“It must be the Jews…”

Jewish Socialist, Spring 2007

I was sipping tea in a darkened room in a dusty village somewhere off the Lahore-Multan road in Pakistan. My host was a rental car driver. We’d been chatting as we made our way across the flat plains of southern Punjab, beginning with cricket, and eventually, in a transition common across south Asia, leading to politics. We had been passionately agreeing on the barbarism and insanity of the invasion of Iraq and US foreign policy in general, and I had been invited to his house to meet his family and continue our talk. Now, with a palpable heaviness, he said, “But why do they act like this? I think it must be the Jews.”

I wasn’t surprised by the remark. Across Pakistan, and in many other Muslim (and indeed some non-Muslim) countries, there is a casual assumption that the Jews are behind the west’s assault on Muslim populations. It’s a safe bet that at least tens of millions around the world believe some form of the 9/11 mythology: that the Jews working in the Twin Towers were warned in advance, that Mossad or Israel or the Jews organised the whole thing.

My host mentioned that he’d heard these stories, but readily agreed when I described them as conspiracy theories. What he raised next, however, required more discussion. “Maybe it’s all because the Jews run America.”

This thesis, or a variant on it, is even more widely believed than the Twin Towers legends (and obviously, not only in the developing world) . The US’s atrocious behaviour in Iraq and its support for Israel are explained by Jewish influence – often specifically the influence of “Jewish money”.

I asked my host how many Jews he thought there were in the US.

He pondered for a moment, then answered : “Maybe about 50%?”

He was struck when I told him it was under 3%, and more than happy to abandon the Jewish power thesis when I explained its improbability and offered him an alternative. This has been my experience in all the conversations on this topic I’ve had with people in Pakistan, ranging from drivers to NGO workers to Mullahs to young male cricket fans in replica Nike trainers.

What’s common to all these encounters is the absence of any personal hostility to Jews. Certainly as soon as I have identified myself as a Jew, I have felt nothing but the warmest welcome, coupled with intense, entirely friendly curiosity. There is also a widespread awareness that Muslims and Jews were once friends and neighbours, and a puzzled sadness that this is no longer so.

The anti-semitism I encountered in Pakistan was driven not by hate, but by confusion. People are looking for an explanation for the daily horrors of US and Israeli aggression. Israel identifies itself with the Jews and with the west, while the west identifies itself with Israel, as do many Jews. These facts, rather than anti-semitic propaganda (of which there is little in Pakistan), are what lead people towards blaming the Jews for the nightmares of the 21st century. In the absence of left and anti-imperialist analyses (the Pakistani left has never recovered from the Zia era), they grasp at an ethnic conspiracy theory. In this, of course, they are hardly unusual.

In all the discussions I’ve had in Pakistan, people have always been quick to accept that oil, money, greed for power, colonialism, racism, etc. are much more likely to explain US policy than “the Jews”. After all, these are the same factors they see shaping their own society. So the good news is that this form of anti-semitism is not deep-rooted and is easily challenged. The problem is that there are so few people around challenging it.

Thanks to the Jewish Socialist Group, I was able to resume the conversation – on air – in London last November. A local Muslim community radio station in Hendon was looking for a Jew for their Friday night topical discussion programme and I was lucky enough to fill the spot.

The topic was “Are we [i.e British Muslims] in danger of hating Jews because of Israel’s actions?” Since a Zionist group had declined to participate, I found myself the sole studio guest. Listeners submitted questions by email and TXT, and the presenter expanded on these. The questions ranged from the naïve to the sophisticated, but the premise of all of them, and of the entire discussion, was that it would be wrong for Muslims to hate Jews because of Israel, and that this was a tendency Muslims had to resist.

Some listeners were puzzled that I described myself as a Jew even though I did not support Israel, because they believed support for Israel was a scriptural commandment for Jews. Others cited various unsavoury goy-bashing passages from the Talmud and asked if it was because of beliefs of this kind that Israeli soldiers behaved as they did in the West Bank and Gaza. Why could Muslims eat kosher food but Jews could not eat halal? Was it true that Jews had massacred Muslims in the 15th century? Was it true that Jews controlled the media in the 21st century?

The hardest questions to answer were those which asked, bluntly, whether there was any hope for the Palestinians, whether attitudes in Israel would soften, whether the Jewish diaspora would join with Muslims in protesting Israel’s cruel behaviour. There was no holocaust denial, but there was anger that other crimes against humanity were not acknowledged in the same way – Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir…

In my attempts to respond to all these queries, I felt I was listened to not only with courtesy but with eager attention. There was a hunger for hard facts and logical analysis. What made it possible to pursue the discussion, however, was that I fully shared their anger over Iraq and Palestine, and specifically that I acknowledged the Naqba and the historic dispossession of the Palestinian people.

After nearly two hours of this, I was completely exhausted. The presenter decided to bowl me a last googly: wasn’t I just what they called a “self-hating Jew”? Having run out of sober logic, all that popped into mind was a Larry David joke on this subject. When accused of being a self-hating Jew (because he’s whistling a tune from Wagner), Larry replies: “I do hate myself – but not because I’m Jewish!”

The presenter cracked up, as did the producer and technicians gathered in the little studio. So if nothing else, I’ve had the satisfaction of telling a bona fide Jewish joke on a Muslim radio station.