It’s not every day you read a book and think, ‘goodness me, I never thought of that’. But that’s what happened when I read David Baddiel’s ‘Jews Don’t Count’.
What hadn’t I thought?
Well, let’s start with the acronym BAME. This stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. Baddiel points out that Jews are an ethnic minority - and proceeds to give dozens of examples of how they are neither considered nor treated as such. Here’s just one example of this invisibilisation: ‘in Britain, recently, Sajid Javid was hailed as the first BAME Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson was and is Jewish’ (p.52; ‘was’ is now more appropriate: Lawson died in 2023).
So that’s what hadn’t occurred to me: I knew that Jews were an ethnic minority but to be honest I’d never noticed how invisible they were in the Nigel Lawson sense, or thought that they should be treated like other, ‘better known’, ones.
Baddiel is wearily familiar with this position, which is that there’s effectively a hierarchy of racism and that anti-Jew discrimination is a ‘second-class’ racism.
I’m guilty as charged.
So why are Jews denied the special treatment afforded other ethnic minorities. Are they too white? That can’t be it because ‘Jews are not white. Or not quite. Or, at least they don’t always feel it’ (p.43). Because they’re wealthy? No, because not all Jews are rich and anyway, ‘fuck off about money’ (p.27) because ‘it doesn’t protect you against racism’ (p.27).
So it seems there’s no good reason why a) Jews shouldn’t be regarded as an ethnic minority on a par with others, and b) they shouldn’t receive the treatment afforded other ethnic minorities.
So far, so persuaded.
Two comments on all this.
First, Jews in the UK are now receiving some of the special treatment they’ve been demanding. As a downpayment (literally), the UK government has earmarked £25m for increased security for Jewish communities, and London’s Metropolitan Police has announced a new dedicated Community Protection Team of initially 100 extra officers for the protection of Jews. This brings the Jewish community into line with Muslims who two years ago were granted £117m over four years for the protection of religious sites and community buildings.
Second, while Baddiel’s argument about Jews being a BAME has stuck with me, so has this two-word comment: ‘Israel? Meh’ (p.93). This comes when he’s discussing the question of whether he should care more for the plight of Palestinians because he’s a Jew.
Winding back a couple of pages, Baddiel asks, isn’t most of this ‘new Jew-hatred actually about Israel’ (p.90) and its oppressive practices? ‘Well, yes, they are,’ he writes, ‘but I kind of think: Fuck Israel. I call Israel, on Twitter, stupid fucking Israel, which tends to upset some Jews, but it isn’t really a comment on the country itself. It’s more to do with the debate, the way that everything anyone says about that subject so quickly gets drawn into the stupid fucking shouting match’ (pp.90-91; my emphasis).
So he’s criticising Israel - except that he’s not. What he’s really criticising is the annoying way people keep wanting to call Israel, its government and its army to account when they should skip past all that and focus on what really matters, which is the treatment of Jews in the UK (in particular). Does Baddiel care about the Palestinians? Of course he does: ‘I do care, but not more than I care about the Rohingya, or people suffering in Syria … etc etc’ (p.92).
Should he care more about the Palestinians than other suffering peoples? No, he says, ‘because that smacks of something weird. It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews - non-Israeli Jews - must apologise for Israel: that Jews - non-Israeli Jews - should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel’ (92). Baddiel says that ‘Israel [has] done many things to be ashamed of. But here’s the thing: I am not responsible for those actions’, so ‘Me, I think, Israel? Meh’ (p.93; my emphasis).
Note what Baddiel has done here: with a stroke of his pen he’s undermined the increasingly accepted practice of present generations accepting responsibility for past generations’ misdeeds and making appropriate reparations.
So I wonder what he makes of the 1949 German law that established legal pathways for descendants of Jews who lost their citizenship during the Nazi regime to reclaim their German citizenship? Subsequent immigration law amendments have strengthened that commitment to recognise past injustices and make appropriate reparations - despite the fact that present generations of Germans had nothing to do with the Nazi persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1945.
Then there’s the Spanish government’s 2015 decision to grant citizenship to 72,000 descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain over 500 years ago by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. Has the Spanish government gravely misunderstood the nature of responsibility?
And there’s more.
Baddiel’s claim that the fact that he’s a non-Israeli Jew (repeated twice, so it’s obviously important to his argument) absolves him of any particular responsibility for commenting on the actions of the Israeli government is not only counter-intuitive but also an ignoring of the kind of fact that in most ethical schemes makes a difference to the question of responsibility.
It’s this: as a Jew, he will know that the state of Israel calls itself the state of the ‘Jewish people’ and is the ‘collective property of the “Jews of the world”’ (from Shlomo Sand’s ‘How I stopped being a Jew’, p.1). As a Jew, in most ethical schemes this ties Baddiel more closely to Israel than to Myanmar, Kurdistan, Syria or Burkina Faso - where his ethical commitments might indeed be regarded as less strong.
In the face of all this, how are we to read Baddiel’s refusal to care (much) about Palestinians, about Gaza? Maybe he’s just a non-committal kind of guy. Maybe he’s heartless. Maybe he approves of the murder of tens of thousands of children. We just don’t know.
Twitter is full of suggestions that the rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic sentiment in the UK would be lessened by Jews making clear their opposition to the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government. It’s also full of posts by Jews saying that this position/stance/demand is racist. So there’s a standoff, and in the meantime Palestinians in their thousands across Israel and Lebanon continue to die and be displaced.
