Opinion: On Being Jewish, Nationalism and Loyalty.

 On Being Jewish, Nationalism and Loyalty.

Mural commemorating the Battle of Cable Street. Source

The mural depicts the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 where 100,000 anti-fascists, Jews and their allies, blocked members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists from marching through London's East End which had a large Jewish community at the time. 

Note: the mural and the title is not with the original commentary. R. Mellor

 

Michael Rosen

London UK

 

Michael Rosen is a writer of children’s books. You can find out more here.

 

 

One of the Labour Party's missions (in the Labour Party's present form) is to try to combat the Tories and Reform by using the banner of national pride. The roots of this Labour patriotism shtick go back decades but they tend to surface most when the challenge from the Right is at its strongest. Some of this is also an attack on the Left on the grounds that the Labour Party , they claim, loses votes because it's known that in its ranks there are republicans and/or people who are so keen to not sound jingoistic they are deemed to be nigh on guilty of treason. 

 

One reason I'm thinking about this at the moment may sound obtuse but bear with me. Because I'm Jewish, I'm appealed to by Israel itself and by those who call themselves 'non-apologetic supporters of Israel' to rally to Israel's cause. What underpins this is another form of nationalism. I should see myself as being loyal to Jews - whether that's Jews where I live (UK), and eg US, France and, of course, Israel. A memorable example of this was when the Chief Rabbi spoke to a synagogue congregation in January 2024 and talked proudly of 'our heroic soldiers'. (He was referring to Israel's soldiers.) 

 

More or less since (but not including) the time when the Zionist terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, killing a range of people including British and Jewish people), the Chief Rabbi's position of having two national loyalties, British and Jewish-Israeli, has not been a problem. Britain has backed Israel. Israel has backed Britain. No situation here, we might say, even faintly akin to, say, the split loyalties felt by people with a German background leading up to and including the First and Second World Wars. 

 

But right now, there are problems. Leave aside non- or anti-zionist Jews like me. There are beginning to be problems for people who feel the loyalty-tug to the Jewish entity, whether they see it as a nation, a people, a community or an 'us'. The problem is this. On paper - and thanks to the example in the IHRA code - Jews can keep two potentially conflicting ideas in their heads. One idea is that we Jews outside of Israel cannot be held responsible for the actions of Israel. To say that we are responsible is, the code says, antisemitic. End of. However, sometimes in conflict with this - some would say in contradiction with it - is a loyalty to Israel precisely on account of the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. The people who are right now killing people in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are either Jews or people acting on the orders of Jews in the military and/or government. 

 

And that last sentence is where the problems are arising. So long as we here look at those planes and armies over there as 'Israeli' there's a bit of distancing going on. But If I say, those planes and soldiers are Jewish (or under orders from a Jewish high command), it starts to feel a bit worrying (not for me, I hasten to add) and 'we' can scurry off to the IHRA code and say, 'Isn't that holding us responsible for the actions of Israel?' 

 

But that's the problem. If the claim is that 'we' are a Jewish nation (inside and outside of Israel) and that we owe this Jewish nation a loyalty at least as equivalent and as strong as the loyalty that I should show to Britain, then these are worrying times. Are liberal Jews really supposed to be loyal to the killing of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, to the daily acts of violence, thuggery and dispossession in the West Bank and to the 'clearances' and killing in Lebanon? Or put another way, when we listen to the speeches of Ben Gvir and Smotrich are we supposed to say, 'He's one of ours' (in the way that my father used to do when he saw a Jewish actor in a play on the TV!). 

 

Maybe it helps to flip this and think of, say, Tommy Robinson, Farage, Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Richard Tice, and with my British hat on, ask myself, do I owe that group of people any loyalty on account of them being, like me, British? I don't think so. And that's the problem (or at least one of the problems) with nationalism. It leaves us with utterly untrustworthy allies, who act against our interests. 

 

Anecdote: Oswald Mosley, antisemite and fascist thought he had a trump card back in the 1930s: warn working class people about 'Jew landlords'. In other words, the Mosleyite problem wasn't landlordism - no matter who the landlords were - it was 'Jew landlords'. The appeal here was (incredibly) that non-Jewish tenants would much prefer to have a bad landlord if they were non-Jews than if they were Jews! What was the response from the Jewish left in the East End to this? To organise community-wide rent strikes. This brought together non-Jewish and Jewish tenants in opposition to landlords no matter what their background was. It cut through two 'national' appeals at the same time - the appeal to 'patriotic non-Jews' to fight against Jewish landlords, and a possible or potential appeal to Jews to defend Jewish landlords purely on account of them being Jewish! The issue was slum landlordism no matter who was the landlord and who was the tenant. 

 

In an ideal world, this is where we could be or should be in relation to Israel (and its protector and backer, the US). What we oppose is the mass killing, the land grabbing, the clearances being carried out to further one (or is two, now) forms of imperialism - US and the local imperialism of Israel. I know and see that many of the people in Israel enacting this have a similar cultural and national background to me (Jews who formerly lived in Eastern Europe (so-called Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews) but, I ask myself, I can't owe them loyalty purely because my great-grandparents came from the same place as their great-grandparents and that those great-grandparents said the same prayers, observed the same holidays and festivals, went to the same places of worship. What's going on right now (no matter how we interpret the past) is state-run criminality. That surely supersedes and overcomes any cultural or allegedly national loyalty.