I am going to begin with a word: antisemitism. It is one of the most powerful words in contemporary political discourse, a conversation-stopper, a career-ender, a moral red card deployed with increasing frequency to silence criticism of the Israeli state. I want to examine it. Not to diminish the reality of Jewish persecution – which is historical, documented, and horrifying – but because the word itself contains a truth that its current users appear not to know, or prefer to forget.
The word derives from Shem. In Genesis, Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The descendants of Shem – the Shemitic, or Semitic, peoples – were the inhabitants of the ancient Middle East. They included the ancestors of the Jews. They also included the ancestors of the Arabs.
Jews and Arabs share a common biblical origin. They are, in the language of Genesis, brothers.
To weaponise the word ‘antisemitism’ as an exclusively Jewish shield, while simultaneously dispossessing Arab Palestinians of their land, their homes, and their lives, is not just historically illiterate, it is a theft compounded by an irony so vast it would be darkly hypocritical, were the consequences not so lethal.
A personal memory
In 1967, during the Six Day War, I was a medical student in London. I was attacked – physically and verbally – by fellow students, some of whom I had considered close friends. One had been my girlfriend. Another was a fellow musician with whom I had spent long hours practising and playing.
My ‘crime’ was my father’s origins. He was Egyptian. Never mind that he had fought the Nazis in the second world war, as his grandfather before him had fought alongside Kitchener at Omdurman. In the terrified, tribal atmosphere of that week, my father’s birthplace made me the enemy. The complexity of a human life – his service, his history, my friendship with these people, the music we had made together – collapsed into a single contempt: Egyptian, therefore Arab, therefore threat.
I am 78 years old. That pain has not fully left me.
I tell this story not to recall 1967, but because it illustrated something I have spent decades trying to understand. Identity, when threatened, narrows down to self. It narrows with terrifying speed. People who were my friends, who knew me as an individual, saw only a category, a label, but perhaps didn’t see me. And within that category, I was the enemy.
This is not unique to Jewish experience it is also the experience of other distinct nationalities. Othering? It is human experience. But understanding the mechanism does not make the wound smaller.
‘Yehudi Menuhin and his father
There is another story I carry; less personal but equally instructive.
Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist, gave a concert to benefit the new state of Israel. His father – an indigenous Palestinian Jew, a man of that land in the full, complex, ancient sense – told his son that if he did not also give a concert to benefit the Palestinians, he would cut him off entirely.
The father understood something his son, in his patriotic enthusiasm, had temporarily forgotten: that the land of Palestine had always belonged to a mixed people of Jews and Muslims and Christians, layered across millennia. The Zionist project, whatever its origins in genuine desperation and genuine persecution, was transplanted into a place that was already inhabited. The father was not anti-Jewish. He was a Jew. He was insisting on the full picture.
Menuhin, to his great credit, did give the second concert. And in later life he became one of the most prominent Jewish voices against the Israeli occupation – a fact conveniently forgotten by those who would claim all prominent Jews as Zionist supporters.
The colonial pattern
Jean Baudrillard, writing about America in the 1980s, observed something that cuts to the bone of this argument. America, he suggested, was born already mythological, a civilisation that understood itself as destined, as chosen, as the rightful inheritor of a continent that was, in the story it told itself, essentially empty and there for the taking. The indigenous peoples were not, in this story, truly present. They were obstacles, or scenery, or, in the more generous version, peoples to be ‘improved’.
The pattern is not American in origin. It is colonial, and it is old.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 – a letter from a British Foreign Secretary to a British Jewish aristocrat, regarding “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine – territory that Britain did not own and whose inhabitants were not consulted – set in motion a process that follows the colonial template with painful fidelity. A metropolitan power decides a territory is available. The indigenous population’s complexity is flattened into an inconvenience, and its existence ignored. A story is constructed about destiny, return, divine promise, or civilizational necessity. And the dispossession proceeds, generation by generation, checkpoint by checkpoint, settlement by settlement. I have personally witnessed the outcome of this in Canada, while caring for the inhabitants of ‘reservations’, near Winnipeg, a past that is thankfully now being acknowledged and partly resolved.
This is not unique to Israel. The same pattern produced the American West. It produced apartheid South Africa. It produced the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. It produced, in a different register, the situation in Ukraine, where the borders drawn by one empire are now being redrawn by the force of another, over the bodies of people who simply live there.
What is particular, maybe even unique, about the Israeli case is the use of historical persecution to immunise the project against criticism. The Holocaust was real. The centuries of European anti-Jewish persecution, the 1290 expulsion from England, the Inquisition, the pogroms, Dickens’ Fagin, Shakespeare’s Shylock, the slow drip of caricature hardening into permitted hatred, were real. The desperation that drove Zionism was real and understandable.
But historical victimhood does not purchase a permanent licence. Suffering endured does not justify suffering inflicted. And the descendants of people persecuted in Europe do not have an automatic claim on land in the Middle East that overrides the rights of the people already living there – people who, in the language of Genesis, are their cousins.
MAGA, muscular ‘Christianity’, and the irony of origins
There is a parallel confusion playing out on the other side of the Atlantic.
The MAGA movement has claimed Christianity as its own: a martial, triumphalist version that has very little to do with the figure at its supposed centre. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, a Palestinian Jew, preaching radical non-violence, economic justice, and care for the outcast. We are told that he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers”, and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
The Christian nationalism of certain MAGA figures worships something unrecognisable from this origin. It is, in Baudrillard’s terms, a simulacrum, a copy that has forgotten there was an original.
And the alliance between this movement and the most aggressive forms of Zionism is its own kind of irony. Two traditions that share a foundational text, both now claiming divine mandate for conquest, both insisting on the exclusive validity of their interpretation of their own story, both willing to bomb civilians in the name of their god.
The Palestinian people, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, deserve better from all interpretations.
What labelling does
I wrote some of this in anger, and in anger I made the error I have been describing. I tarred with too broad a brush. I said the Jews when I meant the Netanyahu government. I said the Christians when I meant a specific and unrepresentative faction.
Labelling is itself a form of the colonial act. It flattens; it removes the individual from view and replaces them with a category. The same impulse that made my friends see only Egyptian in 1967 made me, 57 years later, reach for a shorthand that erased the thousands of Israelis who protest against their own government, the Jewish scholars, such as Ilan Pappe who have documented the colonialism most clearly, the American Christians who are appalled by what is being done in their name.
I am fallible. We all are. The question is whether we catch ourselves, correct, and try again.
The boulder and the jaw
Harold Macmillan suggested that Churchill had said “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war”. Churchill, if he said this, was right, although he did not always practise what he preached.
The conversations that matter are not the ones that resolve these questions – they will not be resolved in my lifetime, or perhaps in any lifetime. They are the ones that keep the complexity alive and that refuse the reductive story. The ones that remember Shem had more than one line of descendants; that insist a man can be Egyptian-born and anti-Nazi; that hold space for the Palestinian Jew who told his son to give two concerts, not one.
I have watched with sadness the promises and the outcomes over my lifetime. I do not expect to see this resolved. But I will keep pushing Sisyphus’ boulder, because the alternative – throwing up one’s hands, letting the simplifiers win, allowing ‘antisemitism’ to mean only what the powerful need it to mean, is a different kind of defeat.
The sons of Shem deserve better than that. All of them.
This article has been written with the assistance of AI.
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