LORD GRADE: THE THREAT WE STILL FACE
Mylategrandmother, Olga Winogradsky, and her husband Isaac lay in bed in Tokmuk, a shtetl on the outskirts of Odessa, late one night around 1910. They decided that this was no place to bring up their children. As Jews, they were under almost daily persecution from both sides of the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the tsarists. Their only source of news in Tokmuk was a cry from the street that either the reds or the Cossacks were on their way to beat up the Jews.
Cut to one night in October 1962 when bubba Winogradski and I were watching the late Richard Dimbleby explaining on a BBC Panorama news special, the state of play in the Cuban Missile crisis: Khrushchev versus Kennedy, nuclear missiles, the Russian fleet threatening to occupy Cuba, American ultimatums.
Finally, Dimbleby solemnly signed off saying “The world stands on the brink of world war three. We will keep viewers updated throughout the night.”
Grandma Winogradsky turned to me and asked: “Sug mir, tatala, is dis good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?”
I smiled. I understood what prompted that question even though we all felt safe in a post war Britain at peace with itself, with many thousands of immigrant Jews assimilated and making their contribution to the country that had offered us all safe haven.
Antisemitism was now a remote issue in our lives. Mosley’s Blackshirts were a distant memory; Jews were establishing themselves in all walks of life — socially mobile, in today’s jargon.
A few unreconstructed golf clubs refused to admit Jewish members — myself included, denied membership by Dulwich Golf Club for being Jewish. Pockets of antisemitism existed behind the walls of a few up-market banks, gentlemen’s clubs and some top schools.
My only brush with antisemitism back then was at Stowe school where a few pupils used to pick on the small band of Jewish boys. We fought back. Pretty small stuff, pretty isolated. In the US, itself a land of immigrants, Lindberg pre-war had made some explicitly antisemitic speeches in his run for the presidential nomination. Walt Disney, the cuddly creator of Bambi and Mickey Mouse, would employ no Jews in his organization. He was by all accounts a racist bigot. After he died and the Disney Empire started withering, it was a delicious irony that it took a Jew, Michael Eisner, to turn Disney’s business round.
But here we are today, worried sick once more about antisemitism – and with good reason. I find it a source of deep regret that CST is needed at all, but needed it clearly is to protect Jews and our places of worship. We appear to have gone backwards.
Antisemitism is on the march all around us. In universities, in academia, in the Labour Party. Where next?
But here I am, 73 years of age, a fiercely proud and privileged citizen of this great country, watching this evil virus reassert itself more boldly and blatantly than any of us can remember.
Why? The simple answer, I guess, is that old familiar story. When people feel angry and disconnected from politics, they look for someone to blame and Jews are the scapegoats of record. We have yet to shake off our tragic status as the whipping boys of history.
It isn’t helped by the fact that we live in a blame culture. Politicians’ and the media’s knee jerk response when almost anything goes wrong is to ask: who is to blame?
There is evidence throughout the free world, fertilised by social media that politicians are out of touch with their electorates. Hence Tsipras in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Brexit, Trump, and who knows what shocks to come.
I believe this gap in the connection between the political masters and the people they represent to be a serious issue for us all, nowhere more so than in the European Union.
I voted for Brexit. My reasoning had nothing to do with economics. In the aftermath of the Second World War, some fine minds proposed a more united Europe, working together to reduce the risk of the far left and or the far right ever rising up again to cause a third European conflict. It was a truly far-sighted vision.
That ambition is, however, a long way from the EU we now know. The Eurocrats through their inward looking political machinations have cre- ated precisely the conditions where the far right and the far left are in the ascendant. From Jeremy Corbyn to Marine Le Pen, Holland even Germany, extreme politics are gaining traction - the ideal conditions for antisemitism. .
My PA, Ros Sloboda, and her husband, who both suffered grievous family losses in the Holocaust, have a holiday retreat in France. She tells me her Jewish friends there are leaving the country. The antisemitism is no longer bearable. Defacement of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries across Europe is now an epidemic, as it is becoming here.
