In the Spectator, I wrote that as punishment for the crime of trying to defend itself against annihilation, Israel was being subjected to a torrent of lies, distortions, libels, abandonment of objectivity and the substitution of malice and hatred for truth pouring out of the British and European media and establishment. Strikingly, this was echoing the moral inversion of victim and victimiser by which the Islamic jihadis justified their attacks on the West. And that was because the West was all too receptive to mind-twisting jihadi propaganda because it had already repudiated truth, reason and morality in its own domestic discourse (Spectator, 20 April 2002).
The really striking thing was that this Israel and Jew-bashing bigotry was strongest on the supposedly anti-racist left. As I noted in 2003, what was going on was a kind of Holocaust inversion with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis, and the Palestinians given a free pass as the ‘new Jews’. Hatred of the Jews now marched grotesquely behind the left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel, but mainstream media chat about the malign power of the Jews over America and world policy (Spectator, 22 March 2003). And tragically, Jews on the left were at the forefront of this anti-Israel witch-hunt – enabling British broadcasters to develop the delightful new spectator sport of Jew-baiting by putting a pro-Israel and an anti-Israel Jew in a studio together and watching each rip the other apart.
This all got worse and worse. In 2004, in the wake of a relatively huge rise in attacks on Jews in Britain, I noted the following: claims by a radio reporter that the Jews might have ‘poisoned the water wells of Egypt’ in 1947; a Tory MP accusing British Jews of dual loyalty unless they repudiated the policies of the Israel government; and a woman at a dinner saying to my face, ‘I hate the Jews’ (Sunday Telegraph, 22 February 2004).
As for the monotonously repeated claim that such venom was not Jew-hatred but merely hostility, much of it legitimate, towards Israel, this was, to put it mildly, disingenuous. This was not legitimate criticism but a unique campaign of delegitimisation based on fabrication, distortion and group libel. And it was its unique qualities that identified it as yet another mutation of anti-Jewish prejudice. For this ‘oldest hatred’ is unlike any other form of prejudice. It is unique in displaying characteristics such as egregious double standards, obsessive fixation, imputation of cosmic malice — and blaming the Jews for activities of which they are not only innocent, but of which they are in fact the victims.
All these unique characteristics were on display in the demonisation of Israel, along with classic anti-Jewish tropes such as accusations of clannishness, sinister and covert power and dual loyalty. Moreover, in denying to Israel alone the right to defend itself militarily against attack, it endorsed Israel’s destruction. In seeking to destroy Israel, it singled out the Jews alone as not having the right to self-determination in their own national homeland. In claiming that Zionism, the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people, was in fact racism, it struck at the very heart of Judaism, for which the people, the religion, and the land are inseparable.
One left-wing commentator took me to task for suggesting that the anti-Israel discourse was in fact anti-Jew. ‘What you have to understand’, he said earnestly, ‘is that we are just so relieved we don’t have to worry about the Jews any more. Ever since Auschwitz we’ve been unable to criticise the Jews at all. Now we feel that constraint has been lifted.’
In other words, now that Israelis were being presented as Nazis it was, thank goodness, back to business as usual for British Jew-haters.
The wholly false belief that Israel is the regional bully in the Middle East, and responsible for the absence of peace with the Palestinians because the conflict is essentially about setting boundaries on land which Israel illegitimately occupies, is now the default in Britain. Not only that, but the sickening campaign to delegitimise Israel in order to bring about its destruction consumes British public life.
This includes boycott campaigns conducted by trade unions, the Church of England, and the medical profession; university tutors marking down students if they don’t reproduce Arab propaganda about the Middle East; fashionable plays claiming that Israel persecutes the Palestinians because of the arrogant Jewish claim to be the ‘chosen people’; and the relentless BBC coverage of the Middle East with its disproportionate coverage of Israel, its failure to report its victimisation so that its military defence is presented as aggression, and its reflexive reproduction of Arab propaganda.
