in the Labour party all too often say things about Jews having big noses, or controlling the media, or somehow engineering the attack on the World Trade Center. Israel is behind Isis, they say. At demonstrations people hold up placards that say Hitler was right. Those words, exactly. Much of Labour barely raises an eyebrow.

read more