Civitas

The Board of Deputies claimed, and the panel hearing the complaint agreed, that the Mayor had brought his office into disrepute, for failing to apologise to an Evening Standard reporter just over a year ago, after the Mayor had likened the journalist to a Nazi concentration camp-guard and had then been informed by the journalist that, being himself a Jew, he found the Mayor's analogy particularly offensive.

Following his four week suspension, against which he is currently appealing on the grounds of its breaching his human right to freedom of expression, Mr Livingstone called a news conference. At it, he claimed the real reason the Board of Deputies had brought its complaint was not because he was in any way antisemitic, something he vehemently denies. They had done so, claimed the Mayor, only because he had been a long-time and persistent critic of the policies of successive Israeli governments towards the Palestinians, a stance which he claims the Board of Deputies does its best to suppress in this country.

‘For decades the charge of anti-Semitism has been used to try to suppress any meaningful debate about the policies of the Israeli government’, Mr Livingstone is reported to have said at it.

I returned to George Orwell’s essay in light of that remark of Mr Livingstone's because I had a hunch it would contain something that had a bearing on what Mr Livingstone said by way of exculpation of himself.

I was not disappointed.

In his essay, Orwell notes that antisemitism has, for a long time, been a quite pervasive feature of the British cultural landscape, but that ‘above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being anti-Semitic and are careful to draw a distinction between “anti-Semitism”’ and another critical attitude towards (some) Jews that is all they are prepared to admit having. Orwell also notes that: ‘Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable sin…. [and] people will go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that they are not anti-Semitic’.

Orwell declined to proffer any explanation of the phenomenon, beyond calling it a ‘deep-rooted prejudice’ that is impervious to any amount of attempts to dispel it by means of reasoned argument. He also described it as but a special instance of a still more pervasive, wider form of prejudice that consists in some baseless form of love or hatred towards whole races or nations considered respectively mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.

Zionist Jews, Orwell points out, can be as guilty as anyone else of this form of prejudice --either towards Jews ('All good') or towards non-Jews or only Arabs ('All bad) -- but who are incapable, whilst Zionists, of antisemitism.

What bearing does any of this have on Mr Livingstone? That bearing becomes apparent in what Orwell goes on to prescribe to his readers. He writes:

‘The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to the lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming across … [such] loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. …. Therefore, … the starting point for any investigation of antisemitism should not be ‘Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?’ but ‘Why does antisemitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?’ If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them. Antisemitism should be investigated – and I will not say by antisemites, but at any rate by people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion.’

In light of this characteristically astute observation of Orwell’s about the pervasiveness of irrational loves and hates towards whole sets of people, perhaps, the Mayor would have done better to be less dogmatic and vehement in his denial of anti-Semitism.

Surely, it cannot have escaped him that some of his best political friends are openly such, even if he isn’t prepared to concede he is. Maybe just maybe, he might then have seen that he might be no more immune to a form of this prejudice towards 'the other' that few others escape, whether the ‘others’ in their case are Jews, non-Jews, Arabs, Germans, homosexuals, women, or men.

What difference might such an admission on the Mayor's part have made?

Well, then, perhaps, he might then have been able to see that, perhaps, he is not free from this form of prejudice against Jews, and that, perhaps, his repeated singling out of only Israel for human rights violations in its long-running conflict with the Palestinians amounts to a form of anti-Semitism on his part, as his critics claim.

Had he gone this far in self-scrutiny, it might then have occurred to him that to say, as he is recently reported to have done, that the most fitting memorial to the Israeli Olympic athletes slaughtered by Palestinians at the Munich Olympics in 1972, would be a Palestinian state, is, to put it mildly, somewhat one-sided to the point of being not just insensitive, but down-right bigoted.

The Mayor might, also, then have begun to see that the line between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism is not always quite as clear-cut as he would have us believe, as evidenced by the recent pronouncement of his political friend, Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi who is reported to have recently publicly described the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a ‘war with the Jews …over land’ and one that ‘religion must lead’.

Were he to reach this level of self-understanding about prejudice, the Mayor might well be inclined to drop the whole issue, or, better still, apologise to the journalist, suggesting possibly at the same time to him and his newspaper that homosexuals are no more fitting an object of prejudice than Jews and blacks are, or are any other whole group of people individuated by some common shared attribute, save one which, like 'Nazi', makes a virtue of such a form of prejudice.

Oh, for some moderation in these all too difficult and troubled times!