Howard Epstein – JEWS STAY HOME!
“Events, dear boy. Events.” Thus Prime Minister of Great Britain, Harold Macmillan — but perhaps only apocryphally. Nevertheless, the dictum attributed to him helps us understand what happened in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland last Thursday, and why it turned out differently from the election of the diabolical Little Austrian in 1933 Germany. There and then, the people found the basest nature of themselves; in the here and now the people of the UK found (pace Abraham Lincoln) the angels of their better nature.
Why the difference? The British, unlike Corbyn, prefer Jews over Moslems? What gives? As Macmillan did not say, but it amounts to the same thing: “Background, dear boy. Background.”
For a British Jew, with nakedly-dual loyalties (living in Israel and working in the UK), this has been the most life-affirming weekend of my past seven decades. Admittedly, I suffered only a solitary anti-Semitic experience over the years in which I spent most of my waking time with Gentiles (and that was an in vino veritas moment, immediately after which my inebriated Christian friend greatly desired to rip out his own tongue). Yet, there is no doubt that there are racial incidents against Jews all over the country, probably every day; but none that spring to mind that have ended fatally, as occurs in France and the USA all too frequently.
In that case, why was I, and very many, if not most, British Jews, quaking over the past two years at the very concept of a Corbyn government that would make life intolerable for us? It was apprehended that Corbyn’s innate antipathy towards Israel would have meant that his Trotsky-inspired government (had it come about), his poisonous resentment of colonialism, all things “American” (thus Tony Blair), Jews and Britain (yes Britain) and, most of all, the hated perceived colonial enterprise that is Israel, would have become the new normal. This, we feared, would have translated into action with, not only the scaling down of UK-Israel ties, but also the appearance of representation offices for Hamas and Hezbollah in London, recognition of the State of Palestine (before the Palestinians are prepared to renounce their zero-sum approach to Israel), no British arms sales to Israel and open season on Zionists (rather all Jews) in the universities and, increasingly, in the professions and other walks of life. Gradually, since all Jews would be presumed to have allegiance to Israel — a hated entity for the Trotskyite-led would-be Labour government — there would naturally be more and more acceptance of anti-Semitic events. Openly antipathetic sentiment expressed in society against Jews (it has already started in what used to be regarded as refined company) and violence might have followed, together with, given the pressure on public finances, a less readily-available police response to violence against Jewish property and persons, not to mention the withdrawal of police protection for synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
So palpable was the fear — it was said that some 40% of Anglo-Jewry was contemplating emigration — so great the apprehended risk, that the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, wrote an op-ed for the Times of London but a month before the date set for the general election. Starkly calling out the prejudices of Corbyn and his cohorts that had taken over the once-loved Labour party, Mirvis claimed that “the very soul of our nation is at stake”. Did the British people care? Should we be maintaining a lower profile — as we had always been taught? It turned out to be a masterly intervention, perfectly-timed and swiftly followed by the endorsement of the spiritual leaders of the other major religions. Suddenly, it became part of the zeitgeist to be opposed to anti-Semitism.
Did the British people really care about the Jews? Who can say? What we can say is that they cared about the soul of the nation and some (the older ones) remembered where virulent racism had led in Germany, that previously most sophisticated of nations — cultured, scientifically-advanced and highly-educated — to the Holocaust, the destruction of the whole of Europe and 26 million dead.
The British understood Mirvis and found their true soul. They rejected the theoretical dogmatism of Corbyn’s Labour Party and voted in droves — and in the wind, rain, sleet, and snow — for decency and practicality. They rejected promises of hundreds of bags stuffed with goodies that they knew no government could afford and preferred promises of mere dozens of similar bags of bounty from Boris Johnson that appeared more fiscally affordable. They rejected the lugubrious, bloody-minded Labour party leader, who had consorted with terrorists, and preferred the journalist whose flowery writings had sometimes got him into trouble, but were consistent with his flamboyant and cavalier, can-do character. Finally, they rejected the much-denied blatant anti-Zionism of Labour and preferred the inclusiveness of a party that already had ministers (Johnson, Gove, Patel, Javid, et al) openly-sympathetic towards Israel.
Thus at a stroke, the British opted for decency over decadence, for inclusiveness over exclusiveness and for propriety over a descent into immorality.
Yet there are thugs in every society and it is important to understand how, when the British could get it so right, the Germans got it completely wrong. Yes, Britain has suffered from ten years of “austerity”, in which social care has been increasingly underfunded, but rates of employment have never been higher and rates of unemployment never lower. GDP growth, whilst much lower than that of Israel is higher than in the EU. By the time Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, the German people had lost the Great War (seemingly overnight, as the truth had been kept from them unto the collapse), been humiliated at the post-war peace conferences, with the deprivation of territory, armed forces, and treasure — with massive reparations to pay — undergone hyperinflation, in which the printing of money became a loss-making activity, accompanied by widespread violence on the streets, with communists and fascists slugging it out, and political murder the norm and, finally, after the Wall Street Crash, massive unemployment. Only the Nazi, Hitler, offered them hope; and they went for his whole blatantly-murderous enterprise hook, line and sinker.
Do I think that the same could ever happen in the UK? This is not the time to take anything away from the land of my birth in which I always felt at home and had only positive experiences, at the time when the people rejected the anti-Semitic party and elected, for the fourth time in a row, what had always been the party of the establishment. And I most emphatically do not. I merely point out that were there to be an election at another time and in another place, with background circumstances similar to those of 1930s Germany, anything could happen. It could be France or Ukraine, with their large Jewish communities. There could be fiscal collapse, blamed on the Jews. (Who else?) In those circumstances, expect the worst. There will be little Aliyah from Great Britain in the next decade but we should ready in our proud nation-state (which is what England, Scotland and Northern Ireland are today) to receive large numbers of Jews who do not have the good fortune to dwell amongst the essentially-decent British and may have nowhere else to go.
Israel has just had a wake-up call, and it could have ended rather differently. Yet Israel is no readier today to receive tens of thousands of Jews than it was three years ago when Corbyn’s antipathy became well-known. We should prepare for another mass influx of Jews at a time of somebody else’s choosing. 
Plans should be laid even now for a megacity in the Negev, with bullet-train links to put the centre within commuting distance. If Egyptian leader Al-Sisi can plan the construction of a metropolis as an alternative to Cairo, so too (as an alternative to Tel Aviv) can Israel, with its much better credit-rating and oodles of dollars in the bank — more foreign exchange per capita than almost any other nation. All we need is a politician with vision — rearward at the risks just avoided, and forward at the challenges that may come. We need to move out of the dark valley of our endless political stalemate to the sunlit uplands of a radical departure for Zionism: to populate some of the vast Negev and offer a haven for Jews who might one day need it.
© 2019 Howard Epstein, Israel
