Has the UN Reformed on Antisemitism?

Update from AIJAC

Has the UN Reformed on Antisemitism?

July 2, 2004
Number 07/04 #01

The UN held a conference on antisemitism last week, which may not sound so amazing except for the fact that the UN has refused to acknowledge antisemitism as a form of racism or do anything about it for decades. Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke movingly, and there was much discussion of the problem from the largely Jewish audience.

But most scathing and talked about was Law Professor Anne Bayefsky, who has repeatedly written about the UN's failures in the this regard. Excerpts of her remarks, amounting to a stinging indictment of the UN, are reproduced below. To read her powerful case, CLICK HERE

Also present was veteran Australian Jewish leader Isi Leibler, who wrote about his experience at this and other antisemitism conferences from his current home in Israel. His major lesson from the conferences is that quiet diplomacy with respect to the problem of antisemitism is a complete failure, and only public campaigns work. For his full argument CLICK HERE

Finally, here is a very well-written piece on the resurgence of antisemitism in recent years by the British author and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. For his pithy comments, CLICK HERE.

One Small Step

Is the U.N. finally ready to get serious about anti-Semitism?

BY ANNE BAYEFSKY
Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 21, 2004

(Editor's note: Ms. Bayefsky delivered this speech at the U.N. at a conference on Confronting Anti-Semitism: Education for Tolerance and Understanding, sponsored by the United Nations Department of Information)

I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you at this first U.N. conference on anti-Semitism, which is being convened six decades after the organization's creation. My thanks to the U.N. organizers and in particular Shashi Tharoor [the undersecretary-general for communications and public information] for their initiative and to the secretary-general for his willingness to engage.

This meeting occurs at a point when the relationship between Jews and the United Nations is at an all-time low. The U.N. took root in the ashes of the Jewish people, and according to its charter was to flower on the strength of a commitment to tolerance and equality for all men and women and of nations large and small. Today, however, the U.N. provides a platform for those who cast the victims of the Nazis as the Nazi counterparts of the 21st century. The U.N. has become the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism--intolerance and inequality against the Jewish people and its state.

Not only have many of the U.N. members most responsible for this state of affairs rendered their own countries Judenrein, they have succeeded in almost entirely expunging concern about Jew-hatred from the U.N. docket. From 1965, when anti-Semitism was deliberately excluded from a treaty on racial discrimination, to last fall, when a proposal for a General Assembly resolution on anti-Semitism was withdrawn after Ireland capitulated to Arab and Muslim opposition, mention of anti-Semitism has continually ground the wheels of U.N.-led multilateralism to a halt.

There has never been a U.N. resolution specifically on anti-Semitism or a single report to a U.N. body dedicated to discrimination against Jews, in contrast to annual resolutions and reports focusing on the defamation of Islam and discrimination against Muslims and Arabs. Instead there was Durban--the 2001 U.N. World Conference "Against Racism," which was a breeding ground and global soapbox for anti-Semites. When it was over U.N. officials and member states turned the Durban Declaration into the centerpiece of the U.N.'s antiracism agenda--allowing Durban follow-up resolutions to become a continuing battlefield over U.N. concern with anti-Semitism.

Not atypical is the public dialogue in the U.N.'s top human rights body--the Commission on Human Rights--where this past April the Pakistani ambassador, speaking on behalf of the 56 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, unashamedly disputed that anti-Semitism was about Jews.

For Jews, however, ignorance is not an option. Anti-Semitism is about intolerance and discrimination directed at Jews--both individually and collectively. It concerns both individual human rights and the group right to self-determination--realized in the state of Israel.

What does discrimination against the Jewish state mean? It means refusing to admit only Israel to the vital negotiating sessions of regional groups held daily during U.N. Commission on Human Rights meetings. It means devoting six of the 10 emergency sessions ever held by the General Assembly to Israel. It means transforming the 10th emergency session into a permanent tribunal--which has now been reconvened 12 times since 1997. By contrast, no emergency session was ever held on the Rwandan genocide, estimated to have killed a million people, or the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands in the former Yugoslavia, or the death of millions over the past two decades of atrocities in Sudan. That's discrimination.

