Writing here last week John MacLeod highlighted the row that has broken out over Neale Hanvey who was the SNP candidate expected to take Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath seat from Labour. The SNP disowned Hanvey when evidence of his antisemitic postings came to light, but, since the date for nominations had passed, it was too late for the party to replace him.
He is still on the ballot paper and standing as an independent, apparently unrepentant. If nationalists in the constituency are as offended by Hanvey’s views as the SNP high command evidently is, then Labour’s Lesley Laird, whom Corbyn had made his Shadow Scottish Secretary, may retain the seat she won by fewer than 300 votes in 2017 and was expected to lose. It will be interesting to see how many votes Hanvey still gets. One must assume that anyone who votes for him is so committed to Scottish nationalism as to be willing to vote for an evidently antisemitic candidate – or is indeed not a whit disturbed by antisemitism.
I used to believe that Scotland was one country where antisemitism could never take root. Presbyterian Scotland had a close affinity with Jews and Judaism. The emblem of the Church of Scotland was the burning bush from which, in the Book of Exodus, Jehovah spoke to Moses. It often seemed that the Kirk was more comfortable with the Old Testament than with the New, and just as Jehovah made a Covenant with Israel, so the Presbyterian Scots of the seventeenth century made a Covenant with the Almighty and came to regard themselves as a Chosen People, just like the Jews. As a small boy I knew much more about Biblical Israel than about the Trojan War, and it was easy to identify Saul and David fighting against the Philistines with Wallace and Bruce resisting the English in our War of Independence.
The Metrical Psalms and the Paraphrases were not only the music of the Kirk; they were our national music, just as much as the folk-songs collected and amended by Robert Burns or the Ballads of the Borders and the North-East. Even today when the Kirk is so much weaker and its message so diluted, it is quite likely that any funeral service in church, and even at a crematorium, will end with the singing of the 23rd Psalm, The Lord’s My Shepherd, or the 121st, I to the Hills will lift mine eyes.
David Daiches was one of the great cultural figures of twentieth century Scotland. He was brought up in Edinburgh where his father was Chief Rabbi and educated at George Watson’s College and the University of Edinburgh. His early essay in autobiography, Two Worlds, vividly evokes the symbiosis of Scotland and Israel. He wrote very well of Scott and Stevenson and whisky, and, though his academic career took him forth of Scotland to America, Cambridge (where I first knew him) and then to the new University of Sussex, he returned in retirement to Edinburgh. One of my last memories of David is of a session at the Edinburgh Book Festival where the Israeli novelist Amos Oz was speaking. Amos read some of his own Hebrew poetry and David, now very old and white-bearded, sat in the front row of the audience, rapt in admiration, his two worlds, Scotland and Israel, in harmony.
Amos Oz, who died earlier this year, was a friend of mine, though I never saw him as often as I would have wished. I think of him often, and indeed do so whenever I find myself deploring the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, for Amos was an Israeli patriot. Born in 1939 and a boy during the British mandate for Palestine, he was a child of the idealistic generation that founded the state of Israel. He believed in the two state solution to the problem of Palestine and never approved of the occupation of the West Bank and the planting of Israeli settlements there.
That solution seems far away now, and the sympathy and support for the Jewish state which used to be general in Britain and especially in the Labour party have withered. Nevertheless it should be possible – indeed it is possible – to disapprove of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and the oppressive restrictions imposed on the Palestinians while at the same time affirming one’s support for the State of Israel and recognizing the richness of the Jewish contribution to culture, science and the idea of human rights. In the same way one may deplore American foreign policy without being anti-American. Many patriotic Americans deplore it, just as Amos Oz deplored the Occupation of the West Bank and the planting of Jewish settlements there, while remaining utterly loyal to the State of Israel.
In an article in the December the 5th edition of the London Review of Books, the veteran Palestinian academic Ghada Karmi (of the University of Exeter) argues that the two state solution is now dead, and that only the creation of a single state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs offers the Palestinians “the basic right to live decent lives in their own homeland”. She admits that there is “no constituency for this solution, not because it is a bad idea, but because it falls outside the existing paradigm, and to depart from that paradigm requires an intellectual leap.” She notes that the Palestinian Authority’s senior negotiator, Saeb Erekat, has made that leap: “Now,” he says, “is the time to transform the struggle, and turn it into a movement for one state with equal rights for everyone.”
Is this realistic? In one sense, obviously yes. The single state actually exists – de facto though not de jure.
Can both Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, be brought to accept the concept of one state with equal rights for all? As things are, surely not. It is inconceivable that the present Israeli government will do so. And yet Israel is a security state founded on insecurity. This is the legacy of Jewish history. Jews have been persecuted and discriminated against everywhere for centuries. Antisemitism is found still today, even in liberal democracies, even in France, England and Scotland. This is shameful. It is shameful even if it is provoked by sympathy for the Palestinians. Our debt to the Jews and European guilt towards the Jews make it shameful. Worse still, the virus of antisemitism infects and coarsens our politics, and is likely to do so still more perniciously. This is the horrible reality and it will eventually be dangerous for Israel itself.
The question is: how can a political solution that offers security for Jews and justice for the Palestinians be framed? How can the single state with rights for all be made acceptable? An imaginative leap is necessary. This would take off from the acceptance that our culture – the culture of Christianity and Europe is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, something that no Scot of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, and other generations beyond them, would ever have denied – and that the very concept of human rights also derives in part from Jewish thought. Consequently Israel is part of Europe and the idea of a single state with rights for all in what we used to call the Holy Land accords with the concept of Europe that has flowered since the catastrophe of the mid-twentieth century, a catastrophe that threatened to obliterate the Jewish people.
Security for the Jews, human rights for the Palestinians, could be guaranteed if the single state of Israel-Palestine became a member state of the European Union. This is a good cause to which the United Kingdom, which opened the door to the return of Jews to the Holy Land by issuing the Balfour Declaration now more than a hundred years ago, might honourably commit itself.
But of course we can’t because we are leaving the European Union, and meanwhile we have a Labour party riddled with antisemitism, a Conservative one not free of anti-Islam members, and by the end of this week we in Scotland will find out how many of the voters in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath have voted for a man disowned by the SNP for his expression of antisemitic sentiment. If there are many, I will fear that David Daiches’ two worlds are drifting apart and the burning bush of the Scots Kirk may be flickering out.
