February 25, 2007
AND THEY'RE WORRIED ABOUT IRENE NEMIROVSKY?:
Independent Jewish Voices can carry on talking to themselves. I don't want to know: Its fantasy of itself as a doughty band confronting the might of official bias is self-indulgent (Howard Jacobson, 10 February 2007, Independent)
How is it that people you admire individually look considerably less admirable the minute they become signatories to a public letter? Why is it that a list of prominent names embracing a cause - any cause - invariably adds up to less than its constituent parts, that what was beautiful as a single bloom looks preposterous in a bunch? I am only pretending not to know the answer. The answer smacks you in the face. It is because you have admired them individually for their individuality, and the minute they sign up to something, they agree to think alike.The particular consensus of folly I'm referring to - which contains people I know and like personally as well as people whose work I would go so far as to say I revere - calls itself, oxymoronically, Independent Jewish Voices and has been declaring its guiding principles left, right and centre, though mainly left, all week. These principles bear, of course, on the Middle East and are, on the face of it, unexceptionable. Human rights indivisible, Palestinians and Israelis have same right to peaceful and secure lives, no justification for racism, etc etc. To which your response, like mine, will be: There needs no letter, come from Stephen Fry and Janet Suzman, to tell us this.
Ask what more specific need Independent Jewish Voices serves, however, and you get the small print. The IJV, as I fear we now have to call it, since it appears to be seeking a quasi-formal legitimacy, is a response to a conviction that "the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole".
One's ears prick to talk of a "broad spectrum of opinion" in a manifesto since that usually means "whatever the manifestees happen to think". In this case, whatever they happen to think is wrong with Israel and the unquestioning support it receives from English Jews. From which you could be excused supposing the IJV to be a voice crying in the wilderness, a David taking on the Goliath of pro-Israel orthodoxy.
In fact the exact opposite is the case. In so far as there is an orthodoxy regarding Israel in this country, the IJV with its "ashamed" and "disgusted" signatories is indubitably it.
Which raises the obvious questions of how you can admire such Philistines individually either.