Neil Berry, Arab News

LONDON, 3 March 2004 — The Jewish columnist Howard Jacobson has fallen prey to morbid thoughts. Writing in The Independent, he disclosed that he and his partner, mindful that their lives might suddenly be extinguished in a terrorist attack, have exchanged farewell letters. A record of mutual devotion, the letters have, it seems, been put away in a safe place. With luck, they will not be read till long after the couple’s natural deaths. But Jacobson no longer takes for granted that he will die a natural death.

With much of the world haunted by the specter of terrorism, there can be few of any creed or class to whom Jacobson’s feelings seem entirely absurd. However, even at the best of times, Jews are perhaps more prone than most to premonitions of doom. The Judaic mindset would be a profoundly anxious one irrespective of the terrible suffering and persecution the Jews have known. But given the increasingly embattled situation of Israel, it is hardly surprising if Jewish fears are now more rampant than at any time since the Nazi Holocaust. Many Jews are terrified that a fresh holocaust is looming and that the final extinction of the Jewish race could be at hand.

This sense of apocalyptic dread undoubtedly played its part in shaping Jewish attitudes to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. It’s true that some British Jews protested against the war, but it is safe to say that they have been far outnumbered by Jews like Jacobson who identified themselves with the pro-war camp while nursing profound suspicions about the war’s opponents. Jacobson himself reserves special scorn for those who talk as though the issue of Iraq and that of Palestine are inextricably enmeshed. He insists — as indeed do great numbers of his co-religionists — that the issues in question are what millions of others cannot begin to see them as being: Wholly separate from each other. Reviling it as a “disgrace”, he maintains that the anti-war movement was compromised from the start by the conspicuous presence among its ranks of pro-Palestinian campaigners with an anti-Israel agenda.

Jacobson has confessed to being gripped by “ancient perturbations”. He is, though, positively restrained in the expression of his views by comparison with the Jewish journalist Melanie Phillips, whose own zeal for the war against Iraq finds vehement, not to say hysterical, expression in the new book, “Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War”. In a gathering of British writers’ opinions in which anti-war sentiment bulks large, Phillips stands out for the sheer stridency of her pro-war convictions and the depth of her contempt for those who thought the war a mistake. Indeed, it is her belief that the anti-war feeling in Britain is symptomatic of a decadent culture which has lost the will to defend itself. Another Jewish contributor to the book, the novelist and critic Frederic Raphael, also makes plain his distaste for the anti-war movement.

Nor has Jewish support for the war been confined (as might be expected) to the right. Take the case of the left-wing London pundit Nick Cohen, who made a name for himself as a scourge of Tony Blair and New Labour. Cohen argues that the regime of Saddam Hussein was so iniquitous that by failing to endorse its destruction the left was simply exposing its moral bankruptcy. Even now, despite the disorder and pervasive insecurity of postwar Iraq, he betrays not the least sign of wondering if his ardor for the bombing of Baghdad might have been misplaced; if anything, he has become still more dogmatic in his belief that those who opposed the war were condoning the totalitarian regime at whose hands Iraqi people suffered so grievously. This posture always seemed somewhat anomalous for a political columnist otherwise known for his “progressive” opinions. Though his arguments have to be assessed on their own terms, it hard to quell the suspicion that behind Cohen’s unrepentant self-righteousness over the war — as behind that of Jacobson, Phillips and others — lies a peculiarly Jewish angst, an extreme sensitivity about Israel and the survival of the Jewish people.

What a monumental historic irony it is that Israel, the haven that was going to put an end to Jewish fears, has wrought precisely the opposite effect. The Israel-Palestine conflict now seems more deeply entrenched, more potentially catastrophic, than ever. Could the conflict have been avoided? Jill Hamilton’s illuminating new book “God, Guns and Israel: Britain, the First World War and the Jews in the Holy Land” discusses the origins of Israel and suggests that it might have been — had not the British politicians and Zionists who projected the Jewish homeland been so soaked in the Old Testament and biblical prophecy as to be heedless of the consequences of displacing Palestine’s indigenous Arabs.

Not the least of the reasons why British statesmen like David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour were so ready to sympathize with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was their gratitude to Judaism for the gift to humanity of the Bible. Lloyd George’s familiarity with the Old Testament was such that he declared himself better acquainted with the kings of Israel than with those of England. It was thanks in no small measure to his intimacy with the Hebrew scriptures that he made such tireless efforts in the Zionist cause. Indeed, Weizmann regarded Lloyd George, not Balfour (whose famous Declaration committed Britain to Israel’s creation), as the true “author” of the Jewish homeland.

Jill Hamilton’s book provides a group portrait of a generation of nonconformist British Cabinet ministers who were in a sense honorary Jews. Perhaps the chief impression left by it is that but for their fortuitous influence Israel might never have been born in the first place. That it even emerged as a remotely viable political project was something of a fluke, the result of a fleeting set of historical circumstances, involving the moribund British Empire, Old Testament-fixated British politicians and Zionist dreamers. Little wonder if fear of ethnic obliteration is conjoined in the Jewish psyche by an enduring sense of the precariousness of Israel’s very existence.

— Neil Berry is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism.”