(Jewish Group) It's hard for us on the Israeli left - liberal antisemitism makes it worse [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

he New York Times apologised this week for a cartoon published recently in its international edition. The drawing was of a blind Donald Trump, wearing a skullcap, led by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was depicted as a dog wearing a star of David collar. The cartoon evoked caricatures of evil Jews misleading blind nations, of a kind popular in the German media during the Nazi era.

The reaction in both the US and Israel was first shock, then a furore. The cartoon couldn’t have come at a worse time – the San Diego synagogue shooting last weekend proved that antisemitism is still deeply rooted in the US. And it came just as Israel prepared to remember 6 million Jews on the national Holocaust Remembrance Day. For New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, the cartoon “checked so many antisemitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign”. The Jew in the form of a dog; the small cunning Jew leading a naive American; hated Trump depicted as blind and Judaised, a puppet of the Jewish state (as if Trump needs Netanyahu to make him act the way he does).

I found it shocking – even more so when my five-year-old spotted my computer screen and asked “what is the dog doing?”. We haven’t discussed the Holocaust with my daughter yet. We’re still figuring out how to let her know that half of her dad’s family is dead because of antisemitism. Living in a Jewish state, celebrating all the holidays and Shabat since she was born, I’m not sure she yet knows that she is Jewish or even what a Jew is. I certainly don’t want her indoctrinated into Netanyahu’s narrative – that the whole world hates Israelis because we’re Jews.

But depictions such as the New York Times one and the ongoing antisemitism blindspot in the British Labour party make me wonder. They give the Israeli right a loaded gun – confirming its basic assumption that any criticism of Israeli government policy is driven by hidden antisemitism.

Netanyahu’s rightwing government seeks constantly to convince the Israeli public of this narrative. The Israeli left, by contrast, constantly struggles to prove that it is valid to criticise Israel, and that those of us who oppose the Israeli government’s policies are not “self-hating Jews”. In this context, an antisemitic political cartoon actually empowers the right.

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