1. The Guardian today carries an editorial against anti-Semitism, and bravo to the paper for that. One of the good things it says:
There is no "Jewish lobby" in the conspiratorial sense that the slur implies, and to assert that there is can only be the result of the kind of racism that has scarred Europe from tsarist Russia to the fascists and Stalinists of the 1930s through to the jihadists now.
Another of the good things it says:
The left fought a long and honourable battle for racial equality, but some within its ranks now risk sloppily allowing their horror of Israeli actions to blind them to antisemitism.
And a third is that Israel is to be criticized and judged 'by the same criteria as any other state'.
2. On the letters page, on the other hand, is this from Professor David Mond of Warwick University, himself Jewish:
The simplest, most effective and most moral method to combat anti-semitism is for British Jews, many of whom are unhappy about shameful Israeli policies, to disassociate themselves publicly from those policies... There is no lingering, millenarian antisemitism, waiting to spring out if we lower our guard. What there is is bafflement, and of course anger, that British Jews appear to sanction the imprisonment, starvation and, now, massacre of defenceless civilians when they are carried out by our brethren.
Mond here licenses the idea that Jews need to earn the right not to be objects of anti-Jewish hatred, to earn it by taking the same view he does about Israel-Palestine; and that if they do not, if they are uncritical of Israel, the anger directed against them will be justified. He doesn't say whether corresponding forms of anger, prejudice or hatred should be directed against non-Jews whose attitude to Israel is not sufficiently critical according to his lights, or whether other ethnic minorities are tasked with earning acceptance from their fellow citizens by having the 'correct' political judgements.
3. On the third hand, Mark Lawson, who is not Jewish, relates an incident:
[D]uring a heated exchange with a radio colleague over the decision not to screen the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza, he suggested my position was inevitable given that I am Jewish...
But the fact that it was misdirected does not make the remark any less potentially antisemitic.
This has happened to me more than once over my support for military intervention in Iraq - at the time of the first Gulf War and then again in 2003. It has been said that I was so aligned because of being Jewish, something I naturally took exception to since it did not allow that I might have reasons, just like non-Jewish supporters of these interventions - reasons, for example, of the generally war-mongering kind I am by now known for: such as not wanting to see Kuwait under continued occupation by Saddam's armies (just as with the Falklands war before this, where my Jewish tendencies also prevailed); thinking there was a good humanitarian case for overthrowing the Baathist regime; that kind of thing. Others, when told of this mode of accounting for my serial militarism, have sometimes been sceptical that there was anything anti-Semitic in it. It hasn't seemed sufficiently Jew-chomping to their eyes. That's the funny thing about diagnoses of racism: here it is caught in the merest nuance; there it can come at you in hobnail boots but if it isn't fuming and ranting, you're just being a bit too sensitive.