But Israel? Well … meh.
What hadn’t I thought?
Well, let’s start with the acronym BAME. This stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. Baddiel points out that Jews are an ethnic minority - and proceeds to give dozens of examples of how they are neither considered nor treated as such. Here’s just one example of this invisibilisation: ‘in Britain, recently, Sajid Javid was hailed as the first BAME Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson was and is Jewish’ (p.52; ‘was’ is now more appropriate: Lawson died in 2023).
So that’s what hadn’t occurred to me: I knew that Jews were an ethnic minority but to be honest I’d never noticed how invisible they were in the Nigel Lawson sense, or thought that they should be treated like other, ‘better known’, ones.
Baddiel is wearily familiar with this position, which is that there’s effectively a hierarchy of racism and that anti-Jew discrimination is a ‘second-class’ racism.
I’m guilty as charged.
So why are Jews denied the special treatment afforded other ethnic minorities. Are they too white? That can’t be it because ‘Jews are not white. Or not quite. Or, at least they don’t always feel it’ (p.43). Because they’re wealthy? No, because not all Jews are rich and anyway, ‘fuck off about money’ (p.27) because ‘it doesn’t protect you against racism’ (p.27).
So it seems there’s no good reason why a) Jews shouldn’t be regarded as an ethnic minority on a par with others, and b) they shouldn’t receive the treatment afforded other ethnic minorities.
So far, so persuaded.
Two comments on all this.
First, Jews in the UK are now receiving some of the special treatment they’ve been demanding. As a downpayment (literally), the UK government has earmarked £25m for increased security for Jewish communities, and London’s Metropolitan Police has announced a new dedicated Community Protection Team of initially 100 extra officers for the protection of Jews. This brings the Jewish community into line with Muslims who two years ago were granted £117m over four years for the protection of religious sites and community buildings.
Second, while Baddiel’s argument about Jews being a BAME has stuck with me, so has this two-word comment: ‘Israel? Meh’ (p.93). This comes when he’s discussing the question of whether he should care more for the plight of Palestinians because he’s a Jew.
Winding back a couple of pages, Baddiel asks, isn’t most of this ‘new Jew-hatred actually about Israel’ (p.90) and its oppressive practices? ‘Well, yes, they are,’ he writes, ‘but I kind of think: Fuck Israel. I call Israel, on Twitter, stupid fucking Israel, which tends to upset some Jews, but it isn’t really a comment on the country itself. It’s more to do with the debate, the way that everything anyone says about that subject so quickly gets drawn into the stupid fucking shouting match’ (pp.90-91; my emphasis).
So he’s criticising Israel - except that he’s not. What he’s really criticising is the annoying way people keep wanting to call Israel, its government and its army to account when they should skip past all that and focus on what really matters, which is the treatment of Jews in the UK (in particular). Does Baddiel care about the Palestinians? Of course he does: ‘I do care, but not more than I care about the Rohingya, or people suffering in Syria … etc etc’ (p.92).
Should he care more about the Palestinians than other suffering peoples? No, he says, ‘because that smacks of something weird. It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews - non-Israeli Jews - must apologise for Israel: that Jews - non-Israeli Jews - should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel’ (92). Baddiel says that ‘Israel [has] done many things to be ashamed of. But here’s the thing: I am not responsible for those actions’, so ‘Me, I think, Israel? Meh’ (p.93; my emphasis).
Note what Baddiel has done here: with a stroke of his pen he’s undermined the increasingly accepted practice of present generations accepting responsibility for past generations’ misdeeds and making appropriate reparations.
So I wonder what he makes of the 1949 German law that established legal pathways for descendants of Jews who lost their citizenship during the Nazi regime to reclaim their German citizenship? Subsequent immigration law amendments have strengthened that commitment to recognise past injustices and make appropriate reparations - despite the fact that present generations of Germans had nothing to do with the Nazi persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1945.
Then there’s the Spanish government’s 2015 decision to grant citizenship to 72,000 descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain over 500 years ago by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. Has the Spanish government gravely misunderstood the nature of responsibility?
And there’s more.
Baddiel’s claim that the fact that he’s a non-Israeli Jew (repeated twice, so it’s obviously important to his argument) absolves him of any particular responsibility for commenting on the actions of the Israeli government is not only counter-intuitive but also an ignoring of the kind of fact that in most ethical schemes makes a difference to the question of responsibility.
It’s this: as a Jew, he will know that the state of Israel calls itself the state of the ‘Jewish people’ and is the ‘collective property of the “Jews of the world”’ (from Shlomo Sand’s ‘How I stopped being a Jew’, p.1). As a Jew, in most ethical schemes this ties Baddiel more closely to Israel than to Myanmar, Kurdistan, Syria or Burkina Faso - where his ethical commitments might indeed be regarded as less strong.
In the face of all this, how are we to read Baddiel’s refusal to care (much) about Palestinians, about Gaza? Maybe he’s just a non-committal kind of guy. Maybe he’s heartless. Maybe he approves of the murder of tens of thousands of children. We just don’t know.
Twitter is full of suggestions that the rise in anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic sentiment in the UK would be lessened by Jews making clear their opposition to the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government. It’s also full of posts by Jews saying that this position/stance/demand is racist. So there’s a standoff, and in the meantime Palestinians in their thousands across Israel and Lebanon continue to die and be displaced.
But Israel? Well … meh.
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