The record of the Secretariat is more of the same. In November 2003, Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a report on Israel's security fence, detailing the purported harm to Palestinians without describing one terrorist act against Israelis which preceded the fence's construction. Recently, the secretary-general strongly condemned Israel for destroying homes in southern Gaza without mentioning the arms-smuggling tunnels operating beneath them. When Israel successfully targeted Hamas terrorist Abdel Aziz Rantissi with no civilian casualties, the secretary-general denounced Israel for an "extrajudicial" killing. But when faced with the 2004 report of the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions detailing the murder of more than 3,000 Brazilian civilians shot at close range by police, Mr. Annan chose silence. That's discrimination.

At the U.N., the language of human rights is hijacked not only to discriminate but to demonize the Jewish target. More than one quarter of the resolutions condemning a state's human rights violations adopted by the commission over 40 years have been directed at Israel. But there has never been a single resolution about the decades-long repression of the civil and political rights of 1.3 billion people in China, or the million female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia kept as virtual slaves, or the virulent racism which has brought 600,000 people to the brink of starvation in Zimbabwe. Every year, U.N. bodies are required to produce at least 25 reports on alleged human rights violations by Israel, but not one on an Iranian criminal justice system which mandates punishments like crucifixion, stoning and cross-amputation of right hand and left foot. This is not legitimate critique of states with equal or worse human rights records. It is demonization of the Jewish state.

As Israelis are demonized at the U.N., so Palestinians and their cause are deified. Every year the U.N. marks Nov. 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People--the day the U.N. partitioned the British Palestine mandate and which Arabs often style as the onset of al nakba or the "catastrophe" of the creation of the state of Israel. In 2002, the anniversary of the vote that survivors of the concentration camps celebrated, was described by Secretary-General Annan as "a day of mourning and a day of grief."

In 2003 the representatives of over 100 member states stood along with the secretary-general, before a map predating the state of Israel, for a moment of silence "for all those who had given their lives for the Palestinian people"--which would include suicide bombers. Similarly, U.N. rapporteur John Dugard has described Palestinian terrorists as "tough" and their efforts as characterized by "determination, daring, and success." A commission resolution for the past three years has legitimized the Palestinian use of "all available means including armed struggle"--an absolution for terrorist methods which would never be applied to the self-determination claims of Chechens or Basques.

Although Palestinian self-determination is equally justified, the connection between demonizing Israelis and sanctifying Palestinians makes it clear that the core issue is not the stated cause of Palestinian suffering. For there are no U.N. resolutions deploring the practice of encouraging Palestinian children to glorify and emulate suicide bombers, or the use of the Palestinian population as human shields, or the refusal by the vast majority of Arab states to integrate Palestinian refugees into their societies and to offer them the benefits of citizenship. Palestinians are lionized at the U.N. because they are the perceived antidote to what U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi called the great poison of the Middle East--the existence and resilience of the Jewish state.

Of course, anti-Semitism takes other forms at the U.N. Over the past decade at the commission, Syria announced that yeshivas train rabbis to instill racist hatred in their pupils. Palestinian representatives claimed that Israelis can happily celebrate religious holidays like Yom Kippur only by shedding Palestinian blood, and accused Israel of injecting 300 Palestinian children with HIV-positive blood.

U.N.-led anti-Semitism moves from the demonization of Jews to the disqualification of Jewish victimhood: refusing to recognize Jewish suffering by virtue of their ethnic and national identity. In 2003 a General Assembly resolution concerned with the welfare of Israeli children failed (though one on Palestinian children passed handily) because it proved impossible to gain enough support for the word Israeli appearing before the word children. The mandate of the U.N. special rapporteur on the "Palestinian territories", set over a decade ago, is to investigate only "Israel's violations of . . . international law" and not to consider human-rights violations by Palestinians in Israel.

It follows in U.N. logic that nonvictims aren't really supposed to fight back. One after another concrete Israeli response to terrorism is denounced by the secretary-general and member states as illegal. But killing members of the command-and-control structure of a terrorist organization, when there is no disproportionate use of force, and arrest is impossible, is not illegal. Homes used by terrorists in the midst of combat are legitimate military targets. A nonviolent, temporary separation of parties to a conflict on disputed territory by a security fence, which is sensitive to minimizing hardships, is a legitimate response to Israel's international legal obligations to protect its citizens from crimes against humanity. In effect, the U.N. moves to pin the arms of Jewish targets behind their backs while the terrorists take aim.