This is the crude face of antisemitism. Its more subtle face lies in more rarified worlds where people really ought to know better. Let’s start with today’s Labour Party. I’d prefer not to, but their inability, convincingly, to acknowledge and confront the cancer of antisemitism in their midst is shameful.
Jewish Labour MP’s are harassed and abused and their premises defaced with antisemitic daubing that owes more to Kristallnacht than the inheritors of the Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee legacy. Jews and the political left were traditionally united in fighting fascism. Today, some in the Labour party are behaving like fascists.
The antisemitism expressed by some followers of the Labour Party can be pretty explicit. But it can also manifest itself in code. They have morphed the word Zionist into their form of hate speech — the equivalent of Yid or Kike.
I remember reading a report in the financial pages of the Guardian about the proposed merger of Carlton TV and Granada. Michael Green, Carlton’s chairman, was described as Jewish and from North London. When writing in the very same article about Granada’s Charles Allen, there was no reference to his race, faith or background.
I challenged the then Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to explain why Green’s religion was relevant, but Allen’s wasn’t. After an internal debate, they had to concede to me that they were wrong to make this distinction. Small victory, but battles like this with
the media are often made up of small victories.
In my TV career, I have faced many public meetings with Jewish audiences and been called on to defend ITV, Channel 4 and BBC coverage of the Middle East. Yes, under the pressure of 24 hour news, reporters make mistakes, sometimes unthinking, sometimes with careless use of language, more often through ignorance.
That does not mean reporters are anti-Israel, I would argue. But these days, I find it less easy to defend the journalists.
Double standards abound among many who comment or criticise Israel. Of course, the Israeli government must not be immune to criticism. But it is easy to spot where such attacks risk crossing the line into antisemitism: it’s when the critic so conveniently ignores the crucial context that Israel is in a permanent state of siege.
She is surrounded on all sides by violent, undemocratic forces, determined to wipe her and her citizens off the face of the earth — they are zealots with no regard for democracy, law, morality or indeed the sanctity of human life.
It is not surprising that Israel should conduct herself at times with a siege mentality. Human rights may need to be suspended in the desperate effort to protect her citizens as they can be here in Britain.
How different in principle is what Israel has to do to protect itself from what happened here in the UK during the Northern Ireland troubles?
As the IRA and others blew up innocent men women and children on both sides of the Irish Sea, our government suspended many civil rights; measures included imprisonment without trial, trials without juries, control over what the broadcasters could say about the troubles and who they could interview, democratically elected Sinn Fein members of parliament were even denied direct access to the airwaves.
Under violent and indiscriminate siege, hard choices have to be made. Israel has to make these choices every day to protect her people. Criticise, yes, but don’t ignore the context.
The other double standard at work, which tips criticism of Israel into antisemitism, is the singular focus of the calls for boycotts of Israel.
If a country is deemed to have a poor record in human rights, the main accusation of Israel’s critics, by all means protest. But why single out Israel for criticism and boycotts?
There are many other countries in the Middle East and beyond whose records of totalitarianism, suppression, mysoginism, lack of freedom of expression and civil rights abuses are far, far worse than their worst characterisation of Israel.
Their silence on the human rights records elsewhere is why the criticism of Israel poured forth in students’ unions is Jew hatred masquerading as political comment.
Those many academics who work actively to boycott Israel and Israeli academics bring shame on their profession.
What can we do to eliminate this pernicious virus? We must continually challenge it. We must pressure government, we must stand up for our individual right and Israel’s right not to be judged for our faith but to be judged in the court of public opinion by the same standards by which all other nations are judged. Criticise Israel by all means but don’t single her out.
Meanwhile, before we can turn that tide, we must rely on the good works of CST to protect us and our places of worship.
The menace of antisemitism calls for sober reflection — and all the protection that only CST can provide. We may have travelled a long way from the Shtetl, but I am not sure it feels like it today.