Is David Baddiel a Zionist?

Letter to Prospect Magazine, about this review

David Baddiel may be one of the many Jews who have realised how engrained antisemitism is in the identity of the Left. But even in the current times, when identity politics has replaced class consciousness, he may feel to belong to such a tribe. One thinks to Lou Reed who, in 1989, asked Jesse Jackson whether there was a place for him, a Jew, in the Rainbow coalition, that was so hospitable for Louis Farrakhan (more than 30 years after, the problem is still there).

I don’t know where David Baddiel stands. But I know whose side Keith Kahn Harris is on. In 2019 he mused that “a change of Jewish behaviour could result in a change of level of antisemitism” (KKH “Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of diversity” p. 171). After a few months, in a review, Kahn-Harris explained that “structural forms of antisemitism are an increasingly distant memoir” before going to the conclusion that “speaking loudly and clearly” is not enough to oppose antisemitism. Therefore -that’s the last point of his agenda- to oppose antisemitism Jews ought to join the ranks of the Jewish (antiZionist) Left, that is currently living through an extraordinary process of revitalisation.

That is precisely the project that David Baddiel problematises in this caustic book. It’s true that both Baddiel and Kahn Harris, are indifferent toward Israel (and in this respect out of sync with the rest of British Jewry, let us remember that this community rallied in mass against the perspective of a friend of Hamas as Prime Minister). But there are important differences between the two.

David Baddiel certainly does not share the warm feelings of Keith Kahn Harris towards the antiZionist Jewish Left. The members of such a tribe make no mystery of their hate towards him on social media, and with this book, Baddiel punches back. Small wonders Keith KahnHarris does not like it.

One final point: Kahn Harris is always perplexed (he is every time he writes) by the support for Israel, wherever it comes from. As per the Mizrachi Jews: why do they support the politics of Israel? Because they are Right-wing! They ought to be educated “to join hands with their non-Muslim cousins”. The fact that for this important portion of the British Jewish community Arab antisemitism is not “a distant memory” is, once again, callously dismissed.