The “3D test” of antisemitism is a set of criteria formulated in 2003 by Natan Sharansky in order to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. The three Ds stand for delegitimization, demonization, and double standards, each of which, according to the test, indicates antisemitism.

Applying this test to what is happening in Britain, it seems clear to me that large sections of the mainstream media, some backbench and some frontbench MPs from the governing Labour Party, and many voices on the street, while attacking Israel, are in fact revealing their antisemitism. To what extent this antisemitism is a consequence of the rise of the far right, the far left, or militant Islamism, is debatable, but that it is the reality today in Britain is, I would argue, an undeniable fact. This is a situation that I see only deteriorating in the future.

At the same time, militant Islamism in Britain is occupied not only with Israel and the Middle East, but also with the political and cultural future of Britain. I fear for the future of British society and, indeed, of Western civilisation.

This was the warning voice that I hoped to capture with my blog today. From the feedback I have received, and some I haven’t, it would appear that I failed in my mission. My fable was presumably insufficiently accurate a parallel of the reality I was seeking to reflect, not a tight enough fit. I was also, as Bernice feared, too caught up in my own apprehension of reality to feel the need to make the metaphor clearer for anyone who was not already consumed by the same fears as I am.

Rest assured that I’ve learnt my lesson. From now on, I will either be explicit or confine myself to trivia. Having established that I’m not Eric Blair, I’ll leave literary allegorical fables to the big boys.

Here’s a story I’ve been hearing and reading versions of repeatedly recently. To be honest, it makes no sense to me, but perhaps you’ll be able to make sense of it.

Once upon a time there was a mine-owner. The coalmine that he owned was a profitable mine, with rich seams that ran not too deep underground and that were wide enough for a man to be able to work them without having to lie down. Not, of course, that the mine-owner worked the mine himself. No: he paid men from the neighbouring village to work for him, and it was they who went underground every day.

The work itself was, naturally, physically demanding, but there were always plenty of men willing to take the job, because the mine brought in a handsome income for the owner, and he, being a fair man, ploughed much of that income back into the business. He paid the miners a more than fair wage. He also took good care of them, providing them with hot-water showering facilities, clothing allowances and subsidised healthcare.

In the long term, the mine was, of course, a killer, with the miners suffering from, and many dying from, lung disease. However, life expectancy in that region was not high anyway, and the miners stoically accepted the risk they took.

A more dramatic risk was of drilling into a pocket of carbon monoxide trapped in the seam; the gas would then escape and asphyxiate the miners. To detect such potential disasters early, the mine-owner kept a community of young boy and girl choristers. He provided each team of miners with one of these young children in a cage, who would descend into the mine with them. All of these children had beautiful singing voices, and they would happily sing all day in their cages. In the event of the release of the odourless gas, the child would succumb to the gas before the adult miners were aware of it. When they heard the child’s singing stop, they would know that they needed to escape from the seam immediately.

When the boys reached the age where their voices broke, and when the girls reached child-bearing age, the mine-owner would ‘retire’ them, and they would then breed a new generation of choristers.

Initially, the miners were grateful for the children, whom they recognised as lifesavers. They grew attached to them and found that their cheerful singing made the long hours of each underground shift pass a little more quickly and lightly.

However, as time went on, the miners’ attitude changed. The choristers’ ceaseless joyful singing, apparently ignoring the fate that they might face at any moment, began to aggravate some of the miners. Others, recognising that the singers were a signal of misfortune, started to blame the children themselves for bringing this misfortune. Some miners started refusing to take the children down into the mine with them, or to have anything to do with them.

Over the years, some of the choristers being taken down seemed to develop extraordinary abilities to avoid their fate. Seemingly unaware that their whole purpose was to succumb to the gas, some of them evolved, over several generations, respiratory systems that mitigated the effect of the poison, and they took much longer to die. There were even some cases where choristers were able to carry on singing after the weaker of the miners had started to be affected by the gas. Needless to say, the miners resented such stubborn resistance on the part of the children, and insisted that the mine-owner start a genetic programme to breed a strain of children that would offer no resistance to the carbon monoxide.

In other cases, choristers started constructing rudimentary face masks, which they then slipped over their head in the darkness of the mine. These masks appeared to give them some protection against the carbon monoxide. When the miners discovered this was happening, they insisted the mine-owner keep the children locked up twenty-four hours a day, with no access to any construction materials. They were determined that the choristers accept their role as helpless victims.

