UPPING THE ANTE

Blind Hatred (Robin Shepherd, Jerusalem Post, September 29th, 2004 )

Britain's Jewish Chronicle can make for sobering reading these days. At a time when fanatical hostility to the State of Israel and the related rebirth of anti-Semitism in Europe have become commonplace, the shock value of the latest cemetery desecration or the latest distortion of Israel's actions in the Middle East has become subject to the law of diminishing returns. The more we hear about it, the less it affects us.

But last week's issue of that newspaper contains a story so appalling that it deserves to be heard by all. The author, Mark Scodie, relates the tale of how a 30-year-old Israeli woman, who wants to remain anonymous, was turned down for a job at a London-based Christmas decorations company called Gisela Graham. On rejecting the woman's application, the company's marketing director, Piers Croke, made a few comments in an e-mail to her about the reaction she was likely to elicit from potential recruiters by including on her resume' the fact that she had done two years military service in the Israeli army as a conscript.

The following remarks attributed to Croke were quoted in the Jewish Chronicle: "The natural reaction of most educated Europeans to the information you provide is likely to be 'So it was she who guided those gunships to targeted assassinations and the murder of women and children with indiscriminate bombing and strafing of refugee camps."

With this, be warned, Croke was merely warming up.

"A sizable proportion [of Europeans and Americans] doubt the 'right' of Israel to exist. This has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Nor is it racism - that is the kind of disgusting attitude which one might say is inherent in the idea of the State of Israel and, one might say, among a large section of believing Jews elsewhere, who regard the rest of us as inferior, unclean, and not chosen by God. What could be more racist than that?"

One can spend a life reading scholarly histories on anti-Semitism and the grand social, religious, political and economic trends that nurture it, but when it surfaces, it is just ordinary people breaking one taboo at a time while everyone else stands by and watches.