Dear Howard,
I write more in sorrow than in anger. You’ve acknowledged that we are a “disputatious people” so I know you will take this response in the spirit in which it is offered. I have relished every book you’ve written since your very first novel, Coming from Behind, was published in 1983. Much of your writing has resonated: your acuity about campus politics, your refusal to disavow, nay your pride, in your particular ethnic version of the Mancunian working class and your fine satirical instincts.
Unlike your first editor, the late Carmen Callil, I don’t object to your “masculinist” point of view. If your special subject seems to be the penis who am I to argue?
Howard, in my favourite of all your books, Roots Schmoots, you acknowledge that Our People are “smitten with their own tragedy”. But that tragedy and your smittenness seem to have overwhelmed your capacity for empathy for the other contemporary tragedy – that of the Palestinian right to self-determination and sovereignty.
Your latest jeremiad argues that antisemitism is the ur-racism, exceptional and eternal. I share your alertness to antisemitism. My mother was regularly called Mrs Goldberg. I said nothing when a chair of a publishing company I led asked whether a P&L statement was “Jewish accounting”. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched people tapping the side of their noses to suggest shrewdness, a nose for making a deal. However, I am surprised that “our” tragedy has left you unable to recognise that the occupation has morally corrupted Israeli society, that successive Israeli governments have colluded to oppress Palestinians, destroy their lives, their homes, and ensured the impossibility of any prospect of justice or peace.
You suspect the western media of propaganda when, in reality, there has been a remarkable lack of representation of life in Gaza since 7 October. I’m not sure where you were last weekend but the epic column inches devoted to the Israeli victims of 7 October does not suggest a failure to give due regard to their suffering. Indeed, what was almost entirely missing, or at best appeared as an afterthought, was any attention to the consequence of that day for Palestinians. This isn’t a call for both-siderism – I take Jacqueline Rose’s (one of your Ashamed Jews) view that “balance is a corrupt term in an unbalanced world”.
One should not ignore the horror of the atrocities committed on 7 October in the left-wing kibbutzim that Netanyahu and his cronies assiduously and cynically ignored for the last 15 years, nor should one ignore the nightmare for families who await, with dread, news of loved ones still held hostage in Gaza. But Howard, I wonder how you can push to one side the 40,000-plus Gazans murdered in the last 12 months because you’re preoccupied by what you describe as that most ancient hatred.
You write, “it is hateful to be accused of what you haven’t done, but more hateful still to be accused of what you would never dream of doing and what you cannot bear to see done”. I wonder whether perhaps you hadn’t noticed the TikTok efforts of proud IDF soldiers, the religious fundamentalist settlers’ brutal treatment of Palestinians, who Yoav Gallant calls “ human animals”, or the obscene crimes against Palestinians prisoners at Sde Teiman prison in a state that promotes itself as the only democracy in the region. The evidence seems to refute your high-minded idea of Jewish people as incapable of barbarism.
You seamlessly conflate Jewishness and Israel. I assume for you that connection is obvious as it is for the majority of diaspora Jews. So I assume you don’t mind being held accountable for the actions of the current government, given your essay evidences no dissent. However, if you are uncomfortable with the reality of the Israeli state today, then perhaps you should reconsider your allegiance to Zionism – rather than asking to enjoy your nightly viewing without being exposed to its deadly manifestation in the form of maimed babies, among other things.
Almost as ancient as the hatred that preoccupies you is the rhetorical question: will this war on Gaza be good for the Jews? I think not.
Yours, Louise
Louise Adler is a former publisher