The U.N.'s preferred imagery for this phenomenon is of a cycle of violence. It is claimed that the cycle must be broken--every time Israelis raises a hand. But just as the symbol of the cycle is chosen because it has no beginning, it is devastating to the cause of peace because it denies the possibility of an end. The Nuremberg Tribunal taught us that crimes are not committed by abstract entities.

The perpetrators of anti-Semitism today are the preachers in mosques who exhort their followers to blow up Jews. They are the authors of Palestinian Authority textbooks that teach a new generation to hate Jews and admire their killers. They are the television producers and official benefactors in authoritarian regimes like Syria or Egypt who manufacture and distribute programming that depicts Jews as bloodthirsty world conspirators.

Listen, however, to the words of the secretary-general in response to two suicide bombings which took place in Jerusalem this year, killing 19 and wounding 110: "Once again, violence and terror have claimed innocent lives in the Middle East. Once again, I condemn those who resort to such methods." "The Secretary General condemns the suicide bombing Sunday in Jerusalem. The deliberate targeting of civilians is a heinous crime and cannot be justified by any cause." Refusing to name the perpetrators, Mr. Secretary-General, Teflon terrorism, is a green light to strike again.

Perhaps more than any other, the big lie that fuels anti-Semitism today is the U.N.-promoted claim that the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the occupation of Palestinian land. According to U.N. revisionism, the occupation materialized in a vacuum. In reality, Israel occupies land taken in a war which was forced upon it by neighbors who sought to destroy it. It is a state of occupation which Israelis themselves have repeatedly sought to end through negotiations over permanent borders. It is a state in which any abuses are closely monitored by Israel's independent judiciary. But ultimately, it is a situation which is the responsibility of the rejectionists of Jewish self-determination among Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim brethren--who have rendered the Palestinian civilian population hostage to their violent and anti-Semitic ambitions.

There are those who would still deny the existence of anti-Semitism at the U.N. by pointing to a range of motivations in U.N. corridors including commercial interests, regional politics, preventing scrutiny of human rights violations closer to home, or enhancement of individual careers. U.N. actors and supporters remain almost uniformly in denial of the nature of the pathogen coursing through these halls. They ignore the infection and applaud the host, forgetting that the cancer which kills the organism will take with it both the good and the bad.

The relative distribution of naiveté, cowardice, opportunism, and anti-Semitism, however, matters little to Noam and Matan Ohayon, ages 4 and 5, shot to death through their mother's body in their home in northern Israel while she tried to shield them from a gunman of Yasser Arafat's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The terrible consequences of these combined motivations mobilized and empowered within U.N. chambers are the same.

The inability of the U.N. to confront the corruption of its agenda dooms this organization's success as an essential agent of equality or dignity or democratization.

This conference may serve as a turning point. We will only know if concrete changes occur hereafter: a General Assembly resolution on anti-Semitism adopted, an annual report on anti-Semitism forthcoming, a focal point on anti-Semitism created, a rapporteur on anti-Semitism appointed.

But I challenge the secretary-general and his organization to go further--if they are serious about eradicating anti-Semitism:

Start putting a name to the terrorists that kill Jews because they are Jews.

Start condemning human-rights violators wherever they dwell--even if they live in Riyadh or Damascus.

Stop condemning the Jewish people for fighting back against their killers.

And the next time someone asks you or your colleagues to stand for a moment of silence to honor those who would destroy the state of Israel, say no.
Only then will the message be heard from these chambers that the U.N. will not tolerate anti-Semitism or its consequences against Jews and the Jewish people, whether its victims live in Tehran, Paris or Jerusalem.

Ms. Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School.

The UN - a home for the Jews?

ISI LEIBLER

Jerusalem Post, Jun. 30, 2004

It has been somewhat bizarre to observe the recent stream of international and government-sponsored conferences dealing with anti-Semitism. Only six months ago most European governments were still indignantly denying the evidence of burgeoning anti-Semitism on their doorsteps. Some were even muttering that the issue was a ploy by Israelis to divert attention from alleged human rights violations.

