Tinging Tonge

Found:

...she...repeats that weary mantra that you can labour for the obliteration of Israel and not be an anti-Semite. To which the weary answer is, yes, but you can equally labour for the obliteration of Israel and be an anti-Semite. Hating Israel is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; it doesn't grant automatic immunity from the charge of loathing Jews.

The "she" is Baroness Tonge, resigned, who claimed:

"The comments I made were in protest at the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the treatment of Israeli Arabs.  "I am disappointed the leadership of my party did not consult me before issuing a press release and seems always to abet the request of the pro-Israel lobby. Israel is acting against international law, the Geneva conventions and human rights.

By the way,

the term 'Tonge', since 1987, became a way of calling someone an ass or a fool, but in a warm and friendly way...

(And tinging: To affect slightly, as with a contrasting quality.)


The above selection was penned by Howard Jacobson.

More from him:

...she is all context, a walking chronicle of odious imputation and malignity...of the medieval mischief she's been stirring for years...her equally medieval libel that supporters of Israel have "a financial grip" on the Western world.  Tell me, reader, what else you have to do, short of murdering Jews with your bare hands, before you can be called an anti-Semite...her imagining, were she Palestinian, how she too would strap explosives to her belt and go out and murder without discrimination.

...there is a further context in which the Tonge phenomenon is to be understood. And that is the continuing imputation that Jews bring trouble on themselves*. Of which other people is it required that they ponder their responsibility for any hatred of which they are the object?...Baroness Tonge has been allowed to roam and rant at will because her sympathy for the Palestinian cause – and I don't take issue with that – is considered to cancel out the sin of antipathy towards anybody else, and because the smoky zone of anti-Zionism she inhabits allows old prejudices to resurface in another name. We rightly pride ourselves on our tolerance; we are not 19th-century France. But in universities and unions, in the meetings of some pro-Palestinian campaigners, in countless tweets and threads and blogs, our own little orgy of hate goes on.

*

Piers Paul Read, the writer of a new book about the 1894 Dreyfus Affair, was criticised this week after saying that the French soldier's treatment could be linked to Jews being a "very powerful influence in finance, in business", and that Jews should ask why people were antisemitic.

^