The kosher controversy at Sainsbury’s speaks to a profound problem: acquiescence to anti-Semitism

Photo: Bloomberg News

Were you outraged by a Sainsbury's store's decision over the weekend to hide away its kosher foods in an attempt to placate anti-Israel protesters? You should have been. For this incident, though seemingly a one-off, speaks to a profound problem in Europe today – the respectable classes' acquiescence to anti-Semitism; their willingness to accept anti-Semitic sentiment as a fact of life and to shrug it off or, worse, kowtow to it.

The kosher incident took place at the Sainsbury's in Holborn in London. When a mob of anti-Israel protesters gathered outside the store, the manager took the extraordinary decision to take all kosher products off the shelves lest the protesters target them and smash them up. Kosher foods, of course, are Jewish not Israeli; they are part of the Jewish dietary requirement, not part of any kind of Israeli food corporatism. To shamefacedly hide away such foodstuffs in order to appease a gang of hot-headed Israel-haters is an attack on a religious people and their rights, not on the Israeli state. That in Britain in 2014 we have store managers taking kosher foods off public display should be of concern to anyone who hates prejudice and racism.

So does this mean Sainsbury's is anti-Semitic? No. It doesn't even show that anyone at the Sainsbury's in Holborn is anti-Semitic. But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism, the rank unwillingness of influential people and institutions to face up to anti-Semitic sentiment and their preference for moulding the world around it rather than challenging it. Imagine if a Sainsbury's manager suggested that the best way to deal with a racist in his store was to remove the black employees who were offending him. There would be outrage. Yet this weekend, in central, apparently civilised London, a manager decided that the best way to deal with people possessed of a possibly anti-Semitic outlook was to hide away the Jew stuff, lest they see it and feel disgusted by it.

Such official or institutional acquiescence to anti-Semitism is now widespread in Western Europe. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people say that the problem of anti-Semitism isn't all that bad, because they would rather just not talk about it. Or they say anti-Semitism is an understandable if slightly wrong-headed response to Israeli aggression in Gaza, excusing this poisonous prejudice as a kind of misfired political anger. In a world in which we are supersensitive to racism, in which a politician telling a less-than-PC after-dinner joke can expect to be harangued in the press and vilified on Twitter, it is simply extraordinary that more people are not exercised by the spread of anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe, by the smashing-up of synagogues, the vandalism of Jewish stores, the attacks on Holocaust memorials. This is the only prejudice that the opinion-forming set would rather not address. And in failing to do so, they effectively collude with it, granting it a special moral authority above all other prejudices. Everyone now knows that this is the one prejudice that respectable society won't really challenge you for holding, and in fact will allow you to hold through making life easier for you. Hate Jews? OK, we'll just remove this kosher food for you so that you don't have to look at such ghastly stuff. Translation: be an anti-Semite, we don't mind.

Even when some people have challenged the new anti-Semitism, they have tended to do so in a back-covering fashion. Consider Owen Jones' Guardian piece on the rise of Jew hatred. He admits there has been some anti-Semitism in Western Europe lately but then suggests that the real anti-Semitism is among far-Right groups in places like Greece and Hungary. This, too, is an attempt to distract attention from the scourge of anti-Semitism in Western Europe by effectively saying: “Look East – that's where the vilest people are.” But a progressive should always start by challenging prejudice in his own society, and there is currently heaps of it in Western Europe. It can be seen, not only in the violent attacks on synagogues, but also in the targeting of Jewish cultural events and Jewish shops and the waving of banners and placards depicting Israelis as big-nosed puppeteers of global politics or as a warped people who take a perverse pleasure in killing children. I’ve seen such banners on the very pro-Palestine demos that Mr Jones has spoken at; no one confronted the people who were waving them. Again, we acquiesce to anti-Semitism; we turn a blind eye; we comfort ourselves with the fantasy that anti-Semitism is something that exists among gruff skinheads in Budapest, but not in polite, tolerant, caring Britain.

But it does exist here, and it is deeply entwined with a now widespread, highly emotional, often unhinged anti-Israel sentiment. This is one of the main reasons people don’t want to pick apart anti-Semitism in Western Europe – because to do so would involve asking some very awkward questions about why it is that Israel gets people angrier and more red-eyed than any other issue on Earth, and why some of the very same things that were once said about the Jews (they’re child-killers, they control global politics, they cause international instability) are now said about Israel. Better to leave the anti-Semitism issue alone than invite scrutiny of Western Europe’s very own middle classes and left and the responsibility they might possibly bear for creating the conditions for contemporary anti-Israel-bordering-on-anti-Jew sentiment.

A civilised, democratic society would confront anti-Semitism. Our acquiescence to anti-Semitism is calling into question both our claim to be civilised and our democratic credentials.