The first breakthrough took place following a fracas between the European Union and the World Jewish Congress. An infuriated EU president Romano Prodi threatened to cancel a scheduled Brussels seminar on anti-Semitism after the WJC accused the EU of indifference. But Prodi soon relented and surprised even his own colleagues by conceding that Judaeophobia was a real threat to society.

He urged member states to introduce tougher penalties against anti-Jewish hate crimes and called for educational programs to promote tolerance. That was in February this year.

In April the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Berlin closed its anti-Semitism conference with a statement endorsed by 54 governments, condemning anti-Semitism and explicitly declaring that the delegitimization of Israel was simply a new vehicle for inciting hatred against Jews.

Further, the declaration called on all member states to support the passage of a stand-alone resolution condemning anti-Semitism at the UN General Assembly. That was in line with the campaign launched by the World Jewish Congress after the Irish, in the face of Arab opposition, had withdrawn a resolution at the UN condemning anti-Semitism.

And now in June, for the first time since its inception, the UN also hosted a conference on anti-Semitism. This represents a milestone. The proceedings were chaired by Shashi Tharoor, the head of the UN Public Information Division, who is considered a possible successor to Kofi Annan as secretary general.

The opening address by Annan was an important political statement and warmly welcomed by Israeli and Jewish leaders. Annan stressed the need to combat the "alarming resurgence" of Jew hatred and explicitly called on UN member states to support the resolution condemning anti-Semitism at the General Assembly.

The secretary general warned that differences over Middle East issues could never justify anti-Semitic outbursts. He noted that the UN had called for an end to attacks on Muslims and Arabs, and said that Jews were entitled to the same. In an aside full of irony, he said that "Jews must feel that the UN is their home, too."

The secretary general was followed by Elie Wiesel, the keynote speaker, who had assumed a similar role both at the Brussels and Berlin conferences. As always, he set the tone when he declared, "I was naively convinced that anti-Semitism had died in Auschwitz. But I was mistaken. Only the Jews perished there."

It is not merely what Wiesel says but the very presence of this Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor that conveys an authentic Jewish mystique which is unique. He is surely the most prized living voice of the Jewish people today.

Another speaker who made an indelible impression, pulling no punches in exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of the UN in relation to the Jewish people, was Prof. Anne Bayefsky of Columbia University Law School. She mercilessly castigated Annan for demonizing Israel and sanctifying the Palestinians, and lashed out at the UN Human Rights Commission for providing a platform for the promotion of medieval anti-Semitic blood libels. "The UN," she said "had become the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism, intolerance, and inequality against the Jewish people and its state."

A VISIBLY distressed chairman Shashi Tharoor was forced to stand by helplessly as Bayefsky exceeded her allotted time and received a standing ovation from the 1,200 predominantly Jewish NGO audience.

Subsequent Jewish representatives called for follow-up action. WJC President Edgar Bronfman encouraged Annan to set up a body to monitor anti-Semitic developments, provide an annual report, and appoint a rapporteur. He also urged Annan to continue canvassing UN members to support the resolution condemning anti-Semitism.

Words are important, especially words from a UN secretary general, but they do not necessarily portend a change in policy. Thus at the very same time that Annan was making his statement condemning anti-Semitism, the UN Human Rights Division was calling for an "international protection force" to stop abuses in the "occupied" territories. Thus any suggestion that this conference heralded a sea change is premature.

Two years ago in this newspaper, I described the UN as a dysfunctional assembly of nations dominated by tyrannies and dictatorships. I predicted that Israel could never expect even-handedness from a body in which the Arabs and their allies occupy such a dominant role and where even the Europeans tend to assume positions of neutrality in the face of lethal anti-Israeli hostility.

Nevertheless the WJC, which launched the campaign for a UN resolution nine months ago, can take satisfaction with the progress achieved. In addition to the OSCE and now the support of the UN secretary general for the anti-Semitism resolution, the petition to collect millions of signatures in support of UN action is making great progress.

There is an important strategic lesson to be learned. The rash of conferences on anti-Semitism hosted by governments and international bodies did not erupt spontaneously. They came in response to the public campaigns initiated by the WJC and other Jewish bodies. Plainly, Jewish leaders must publicly expose and shame governments into action. This will require a concentrated global strategy.