Eventually, all of the children in the mine-owner’s stock were weakened. As luck would have it, this coincided with a period when the miners were working a seam that was riddled with pockets of carbon monoxide. Every day a pocket was hit. Every day, more and more children died.

In a relatively short time, the entire community of choristers was wiped out. The very next day, the miners, now unprotected, started to be killed in increasing numbers by the gas. A few months later, there was not a single miner left alive. The mine-owner was forced to close his mine, and the families of the miners, with no financial support, slowly but inexorably starved to death.

It was only at this point that it occurred to the mine-owner that, if he had invested money in developing the gas masks that the children had invented, he could have equipped all his miners with them, and nobody, miner or chorister, would have had to die. But by then it was too late. Nobody should wait until it’s too late.

Most weeks I get to choose the topic of my post. However, some weeks the topic chooses me. This is one of the latter weeks.

One news story of the last week defines for me so clearly the best and the worst of Israel in September 2024 that, difficult as it is to write about, I feel I have to write about it.

A shiva call is rarely an easy thing to make. If I am not particularly close to the mourners, I often feel awkward about finding something suitable to say. However, if I take my lead from the mourners themselves, as we are required to do by Jewish law, and allow them to initiate and lead the conversation, then some way will usually suggest itself for me to offer comfort to them, which is, of course, the object of the call. At the very least I can offer a listening ear.

I do not envy public figures who are expected to make regular shiva calls as part of their duties. Some clearly have a natural empathy that is clear to see; Israel’s President Herzog seems to be such a person, Others clearly don’t.

One of the noticeable features of the last eleven months has been the fact that Prime Minister Netanayahu has not made shiva calls to the families of those, civilians and soldiers, killed on October 7 and in the war. Clearly, this is a conscious decision on his part to avoid situations that will potentially expose him directly to the anger of bereaved families who feel that he has at best let the country down badly, producing scenes that will play very badly in the media.

However, last week, Netanyahu, and his wife, chose to pay a shiva call. They visited the family home of Ori Danino z”l, one of the six hostages executed underground by Hamas. Ori had been at the Nova party, and, after he managed to escape the party unharmed on October 7, he chose to return to try to help others escape, and managed to save three others. He himself was then captured and taken hostage.

Why did Netanyahu choose this particular shiva house? It is difficult to think of any reason other than the feeling that Ori’s father, Rabbi Elhanan Danino, and his family, whose roots lie in Morocco, represent part of Netanyahu’s core constituency. Netanyahu must have felt that he would be among friends.

If this was his reasoning, then it was a severe misjudgement, because, some time into the visit, Rabbi Danino informed Netanyahu that he had some hard truths to tell him. He suggested that Netanyahu might prefer not to hear them, but rather to cut short his visit. However, Netanyahu chose to stay.  

Rabbi Danino then criticised Netanyahu’s long-term response to the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza and his handling of the war. The appropriate way for Netanyahu to respond to this criticism would have been in humbled silence. Instead, he responded with the following self-pitying comments.

“I won’t tell you what happened behind closed doors. It’s not very interesting anyway.” (Here Sara Netanyahu interjected: “You were pretty much alone.”) “Alone.” (Sara: “Facing the whole world.”) “Exactly. Facing the whole world. Facing the US President. I went into the room every day and asked myself: ‘Why am I here? What am I here for? For what? For the perks of office?’” (Sara: “What perks?”)

I don’t want to understand this response in the way I’m going to explain it, but I cannot see any other explanation. Netanyahu is here appealing for sympathy from the family of a 23-year-old man who was kept prisoner underground for 11 months and then shot in cold blood. He is asking for their sympathy for him because, surrounded by his adoring family and his loyal supporters, commuting between his home in Jerusalem, his luxury home in Caesarea, and the White House, given standing ovation after standing ovation while addressing the US congress, he felt alone: while their son was rotting, underfed, starved of fresh air, urinating in a bottle, in a tunnel in Gaza so low-ceilinged that he could not stand upright.

Contrast the content of this (and, if you listen to the recording on YouTube, contrast the tone of voice) with the content and tone of Rabbi Danino’s response.

“You didn’t do this for 15 years. Don’t come now, when they are there, to do this. 15 years you sat quietly. You didn’t do anything.”

