The off-beat Peace News book shop in King’s Cross, now called Housmans, is a place we have always had a soft spot for because of its association with General Crozier—who was appointed Commander of the Auxiliaries by Lloyd George, but resigned the command in disgust when he saw how the War on the Irish was being conducted, and became an activist in the Peace Pledge Union.

Alas for times past!  Such things are not possible in these relentlessly progressive times.  Crozier would be hailed as the perfect soldier of the kind required by the conditions laid down at Nuremberg (1947)—soldiers who judge the orders they are given, instead of just obeying them.

The fact that Crozier is forgotten is evidence that the Nuremberg conditions were only intended to apply to the defeated German Enemy.

The paragraph in which the current Housmans management declares its abhorrence of the actions of the Jewish State and purports to have discovered “antisemitic tropes” in our publications shows the signs of having been concocted under pressure of a factional dispute, or of intense external pressure.  It is incoherent and evasive.

It would have been useful if the “tropes” about Jewish culture and character were specified.  It would also have been useful if Housmans explained, what, in their opinion, Jewry was.

Oliver Sears—a campaigner against ‘Anti-Semitism’—has asked why Jews are held to be accountable, in some degree, for actions of the Israeli state while Christians are not held accountable for the actions of Christian States.  The question implied that Judaism was a religion.  We pointed out that Judaism had decisively asserted itself as a nation in 1917, when it made the agreement with the British Empire that brought about the present condition of the Middle East.  Judaism is a nation, Christianity is not.  It could even be said that that was the issue on which Christianity separated from Judaism and created European civilisation.

Judaism had always routinely treated itself as a nation with rights in Palestine.  The routine was wearing thin amongst Jews in Britain when the British Government suddenly made the offer to it—as a nation—to re-install it in Palestine as a colony and enable it once again to become a Jewish State.

Religion, nation, and State are all bound together in historic Judaism, as they are in the revived Jewish nationalism that was empowered by the British Empire.

Some British Jews opposed the revitalisation of the national and territorial claims of Judaism.  The matter was disputed amongst the Board of Deputies.  The nationalists won, and they set about hegemonising Judaism as a whole, and did so very effectively.

The Balfour Agreement was adopted by the League of Nations, and was passed on to the United Nations.  The Jews, in their dispersion amongst the other nations, acquired the official status of a nation with national rights in Palestine.  Israel, the Jewish State—which is still an expansionist work in progress—recognises Jews everywhere as having a “right of return”, after 2,000 years, while denying it to the natives that it has made refugees within living memory.

Is it an anti-Semitic ‘trope’ to state these facts?  The Jewish State says that it is.  So, apparently, does Housmans.  The Israeli Ambassador has denounced the UN General Assembly to its face for saying it.

As to Jewish character and feeling—the only reference to it we can recall is that we quoted the architects of theBalfour Declaration as being of the opinion that the Jewish State which they wished to restore would behave like the Jewish State of two thousand years ago—which the Romans found it necessary to destroy—if it was left to its own devices.

Those English Zionists of 1917 were impressive intellectuals.  They investigated the history of Jews Nationalism and concluded that the Romans did the right thing in destroying the Jewish State in the interests of liberal civilisation.  But they assured themselves that the destructive tendency of Jewish Nationalism could be curbed if the Jewish State was put under British guidance as a colony of the British Empire.

We shall never know if they were right about that.  The British (Labour) Government of 1948 reneged on its Imperial responsibility to the Arab population of Palestine when it surrendered to the Jewish nationalist terrorist campaign and opened the way for the Nakba [the terrorist war which expelled a large part of the Palestinian population, ed).

The British Empire was confident of its ability to civilise the Jewish nationalism that it adopted as an ally, or as an instrument.  That was in 1917.  Only thirty years years later it was so decayed that the Jewish Nationalism it had cultivated shrugged it off with a brief, sharp, indiscriminate terror campaign, and declared itself an independent state.  And, as an independent state, it bore out the opinion of its Gentile architects of 1917 that it would have much in common with its predecessor of 2,000 years ago.

Jewish opponents of Zionism in 1917 were of the opinion that, if Judaism was re-activated as nationalist, instead of consolidating itself as a religion, it would inevitably regress into archaic fundamentalism.  An “anti-semitic trope”, no doubt.  But were they mistaken?

Brendan Clifford