Sheer Anti-Semitism

Without the second paragraph, this letter of mine appears in the New Statesman:

If anti-Zionism is but another form of anti-Semitism, then how does Lord Sacks account for Yisrael Beiteinu, the party of Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman? That party wants to make citizenship rights conditional on the swearing of an oath of allegiance to the Zionist State, thereby denaturalising not only the Arab fifth of the population of Israel’s pre-1967 borders, but also the comparably fecund Haredim, usually known as “ultra-Orthodox” Jews. Lord Sacks has made great efforts to accommodate the Haredim in Britain. In Israel, they face denaturalisation by a party the presence of which in government would rightly cause any other state to be treated as a pariah.

By contrast, there are already those from Russia who have no difficulty taking the nearest thing to such an oath, namely that of a member of the Israeli Defence Force. Provided that they are permitted to swear it on the New Testament alone. Russian Orthodoxy keeps Old Testament figures as Saints, and venerates icons of them. So this insistence, by the most dedicated of Zionists, can have nothing to do with that. It can be attributed to one thing only, and that is sheer anti-Semitism.