It will necessitate the backing of all Jewish bodies and the setting aside of organizational rivalry. To achieve that, we must be aggressively on the initiative. The road to success will be painful and long. But we must not allow ourselves to become passive. Shtadlanut (private diplomacy) and pleas unsupported by public action are utterly futile.

The writer is senior vice-president of the World Jewish Congress. He attended the three conferences on anti-Semitism held this year in Brussels, Berlin, and New York.

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A dangerous time to be a Jew

Simon Sebag Montefiore

The New Statesman, Monday 28th June 2004

11 September and Iraq have sparked the return to a medieval anti-Semitism in which Blair, Bush and the media act as pawns of a sinister cabal.

When I was 16, I went to toil in a kibbutz in Israel for a few months, imagining myself as a Hebraic warrior, sweatily harvesting oranges with fecund Israeli girls in groves blossoming with Jewish ingenuity amid the once-sterile Negev Desert. I actually found myself making plastic toilets. This was not good for my Jewish self-image. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder, foresaw that statehood meant Jewish intellectuals, but also truck drivers and criminals. But he never mentioned loo-makers. From the shtetls of Lodz to Starbucks in Manhattan, even our comic geniuses - Sholom Aleichem, Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld, had not invented the Jewish toilet-maker. So here I was: a new character in our ancient canon of self-mockery, the humour that makes our tragedies bearable, our successes ridiculous. My favourite example: my witty great-uncle being asked his age at a funeral. "Ninety-two," he said. "Hardly worth going home, is it?"

At the toilet factory, I worked a sealing gun joining the pipes. Whenever I tried to fuse them, however, one would fly off, spinning around the factory and sending workers ducking for cover. I was such a klutz, that I was called before the Boss, a septuagenarian cockney who had fought Mosley's fascists in the 1930s. He was contemptuous of me not only for my lack of toilet-training (as it were) but also because I was a public-school, "gilt-edged Jewish Monte-Fauntleroy" - by which he meant the Montefiores had helped build Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine, but never deigned to live there. I retorted that my mother's family were tough immigrants from Lithuania, Poland and Russia. The Boss laughed: "That's being a Jew: Heinz has 57 varieties."

This Heinzian principle of Juda-ism has been overshadowed by the contemporary image of Israel - and by the frenzied anti-Zionist, anti-American circus of bizarre conspiracy theories that present Jews as a single political "cabal" rather than the world's most diverse diaspora, a wealth of religious, cultural and racial communities, separate from Israel or America.

The diaspora tells its stories in some newly republished literature - remarkable voices such as Joseph Roth and Isaac Babel: as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. In Britain, Howard Jacobson has just published an Anglo-Jewish comedy, The Making of Henry, which shows the Jewish experience here is as laden with absurd angst as that of Bellow or Singer.

I learned how small the Jewish community is in Britain when I was at Cambridge, having an affair with a girl who had no idea I was Jewish. One day, in bed, it slipped out. Eyes widening as if I had horns and fangs, she explained that her father had warned her that she might "meet Jews" at Cambridge, but she must beware of this "amoral but diabolically clever sect". Now, she mused, with an erotic shiver, "The first one I meet is in my bed."

Being an English Jew is very different from being an American Jew. American Jews can never quite understand the insecurities of being a European Jew, for the 5.8 million American Jews feel totally secure. (Though it should be noted that in the US, there are still co-ops in uptown NYC, clubs in Miami, where Jews are inadmissible.) Here in Britain, we are only 275,000 out of 60 million. Most parts of Britain have no Jews at all. I constantly meet educated Brits who have never met a Jew. Such people can never quite believe it: "You're not, are you? Oh, you really are. Great! I've always thought you're a very clever people."

