Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

therefore a large section of mine—had been murdered. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you’re Jews.

The problem is that Jews occupy a socio-cultural gray area. Jews, although marginal, are not thought of as marginalized. Which means Jews can’t be seen as representative of a modern Britain that is intent on shifting marginalized experiences into the mainstream. Jews, therefore, as far as progressives are concerned, don’t represent anything outside of themselves. No victory is claimed by championing their experience, and this leads to a subtle—and unconscious—exclusion.

We live in a culture now where impact is more important than intent; where how things are taken is more significant than how they are meant. You have to listen to the people being talked about rather than the talker—and the power, throughout history, has tended to be with the talker, the person with the platform, rather than the

talked-about, who are usually the ones affected.

Someone like Corbyn will see the anticapitalism in that sentence before the antisemitism. He can be brought to see the antisemitism, grudgingly, but another part of him would always be deeply resistant to having to shut down or condemn an anticapitalist statement at all. Anticapitalism is at his core. When it is pointed out to him that sometimes anticapitalism blurs into antisemitism, his first instinct is to protect the anticapitalism and dismiss the antisemitism with irritation.

In the Great Replacement, Jews are not white—they can’t be, as they are operating against the white races and they are the whites’ main enemy—but they are not Brown or Black either, because they are utilizing those races for their secret, world-conquering purposes. Jews, for the racists, don’t have a skin color. That’s part of their dastardly power. Jews are invisible, working their terrible magic behind the global scenes, and they don’t even have a visual mark. Unless, of course, you’re one of those specific racists with the superpower to spot that underneath, Jews are lizards.

It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews—non-Israeli Jews—must apologize for Israel: that Jews—non-Israeli Jews—should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel, and must, before they are allowed into any kind of public conversation, make some kind of supplicant-like statement to that effect.

I think, by the way, that a lot of Jews on the left are ashamed of Israel, and so they go out of their way to say so. Fine. I’m not suggesting that the state of Israel hasn’t done many things to be ashamed of. But here’s the thing: I am not responsible for those actions and expecting that I should feel so is racist. If a non-Israeli Jew does feel responsible, it is internalized racism. To be perfectly honest, I think a fair amount of Jews on the left are just ashamed of being Jewish. I think Jews on the left

have to some extent absorbed the myths about Jews being rich capitalist power mongers, and so therefore make a special point of how un-Jewish they are, the objective corollary of which is hating Israel. Me, I think, Israel? Meh.

The Jews must always be in some way responsible. If it’s not bankers and capitalism, it’s Israel.

Her response is visceral, it is physical: the video makes her feel sick. Her response is one of disgust: disgust with Jews, for both manipulating history (high status) and for snivellingly wanting a safe haven to run away to (low status). Disgust with Jews for failing to be the tough that get going when the going gets tough (like, y’know, when you’re being herded naked at gunpoint with your children into a mass grave that you dug yourself).

The historian Deborah Lipstadt, when I interviewed her for a BBC 2 documentary about Holocaust denial, talked about something she calls softcore Holocaust denial, which would include, and I quote, “Yes, but look at you now.” Meaning: come on Jews, you’re OK now. You’re rich, you’re powerful, you’ve got Israel. Basically, it’s non-Jews saying, enough already.