Jew haters haven’t gone away – they just don’t speak the quiet part out loud any more

Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitic book review caused a furore in 1983. But similar sentiments pass unremarked today

Israel is indiscriminately attacked across its border with Lebanon. Rocket barrages drive thousands of Israelis from their homes. A terrorist militia larger than most armies subverts Lebanon’s sovereignty and targets Israeli officials for assassination. The international community fails to implement binding UN Security Council resolutions, but seeks to bind Israel in demands of “restraint” and “avoiding escalation”. When Israel is forced to secure its borders and expel the terrorists, Western opinion is outraged.
Today’s news is old news. The reaction to Israel’s confrontation with Hezbollah revives a script from 1982’s Lebanon war. Back then, it was the PLO firing Soviet-made rockets from southern Lebanon, and Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to London, who was shot on the doorsteps of the Dorchester. This time, it’s Hezbollah firing Iranian-made rockets and, Israel’s security service says, an Iranian plot to assassinate Benjamin Netanyahu or a senior Israeli minister.
Once more, a horde of independent minds unanimously denounce Israel for defending its internationally recognised borders against genocidal murderers. But these days they usually manage not to say the quiet part out loud – and they almost always get away with it.
In 1983, Roald Dahl reviewed a book about the Lebanon war for the Literary Review. Dahl compared Israel and the Jews to the Nazis: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from victims to barbarous murderers.” The United States, he added, was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions”.
In a follow-up rant to the New Statesman, Dahl claimed that an eternal “trait in the Jewish character… provokes animosity” across time and space: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason.”
The outcry that followed is the subject of Giant, a play opening this week at London’s Royal Court Theatre – exhuming Dahl’s resentments and the promotional difficulties they caused for his new novel, The Witches. What surprises today is that there was an outcry at all.
In 1983, many of Dahl’s peers in the writing game condemned him. Now, the chorus is with him. In the age of “microaggressions” and speech codes, it’s open season on the Jews.
Dahl was an old-school racist and snob. Today’s Jew haters don’t admit to hating the “Jewish race”. They have learnt to talk in euphemisms about “settler colonialism” and “ending Zionism”. They call themselves humanitarians.
Dahl had the courage of his convictions, crackpot as they were. Today’s crop are devious and passive-aggressive, passively embracing Islamists at home and Hamas and Hezbollah abroad, aggressively seeking to stifle Israel in the grip of a speciously politicised international law.
Dahl was fluent in the nastier side of human nature. Our humanitarians know as little of themselves as they do of Middle East history. They are as sure of their virtue as any inquisitor. They not only feel justified in singling out Jews and Israel for contempt, they feel virtuous.
St Augustine advised that Jews be kept in a state of humiliation, the better to demonstrate their error in rejecting Jesus. From Kant to Corbyn, the apostles of European universalism have continued this tradition. Israel must never be allowed to be normal. The Jews must not be allowed to defend themselves. Dahl had the honesty to admit his irrationality and sadism. The ignorance of our humanitarians is part of their intellectual cowardice. Their cant of human rights masks a strange and sinister bloodlust.