To live in a country where no official voice is raised against this vicious and racist madness, where British Jews who defend Israel become ‘you people’ and their loyalty is called into question, and where the only good Jew is an anti-Zionist Jew, is really quite intolerable. It is also singularly myopic. Israel is the forward salient of the war to defend Western civilisation – and, although the British do not seem to realise it, that includes them, too. It is in Israel that the defenders of Western civilisation are already fighting the battle with courage and integrity, rather than cravenly cringing on their knees.
In 1982, I was told my country was Israel even though I had never been there. In 2001, I was told I was disloyal to Britain just for supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, even though I had visited it only twice and did not particularly want to go again. Time and again, I was told to go and live in Israel because that was my country — when it was not. I could never relax when turning on the radio or TV, opening a newspaper or going to a dinner party, for fear of hearing some libellous accusation or other casual prejudice against Israel or the Jews. And if I protested, it was made clear that it was I who was causing great offence to decent British people -- amongst whom of course I was not to be counted, but was instead to be disdained and marginalised as the ‘wailing Jew’.
I had been made to feel an outsider in my own country. The real tragedy of all this, however, is that it means Britain does not understand that the interests of its own Jewish community — which remains conspicuously loyal to Britain — dovetail completely with the geopolitical interests of Britain itself. And this is not despite its attachment to Israel, but because of it. If Israel were ever to go down, Britain and the West would be next in line and with no defender in the Middle East. The fate of the Jewish people is inseparable from the fate of Britain and the West. Rather than levelling the distasteful canard of 'dual loyalty' at those British Jews who feel an attachment to Israel, the British would serve their own interests rather better if they were to be more like America, where the non-Jewish public overwhelmingly backs Israel as the guarantor of its own culture of liberty.
CHAPTER 16: Separated at Last
My mother remained in her own home for a little over a year after my father died. It was an increasingly stressful time; she disliked most of the women who were sent to care for her. I listened to her complaints. Were they justified? Was she being badly treated? I was in and out of her flat all the time, but it was impossible to judge. Her complaints became more and more insistent. I became increasingly frantic.
One day, she rang very early in the morning and claimed that the carer had hurt her. It was when she said that the girl was listening in on this call because she had penetrated the phone system that I called her general physician. Later that morning, I went with the GP to my mother’s flat. The doctor told me my mother was suffering from a psychosis and needed hospitalisation straight away. We knew she would probably refuse, but if between us we couldn’t persuade her to go in voluntarily, she would have to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
The GP talked to her plainly, carefully and gently. My mother looked at me. For a moment, the rigid Parkinson’s mask that had turned her into a stranger seemed to slip away from her face; in that fleeting instant she became my mother again. Tenderly, she said: ‘Is this upsetting you very badly?’ I couldn’t trust myself to speak. ‘I’ll go,’ she said.
I packed her bag and we left for the hospital. As she shuffled out of the front door, she
said flatly, ‘I will never come back here again.’
She remained in hospital for several weeks. The psychiatrist told me her brain was riddled with lesions. ‘She cannot go home’, he said. I was distraught. I knew that my mother’s great dread was that she would ‘end up in a home’. How could I possibly do that to her? Should she come and live with us? Our house was totally unsuitable for her; should we perhaps sell it and move to somewhere fully equipped for a severely disabled person? Even if we did that, though, she would still need specialised nursing around the clock. But how could we possibly afford that?
Thus I agonised with my mother’s GP. Firmly she told me that my mother needed to be cared for in a nursing home. For a variety of reasons that she carefully listed, it would not be in my mother’s interests for her to live with us; we simply wouldn’t be able to cope with her rapidly multiplying needs. Living with us was out of the question.
Suspicious that the GP might be trying out of kindness to give me an escape route, I nevertheless accepted what she told me. I found a nursing home I thought was suitable, and which was prepared to accept my mother. In the greatest possible dread, I braced myself to broach this with her. I expected tears, reproaches, resistance. To my astonishment, she accepted it without demur.
