The Balfour desecration

The other day, members of the pro-Hamas organisation Palestine Action slashed and spraypainted the portrait of Lord Balfour at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Such zealots, sometimes going by the nickname of ‘anti-Semites’, have it in for Balfour, of the Declaration fame. The 1917 document bearing his name undertook to create a “national home for Jewish people” in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was cited as a legal justification for the founding of Israel in 1948.

Yet much Jordan water flowed under the bridge between those two dates, with HMG doing all it could to redeem Britain in the eyes of Muslim fanatics. After the war, the British tried their hardest to prevent what Balfour promised, a national home for Jewish people.

The Royal Navy harassed ships carrying Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine, and the incident involving one such ship, the Exodus 1947, created a wave of protests and hunger strikes on both sides of the Atlantic.

British destroyers first surrounded and then engaged the Exodus, killing a crew member and two passengers. They then forced the ship to sail to France, but the passengers, including many orphaned children, refused to disembark, going on a hunger strike instead. (Leon Uris described their three-week plight in his 1958 novel Exodus.)

The British in general fought against the partition of Palestine tooth and nail, eventually voting against the founding of Israel at the UN. That, incidentally, made the USSR vote in favour, on the mistaken assumption that Britain was still a major power capable of thwarting Stalin’s ambitions.

I don’t know if members of Palestine Action are familiar with this history, though I suspect they probably aren’t. But Lord Balfour and his pictorial representations remain their enemy to this day, as are Israelis and Jews in general.

Following the 7 November monstrosity committed by Hamas in Israel, and the latter’s predictable response, pro-Hamas protests (aka riots) have become commonplace in London, as have anti-Semitic attacks on Jews. The situation has got so bad that counter-extremism commissioner Robin Simcox has described London as a “no-go zone for Jews.”

HMG is doing next to nothing to put an end to Islamic fascism in the streets of London, a tendency lovingly kept up by Sadiq Khan, the capital’s mayor and police commissioner. For example, no arrests were made in the wake of the slash-and-spray attack on Balfour’s portrait.

The photograph of that act of vandalism is blurred, so it’s hard to establish the attacker’s race. Such identification, however, would be relevant because pro-Hamas activities involve not only Muslims but also infidel Lefties.

Many of that group are themselves Jewish, which sets up one of those conflicts of pieties that give me a feeling I can only describe as schadenfreude. My own loyalties are invariably undivided, which makes it easy for me to take sides in any conflict.

Yet many of those on both the Left and the Right don’t have that luxury, what with some of their views being not just contradictory but mutually exclusive. And I’m man enough to admit that, rather than sympathising with their conundrums, I tend to gloat in a most un-Christian way.

It was in that shameful spirit that I read today’s letter to The Telegraph whose nine signatories are all prominent British Jews, or rather “Jewish people living in the UK”, as they identify themselves.

A more sensitive person than I would commiserate with the authors: they have to reconcile their self-acknowledged Jewishness with their clearly evident wokery, which is no easy task in the present situation. Jews everywhere tend to support Israel and abhor Islamic terrorism, along with general anti-Semitism. However, for most Lefties it’s the other way around.

Hence Jewish Lefties have to be especially fleetfooted to dance around the problem. Yet even if they are, sooner or later they’ll stumble over it. At that point, they’ll have to select one of their two mutually exclusive pieties. That’s what the authors of this letter have done.

First, they acknowledge that “Anti-Semitism is a very real problem, faced by us for centuries and increasingly in recent months.” Having provided that historical perspective, the authors then explain that some problems are much worse:

“Pro-Palestinian marches [are not] the major problem we face. Many of us join those marches and feel safe on them; indeed we are much more worried by the Government’s branding of them as ‘hate mobs’, and the constant stream of Islamophobia coming from the media and Westminster. We urge care when it comes to reporting anti-Semitism – because doing so in the way you have… risks dividing our communities.”

Righty-ho. Mobs blocking major thoroughfares and screaming “From the river to the sea!” don’t divide communities. The real culprits are government officials who describe London as dangerous for Jews and The Daily Telegraph that whips up Islamophobia by reporting on, say, pro-Hamas fanatics vandalising works of art.

Those nine signatories looked deep into their woke hearts and decided that their politics occupied a larger space in that organ than their Jewishness. One has to conclude that they are either ignorant of geography or else don’t realise that “from the river to the sea” presupposes the extermination of everyone currently filling that space, the six million Jewish Israelis (the number has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?).

Yet conflict of pieties is like Covid. It can afflict everyone, and people on the right of the political spectrum aren’t immune either. Most Americans I know who fit this description tend to be enthusiastic fans of Trump and also equally enthusiastic supporters of the Ukraine’s heroic fight for her survival.

Suppose for the sake of argument that Trump is elected president. His hero-worship of Putin is well-known and amply documented, both by eyewitnesses and his own numerous statements of admiration. Equally well-known is Trump’s understated affection for NATO often expressed through hints that he’d consider taking America out of it.

Not wishing to upset my American friends, I’ll describe their ensuing conflict of pieties as hypothetical rather than assured. So how would they reconcile their affection for Trump with his betrayal of the Ukraine? I’m not saying they are guaranteed to be gored by the horns of that dilemma, only that this is a realistic possibility.

That would present a problem not only for them but also for me. Since mocking Lefties comes more naturally to me than doing the same to my fellow conservatives, it would be harder for me to maintain the role of a sniggering outside observer. Oh well, we’ll drive off that bridge when we get to it, as Teddy Kennedy could have said.