You might say that only a Jew could possibly take this acclamation of cleverness as an insult. Being a Jew is all about living on several levels, listening on different frequencies, deciphering codes. Even in England. But I have to say that there is not a single day when I do not thank God that I was born a Jew in England, this tolerant, quirky, flexible land that has embraced Indians, Pakistanis, African Caribbeans as it embraced Jews. It is typical that, when my wife converted to Judaism, I couldn't have been more welcomed into her family. Ultimately, since our Cromwellian return to this island, the Anglo-Jewish experience has been positive. First, there were the Sephardic (Arab-Mediterranean) Jews, like my own family, the Sebags of Essaouira, Morocco. In the 1880s, the Ashkenazim arrived, refugees from tsarist pogroms. These included my mother's family, poor but learned, descended from 33 generations of rabbis. My mother's Lithuanian-Russian ancestors have not done badly: they spawned two Lord Chief Justices (including the present one) and (crazy but true) Gwyneth Paltrow. (Yes, the ultimate ivory-skinned blonde shiksa who, according to a surreal Jewish Chronicle "exclusive", is - like me - descended from the Paltrowiches of Nizhniy Novgorod.)

Anti-Semitism here was subtle. Yet those Sephardic ancestors felt they had to work particularly hard and behave especially well: "Our race can do anything but fail," wrote a Montefiore to Benjamin Disraeli. Prejudice was part of upper-class culture - and literature, too: see John Buchan's Jewish villains, George du Maurier's wicked Svengali, or Anthony Trollope's grotesque financier Augustus Melmotte and Sephardic adventurer Ferdinand Lopez.

Although between the wars, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill fostered Zionism and a Jew was appointed Viceroy of India, there were also Oswald and Diana Mosley and those mandarins who complained during the 1930s of "wailing Jews" making out as if the Nazis wanted to kill them all. When Anthony Julius, lawyer to the late Princess of Wales, recently published a book about T S Eliot (whose wonderful poetry gave literary anti-Semitism a good name), he argued that anti-Semitic prejudice was sometimes serious, but often harmless. It "encompassed drawing-room condescensions and forest shootings", but "the drawing-room anti-Semite" is "not a murderer", just an "anti-Semite".

Yet something has changed about the European attitude to Jewishness. One feels it everywhere: we have moved, as it were, from the world of Howard Jacobson back to Franz Kafka. This is connected to Israel, America, 9/11 and Iraq. For more than a decade now, Israel has been the fashionable bete noire of the chattering classes. The response to Israel in the European media, particularly the BBC and the Guardian, has long been prejudiced, disproportionate, vicious.

A typical case of the media's mendacity on Israel was the invented coverage of the Jenin "massacre" (not) by British news organisations, which were so anti-Israel that they popularised an event that they could not have witnessed, because it had not happened. They never apologised - because any Israeli "atrocity" is seen to illustrate a greater truth. Another example was the Israeli assassination of the man whom the BBC called Hamas's "spiritual leader": Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was actually a terrorist boss, about as "spiritual" as Osama Bin Laden.

Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya, the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern tyrannies are ignored - but in Britain, every Palestinian death is reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross revealed in the National Review that when the "moderate" Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for "community cohesion". Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews - "scum of the human race, rats of the world" - to be "annihilated".

It is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. Many of its policies are clumsy, self-defeating, wrong. I am against most of the settlements, against the razing of Palestinian houses. Israel will lose its soul if it uses citizen-soldiers to skirmish through Rafah or Hebron for much longer. I want a Palestinian state; I care deeply about the humiliation and deaths of Palestinians. If criticisms against Israel were based purely on its political faults, no one could complain. Yet, since the first intifada, Israel's critics use hysteria and unreality, holding Israel to standards to which Britain, for one, could never aspire. A veteran MP, Gerald Kaufman, regularly attacks Israel in attention-seeking missives billed as "Well-known British Jew attacks Israel", when they should be headlined: "British Jew well known only for attacking Israel attacks Israel again!"

Kaufman provides Jewish cover for more dangerous people. The first head of the hydra-like monster of medieval anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was the implied parallel between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Nazis' treatment of the Jews. This is a de facto cousin of Holocaust denial, as it diminishes and trivialises what really happened then. Since the second intifada started, 2,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have died - an appalling loss of life, but hardly a genocide. This couples with sympathy for anti-Israel suicide bombers: Israeli deeds are disgusting, those of Palestinian terrorists permissible, because of their victimhood.