She lived in the nursing home for nearly four years. To begin with, she fought it; she stayed in her room, kept her distance from the other residents who she noted in horror were so very old and frail, and insisted on being addressed as ‘Mrs Phillips’ rather than by her given name. But then, finally, she submitted; she sat in the lounge with the others, stopped noticing her increasingly disheveled appearance, and became ‘Mabel’. I don’t know which tore me apart more.
As she had become too weak to wheel herself around the building, I bought her a motorised wheelchair. She struggled to control it, and the home gamely turned a blind eye to the plaster she took off the walls. But when she crashed it into other residents as they were having their hair done in the salon, the electric wheelchair was finally taken away from her. And then she was stranded, totally dependent upon others for everything she wanted to do.
I was told by social service professionals of my acquaintance that this home was ‘as good as it gets’. There was not a week, however, when I did not feel the utmost anguish as I relentlessly noted every so-telling deficiency in her care — her spectacles coated with a film of dirt, the flowers left dead in her vase; not a week when I didn’t fantasise about spiriting her out of the home; not a week when I did not bitterly reproach myself for having effectively put her there. In my sleep, I dreamed that my mother rose from her wheelchair, and, gently smiling, walked again.
As her mind disintegrated, my mother gradually left me. In 2004, a few minutes into her eightieth birthday, she died.
CHAPTER 17: A Very Strange Obsession
Over the years, some people suggested that the dislike and disdain I had provoked by my writing was itself evidence of anti-Jewish prejudice. For sure, there was always an element of that. But in the main, I believe that this was not the main driver. I think I became a lightning rod for the onslaught by the left against the foundations of Western society – and that onslaught necessarily also meant attacking the Jewish people, whose ancient moral codes underpinned the West. I think I came to embody all of those things – made much worse by the fact that I was not only an apostate of the left, but was calling them to account for betraying the very values they professed.
In other words, I was a kind of permanent reproach for the left, a bad conscience. The fact that I continued to write along these lines regardless of all the abuse hurled to shut me up seemed to drive them simply nuts. After all, the sheer scale of their obsession with me, and the things they have said – in literally hundreds of gratuitous comments every year — are surely evidence of some kind of disorder. A few examples, chosen pretty well at random:
‘The routinely insane Melanie Phillips’ (Caitlin Moran, Times, 14 April 2012); ‘spoof columnist’ (Martin Robbins, Guardian, 26 January 2012); ‘One of the Mail’s routine monsters’ (Marina Hyde, Independent, 23 November 2011); ‘The Daily Mail’s queen of mean’ (Hugh Muir, Guardian, 9 November 2011); ‘the simplistic authoritarian commentator Melanie Phillips’ (Dave Hill, Guardian, 17 August 2011); ‘depths of ignorance and bigotry that can scarcely have been matched, even in the Mail’ (Greg Wood, Guardian, 6 December 2011); ‘Consider the rightward and increasingly scary trajectory of — ooh, shall we say Melanie Phillips? — who started out as a Guardian herbivore and now, like Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, eats broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth’ (Nicholas Lezard, Independent, 5 December 2011).
In 2003, the Guardian devoted a two-page spread by Andy Beckett to my ‘extraordinary political journey’. Why extraordinary? Because of my ‘background, choice of subjects, and the quality of [my] anger’. But why was I so angry and severe? And how could I possibly have left my Guardian ‘family’ and ended up at the Daily Mail? His puzzlement only increased when he saw my ‘buttery leather suit’, which made me look like ‘a left-wing activist who has somehow acquired a Daily Mail salary’. When I briefly mislaid my folder of papers, I momentarily seemed ‘scatty and quite normal’; but then when conversation commenced, I spoke ‘in formal paragraphs’ (Guardian, 7 March 2003). Oh dear.
