Identity
By Donald Sassoon
‘What are you then?’ people ask, as they detect my foreign accent. This simple question is not easy to answer. I am tempted to say ‘British’ since I have been here for over forty years. But this won’t wash. Italian? Not really, I grew up in Milan, but am not Italian. I was born in Cairo, I mutter. Ah, Egyptian, they say, eager to find the right hole for the pigeon. Not quite, I mumble, I have no Arabic; I left when I was a baby. French, then. No, not French though French is my mother tongue and I lived in Paris for a while as a child.
I am Middle Eastern Jewish I say, invoking my nearest available identity. I have no wish to hide my Jewishness -at least not while there is a single anti-Semite lurking somewhere –but I am not a bacon-fearing, synagogue-attending, yarmulke-wearing true-to-God Jew. This, of course, is hardly unusual. A majority of Jews are not practicing and hardly ever go to a synagogue. Even in the USA more Jews are secular than religious one. According to a recent survey (The Economist, 11 January) only 57 per cent of American Jews said that caring about Israel was a very important part of being Jewish.
Jews may be observant or agnostic, Zionist or non-. Yet this is not how the identity game is being played out at the moment. For Jewish organizations such as the Board of Jewish Deputies, to be a Jew means to support the State of Israel. Though it represents a small proportion of Jews in this country it is wheeled out in front of the media to speak on behalf of all Jews and spends a considerable amount of time and money to counter criticisms of the State of Israel ignoring the fact that some of it is often expressed by Israelis themselves.
Last year the Church of England considered disinvesting from Caterpillar a company whose equipment is used by the Israeli army to demolish the homes of Palestinians. Almost as a reflex action, Channel Four News interviewed, alongside a representative of the Anglican Church, a member of the Board of Jewish Deputies as if disinvesting from Israel is an attack on British Jews (can’t the Israeli Embassy provide its own spokesperson?). One way of being Jewish may be to defend Israel ‘warts and all’ as Lord Kalms, a former treasurer of the Conservative Party, wrote in the Jewish Chronicle recently (26 January); but there are numerous Jews who want to denounce infringements of human rights in Israel and in the occupied territories as Jews instead of –as they are often urged- keeping criticism within the ‘family’.
Those like me who do not wish to give up their Jewish identities are in a quandary. One could, of course, could speak as members of the human race and leave at that, but that would be to concede to the other side the monopoly of defining Jewish identity. This is why, in many European countries, in the United States, in Canada and elsewhere Jews of differing views have come together to say ‘Not in Our Name’. In Britain, ‘Independent Jewish Voices’, a network of Jews with a strong commitment to social justice and universal human rights, is being launched today. Its website (www.ijv.org.uk ) contains a declaration –of which I am a signatory- arguing that the spectrum of opinion among British Jews is not reflected by institutions which claim authority to represent all of us. It wishes to offer an alternative to the misconception that the Jews of this country speak with one voice and that this voice supports Israel’s policies. The network, which includes writers, rabbis, doctors, lawyers, and academics aims to garner widespread support at a time when the situation in the Middle East continues to deteriorate forty years after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The aim is to create a climate and a space in which Jews of different affiliations and persuasions can express their opinions about the actions of the Israeli government without being accused of disloyalty or being dismissed with the psycho-analytically dubious term of ‘self-hating Jews’. Non-Jews too are sometimes reluctant to speak out against Israel out of fear of being labelled anti-Semitic while real anti-Semites use Israeli behaviour in the occupied territories to attack all Jews.
It is far better, I think, for Jews to speak out as Jews on matters such as Israeli policies and the desperate conditions of Palestinians and so remind everyone that belonging to a persecuted minority has given many of us a special insight into what it feels to be treated as second-class citizens –as so many Arabs are in Israel and in the occupied territories. One cannot defend human rights in general and not defend them when they are infringed ‘in our name’.
This is not just a Jewish problem. Speaking for myself, I have considerable sympathy for those Muslims in this country and elsewhere who are faced with a relentless media campaign to depict them –all of them, not just the fundamentalists and the mad dreamers of a new Caliphate- as ready to excuse the crimes committed in their names. Identities are a tricky business. Some we can choose, but some are thrust upon us and we ignore them at our peril. Inside, once identities are lifted, we are all human beings. As James Baldwin wrote, identity is like the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self.