Since 9/11 and Iraq, a millenarian cauldron of old-fashioned anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claims that secretive Jews (the wicked "neo-cons") are controlling Bush, Blair and the media, and even arranged 9/11. Anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become interchangeable.

The conspiracy fever sounds like something out of that notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, mixed with the medieval blood libel about the drinking of Christian children's blood. This rubbish seeps over the internet from the Arab media, where feverish anti-Semitism is the norm, to insane US/UK websites. The message: from Iraq to 9/11, it's the Jews wot did it.

Even respectable commentators are at it. Tam Dalyell MP last year said that Tony Blair was "unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers". After al-Qaeda's Madrid bombings, left-wing commentators argued that the Zionist state was the real source of terrorism. (Yet Israel is the leading Islamist grievance solely in the western media: a glance at jihadist websites actually shows Israel is mentioned much less often than Chechnya, Kashmir, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.) The liberal historian Anthony Sampson blames the turmoil in Iraq on a "neoconservative cabal and the Israeli government". Whatever he actually meant, "cabal" has become a code word, a shibboleth. (Always a "cabal". What would Charles II's Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington, Lauderdale make of this? Or were they really Cliffordstein, Ashleichem, the Duke of Buckinghamowitz, Arlingtonbaum and Lauderschnigelglas?)

Conspiracies are founded on coincidence and fantastical connections. Obviously there is no cabal. There were more Jews in Bill Clinton's administration than there are in Bush's; most American Jews are Democrats. Bush's Iraq policy is actually led by Donald Rumsfeld (of German ancestry) and two African Americans, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. (Ever read about the "African American cabal"? Hardly.) This Judification of US policy resembles Goebbels's campaigns against "the Jew Roosevelt". Besides, if the media were really controlled by Jews, they would not continually run anti-Israeli stories. Or covers such as the New Statesman's own "Kosher conspiracy", published in January 2002: illustrated with a brazen caricature, it suggested a London-Jewish conspiracy of arms dealers and press barons, then concluded that no such coven existed.

A part of this is a refusal to analyse what really happened to the Oslo land-for-peace accords. Premier Ehud Barak offered Chairman Yasser Arafat a viable West Bank-and-Gaza state. Arafat turned it down. The Palestinians returned to terrorist tactics; Israelis recalled the old warhorse Ariel Sharon. Both sides have done atrocious things to each other and been ill-served by their leaders. But it is Hamas-PLO that has needlessly resuscitated Sharon's career, destroyed Israel's peace party, sunk its own people into a quagmire of suicide, war, corruption, poverty and humiliation.

When Israel offered to do what everyone has wanted it to do since 1967 - withdraw from Gaza - the reaction to the initiative was as if Sharon had proposed the execution of every first-born in Araby. Yet Sharon's ruthlessness has almost decapitated Hamas, and certainly slowed the suicide bombings. Indeed, as a result of his policies, there are signs that the intifada is drawing to an end.

Today's conspiracy fever is based on fear, expressed in a millenarian yearning for answers in an uncertain, post-cold war world. Fear of Islamist terrorism leads some to think that if the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda/Hamas are so fanatically strong, they must be just.

In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists, the bien-pensants purveyors of these conspiracies will not heal Islamist grievances. For such grievances are about western power, modernity and freedom. Islamist terrorists visualise "Jews" as perhaps a weak link in our western civilisation, but an essential part of our society. Those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews.

This month, arsonists attacked two more synagogues in north London; more than one hundred synagogues have been desecrated since 2000. This, in a time of prosperity: what would happen in a time of instability if these cod conspiracies became accepted political discourse?

Until 9/11, Anglo-Jewry had become accustomed to prejudiced coverage of Israel. But if you were not a Zionist, as many Jews are not, you did not need to worry. Since 9/11, and particularly post-Iraq, we have witnessed a sea change. It is as if, in the mythical scale of 9/11, al-Qaeda had unlocked a forgotten cultural capsule of anti-Semitic myths, sealed and forgotten since the Nazis, the Black Hundreds and the medieval blood libels. Just words? But words matter in a violent world. This weird and scary nonsense is an international phenomenon, not a British one. Despite it, Britain retains the easygoing tolerance and pragmatism, the sources of her greatness. It is still better to be a Jew in England than anywhere else.

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