Met with friends who had been to the demonstration 'Don't attack Iraq'. They were quite sanctimonious about their participation and I explained why I didn't feel free to march. That the issue was mixed with 'freedom for Palestine' and wasn't just an anti-war march. They don't acknowledge that it might be problematic, to link the two issues, that only those two issues are linked and not the wider context. There are other geographic areas where Muslims are being killed or denied human rights - Chechnya, the US 'Afghan detainees' from the 'war on terrorism' but Israel is the focus....
I am not saying that atrocities have not been commited by Israel, just that it has the sole focus and wrath of the world. I was talking about it with K who reminded me of the articles that have appeared in various magazines and newspapers where 'journalists' or opinion columnists who write in unrelated areas have put their tuppence worth in.....
One was a review of an Israeli artist. The critic dismissed the entire exhibition because he was not dealing with, in a gratuitously guilty manner, the issues around Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Depending on how you read his work, he does deal with ideas of land and nation, but because it is oblique and poetic (some of the qualities we usually value in art), she laid the current Israeli situation at his door.
The other one was a food review which, on the surface, was an article about the overpricing of herbs in surpermarkets. What it actually did was link all overpriced herbs to Israel, where some of our herbs are grown. The only highlighted expensive herbs were the ones grown in Israel. Herbs that were grown elsewhere where called, various nations, and their prices weren't disclosed - so once again, links with Jewishness, money or overpricing and the injustice of it all from a 'decent British perspective'. Am I really being paranoid when I see the links between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?