Another interview with the Guardian in 2006 following publication of my book Londonistan demonstrated the unbridgeable chasm between myself and the left. Jackie Ashley, the interviewer, found that my ‘hysterical tone repels frank and thoughtful argument’; indeed, it was ‘like interviewing a human cactus’. My ‘medieval self-righteousness of tone’ was apparently exemplified by the fact that I ordered only black coffee, behaviour that was apparently so bizarre and intimidating that poor Ashley was too terrified even to ask for a bun.
But it was an exchange which was not included in the interview which for me encapsulated the chasm between myself and the left. Expressing exasperated disbelief at my description of ‘a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children, and violence, squalor, and vulgarity on the streets’, she waved her hand dismissively at the window and said, ‘I see no feral children. Where are they?’
We were sitting in a cafe in Chiswick, one of the most chic and well-to-do areas of London. Of course there were no feral children there, I said in astonishment. But in deprived and shattered communities, in the north of England for example, there were veritable cultural deserts where committed fathers were simply unknown and children who knew nothing but abandonment, disorder and violence were indeed not just wild and undisciplined but lacked the basic connection to a civilised society.
How could Ashley, a Guardian journalist, not know that there were now two Britains, one that was part of society and another that had largely detached itself from it? How could such misguided complacency possibly be considered progressive?
Those of us who live by the verbal sword must accept that we have chosen to inhabit the world of intellectual combat, and not be too surprised by the missiles that are hurled our way. But I believe that what has happened to me illustrates what has happened to British society and Western culture during the past three decades. It helps explain what is otherwise very hard to understand and bewilders so many: that our cultural and political elites have simply turned truth and justice inside out and, with argument replaced by insult and abuse, taken leave of reality itself.
Why was I shocked? I surely knew the Guardian mindset by now. Indeed I did; but I am always being shocked by the sheer scale of the disconnect between left-wingers and reality. I am always shocked by the sheer impossibility of getting them to see what is actually in front of their eyes. Indeed, it is terrifying. For it means that they are simply impervious to reason. It means that the West will always harbour those who will repeat the horrors of the past. And that means sliding into primitivism and chaos.
I believe that the left has suborned the centre ground by hijacking the language of mora
lity, virtue and progress, and that all these urgently need to be reclaimed for the true centre ground.
So do I feel well satisfied to be shot of my former comrades with whom I have fallen out so badly? On the contrary: the whole thing remains for me deeply painful. It feels like being excluded from a family because it has joined some kind of weird brainwashing cult. The rupture with the left feels like a very bad divorce.
In May 2012, I went back to the Guardian for the first time in sixteen years to be interviewed by Ian Mayes, the editor of the latest volume of the paper’s official history. I had known Ian a little when I was on the staff. He was now not only personally as courteous as I remembered, but referred in passing to insightful observations that former colleagues of mine had made to him about my experiences there. Maybe he was merely being tactful to get me to open up; nevertheless it was the first time I had heard that anyone at the paper had been sympathetic to my story. When I left the Guardian building that day, I wept.
So am I over my rupture with the left? No. But here I am; and I can only do what I have always done and follow where the evidence leads. Will I continue to wonder whether I’ve got it all terribly wrong? Certainly. Will I persist in trying to reconcile my dream of Britain’s Jerusalem with my love for the country whose capital city it is? Without doubt. Will I ever opt for a quieter life, renounce my views and conform to the received wisdom back in the company of my fashionable former friends? Never.
If Britain continues uninterrupted in this way, leading the rest of the West into destroying the building blocks of its culture, I believe that Western society will eventually cease to be civilised, and will descend into a type of barbarism in which freedom and decency will be extinguished.
All, however, is not lost. A culture can pull back from the brink if it tears off its suicidal blinders in time. This can still be achieved — but it requires a recognition above all of the paradox that so many fail to understand, that freedom only exists within clear boundaries, and that preserving the values of Western civilisation requires a robust reassertion of the Judeo-Christian principles on which its foundations rest. And that requires moral, political, and religious leadership of the highest order — and buckets of courage.
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