Howard Jacobson - Views On The Middle East

Views On The Middle East

Howard Jacobson has strong views on the Israel-Palestine issue, which he regularly airs in the British media. Writing in The Independent in June 2007, about his support for the Israeli West Bank barrier, Jacobson stated that "it serves a... practical purpose, which is to keep out enemies... As long as they (the Palestinians) come into Israel primed as human bombs, that is how they will be viewed."

In the same Independent article, speaking about boycott and sanctions on Israel, Jacobson stated that it was "repugnant to humanity to single out one country for your hatred, to hate it beyond reason and against evidence, to pluck it from the complex contextuality of history as though it authored its own misfortunes and misdeeds... to deny it any understanding... and - most odious of all - to seek to silence its voices. For make no mistake, this is what an intellectual boycott means." On the wider Middle East, and Arab attitudes towards Israel, Jacobson added that "the existence of a militarily successful Israel remains so galling to Arabs whose daily lives are otherwise not incommoded by it."

Discussing Jews who criticise Israel, in The Jewish Chronicle, in August 2010, Jacobson said, "If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly... (but) when it’s without the affection, I worry." Jacobson went on to say that "one of the first things you notice about the anti-Israel stuff is that it is not funny. There’s none of the ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ business that we do."

Discussing his first visit to Israel, again in The Jewish Chronicle, Jacobson said, "when I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, ‘I can’t stand this’. Then I’d meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are." In the same interview, Jacobson stated his belief that the language anti-Zionist Jews use is "pathological — I don’t need to know anything about Israel to know that there is something wrong with the way they are talking, something false about it. No place could be as vile as they describe it. No people so lost to humanity. Not even the Nazis were as bad as the Jews are accused of being. Which Zionism are they anti?"

Jacobson rejected the notion that 'Zionism equals colonialism', saying "when I hear a Jew saying Zionism was always colonialism, I say, no it wasn’t." Dismissing Chomsky's scholarship on the Israel/Palestine debate as "drivel", Jacobson has stated, "what are some of them for? I am very sympathetic to somebody worrying about the Palestinians. But not spouting the Chomsky drivel."

Jacobson has tackled Jewish anti-Zionists and those Jews that reject Israel in his novel "The Finkler Question." According to Professor Edward Alexander, amongst those he parodies and criticizes is musician Gilad Atzmon. Reviewing the book for the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East web site in 2010, Alexander writes, "the novel’s Holocaust-denying Israeli yored (expatriate) drummer is in fact based upon one Gilad Atzmon, who is better known in England for endorsing the ideology of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and describing the burning of British synagogues as a “rational act” in retaliation for Israeli actions."