A giant calumny Was a London audience quietly nodding along with Jew-hatred on stage? Melanie Phillips
Last week I finally got to see Giant, the much-acclaimed play by Mark Rosenblatt about the antisemitism of the children’s author Roald Dahl.
It’s superbly written and magnificently acted. But I found watching it in a London theatre deeply uncomfortable.
The audience laughed sympathetically at the on-stage Dahl putting down the Jewish woman who objects to his rampant Jew-hatred. Was the audience actually nodding along to what he was saying?
For some of his vile lines are what British Jews are now hearing as a matter of unexceptional routine.
The play deals with the furore in 1983 after Dahl published a savage article in the Literary Review about Israel’s war in Lebanon. “Never before in the history of man,” he wrote, “has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers”.
That’s precisely the vicious claim that has made many British Jews today feel that their country has turned into a nightmarish alternative universe. After the Hamas-led atrocities against Israelis on October 7 2023, many switched rapidly from pitying the victims of genocidal aggression to portraying them as barbarous murderers for defending themselves against it.
In the play, the publisher Tom Maschler — portrayed as the kind of British Jew who shudders at the very thought of living among so many other Jews in Israel — presents Dahl’s grotesque antisemitism as moral because it’s wrapped up in compassion for the Palestinians. That’s precisely the gaslighting to which British Jews are today being subjected.
At the weekend the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, made the remarkable statement that antisemitism among schoolchildren is now a “national emergency”.
“Jewish pupils are being bullied in playgrounds, Holocaust jokes circulate on social media and swastikas appear on school property”, she said.
But this emergency goes much wider and deeper than schoolchildren.
A Jewish student at Manchester University told The Times last week that the Gaza war has brought such a wave of abuse that many students are hiding evidence of their Jewish identity.
Swastikas were graffitied on the student union building. Messages such as “Zionists = Baby Killers” and “Up Hamas” were carved into campus lavatory cubicles.
A humanities student at King’s College London said that, from her first day at university last year when she said she was a Zionist, she was abused and ostracised. She said:
It was such a scary and intimidating time. There were flags everywhere, people wearing hoodies with “globalise the intifada” and chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. You couldn’t go anywhere on campus without facing this. “I just remember feeling completely alone, and I just wanted to go home.
Across the professions, administrative class and business world, it’s become the default position to harass Jews for the assumed crimes of Israel.
In the music industry, there’s a drumbeat of cancelled performances with Jews or Israelis. An event organiser for the Jewish community told the Jewish Chronicle: “We are not welcome in 95 per cent of the venues”. The paper reported:
“The first shock for me was the silence of the dance music world after Nova,” says Donna (pseudonym), a veteran club promoter. “I cannot imagine this happening at any other festival – with DJs and dance music fans being massacred and no one says anything. Anywhere else in the world, there would have been an outcry, there would have been fundraising, there would be activism.
But in the dance music industry it was like nothing had happened. That was the first sign for me — how de-humanised Israelis were in these people’s minds. There was this great big silence. The next was the people becoming obsessed with the Palestinian side. These are people who don’t normally say anything about politics and now they are non-stop tweeting about the war with some incredibly provocative material.
I had one person say to me the other day, “Why would you have a dance festival next to a concentration camp?” and they actually believe this stuff.
Accused by their clients of supporting “child-killers,” Jewish business people say they don’t dare correct such misrepresentations for fear of losing potential contracts. One young woman told me that after she posted a holiday snap of herself at an Israeli tourist site, her friends told her they would never speak to her again.
This is all madness. Because so much of this is about Israel, however, many deny it’s a madness directed at Jews as people. These deniers fail to acknowledge the unique pathology of the astonishing lies being told about Israel — such as that they target rather than seek to protect civilians — because they believe them.
This is hardly surprising, since so much broadcasting coverage in particular transmits distressing images of suffering in Gaza that are not only radically decontextualised but are accompanied by a mendacious Hamas narrative that’s treated as credible.
Most people know nothing about the demonisation of the Jews and the unending threats to wipe out every Jew on earth that pour unremittingly from the supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority.
No other country, people or cause is subjected to demonisation and delegitimisation based entirely on falsehoods and distortions; these tap directly into the ancient calumny of murderous Jewish power.
No other people has ever been told they have no right to self-determination in their own ancient homeland. The false belief that Israel is a colonialist enterprise means that when its defenders cry antisemitism they are viewed as trying to sanitise aggressive conquest. So Jew-hatred is airbrushed out of the picture.
Phillipson says the remedy for this is more Holocaust education. Every schoolchild in England, she says, will learn about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Alas, this ignores another deeply uncomfortable fact.
Since 1991, the Holocaust has been the only mandatory subject on the national curriculum. Yet during that time, antisemitism in Britain has rocketed.
Holocaust education and memorialising failed to neutralise this poison because it fell into a trap. Antisemitism isn’t merely a type of hatred or racism. It’s a uniquely murderous pathology.
Many of those creating Holocaust remembrance materials, however, relativised them to cover not just antisemitism but all types of hatred and all “genocides”.
The message was that anyone could become a Nazi. So the ground was laid for malign forces to claim that Jews could themselves become Nazis — which led straight to the calumnies against Israel, that it was committing “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” of which it was not only innocent but was the target.
To combat antisemitism, people should be taught about Judaism and its unique fusion of a people, their religion and the land in which they are the indigenous inhabitants. That fusion is why anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Judaism.
In the play, Dahl says he’s antisemitic because there are Jews in England who support Zionism. The suggestion is that they therefore deserve to be loathed — and that antisemitism is therefore actually justified.
Did the audience quietly agree? Given how so many appear to have gone through the looking-glass over Israel, this sickening possibility was no theatrical illusion. It was all too likely to be true.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk
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