After R Danino accused Netanyahu of equipping Hamas with swords, tunnels and dollars, Netanyahu politely asked if he could reply. R Danino said that he didn’t intend to get into this. He asked whether Netanyahu had come to listen or to be heard, because what Netanyahu had to say we had been hearing for 15 years.

Rabbi Danino later begged Netanyahu to stop wasting time and energy on what he called nonsense. He then explained that he was referring to the endless pursuit of mandates and studying of opinion polls – what’s going to yield political results and what isn’t.

At one point in the shiva call, Sara Netanyahu accused Rabbi Danino of repeating what others had told him to say. She couched this in an apologetic tone, but it is, obviously, a deeply insulting observation. This elicited a wry laugh from Rabbi Danino, and a response that asserted, as was very clear from his whole manner and dignity throughout the visit, that he was his own man and beholden to nobody.

Eventually, Netanyahu referred to the fact that he too is one who has suffered bereavement, citing his older brother Yoni, who was the only Israeli fatality during the dramatic rescue of 102 of the 106 hostages from Entebbe in 1976. There is a way to introduce a reference like this into a conversation like this and to make it a way of recognising, and identifying with, the depth of the grief of the newly bereaved family. When Netanyahu refers to his brother’s death, and he certainly refers to it very often, it is with something of a sense of competing for sympathy, rather than expressing empathy.

After this shiva call, Netanyahu addressed the nation, stating: “I hear the cry of the families of the hostages. I hear. I listen. I don’t pass judgement either.” I can’t imagine a more patronising comment, a greater demonstration of Netanyahu’s total incapacity to understand the relationship between one paying a shiva call and the mourner, than that reference to not passing judgement.

Rabbi Danino urged Netanyahu to rewind to the time of Yoni’s death and to recapture his true Zionist self from that period, forgetting the distractions of the last 50 years. He also urged him to reflect on the fact that he has been charged by God with the welfare of the Jewish state, and he recommended that he close his office door for 10 minutes each day and ask himself what the Jewish value is that he is bringing.

The contrast in human dignity between the two men in this exchange is as stark as it could be. To empathise with Rabbi Danino and his family is very easy. To empathise with Binyamin Netanyahu is more difficult. However, there is one sense in which I feel very sorry for him. As a young adult, he lost the older brother he adored. He then set out, I believe, to devote his life to matching his brother’s achievement. However, this was always going to be a hopeless task. Yoni z”l paid the ultimate price in a truly heroic and magnificent military operation. Nothing that Bibi could do could match that. He has, I fear, spent his whole life measuring himself against Yoni and, inevitably, finding himself wanting. Eventually, such an effort takes its toll on a person. Along the way, he has lost his way, and is in danger of dragging the country after him. I can only hope that some of Rabbi Danino’s measured, quietly impassioned, words found their mark, although, sadly, all the evidence to date suggests not.

I pray that next week I may have something more uplifting to write about. At the time of writing, sadly, all the evidence suggests not.

Blogger’s Note: There’s esoteric and then there’s just impenetrable. Having googled and discovered Prima Donna, I couldn’t resist enlisting it for my title, but I won’t pretend I was familiar with it before. It is, apparently, a Dutch cheese, closely related to Gouda but with notes of Parmesan. This week’s title is therefore a Rigolettoish rendering of ‘Somebody moved my cheese’. If you’re waiting for an explanation of Rigoletto, or Gouda, then you’re probably here by mistake. If, on the other hand, you suddenly feel you must listen to the aria in question, let it not be said that I don’t anticipate my readership’s every last wish. This is, I’ll have you know, a class establishment.

Regular readers will know that I am not one to let himself be troubled by the vicissitudes of daily life. I’m always ready to make lemonade at the drop of a lemon and I cut the bread in half before I freeze it, so that there’s never a risk of it going a bit Saint Agur bluish before we manage to finish it. In other words, ours is a kitchen where half a loaf is not just better than no bread; it’s ideal.

Blogger’s Note: Two paragraphs and already three cheeses named. If you think you’re detecting a theme here, you’re completely wrong.

So, no, I take the rough with the smooth, roll with the punches and whistle while I work. But, my goodness, this has been a tough week. Scarcely a single cheese has been left unmoved.

For starters, here’s a handy tip: if you listen to Reshet Bet of Kan, Israel radio’s news and current affairs station, don’t drive through Ma’ale Adumim. As you approach Ma’ale Adumim from Jerusalem, you find that you need to retune from 95.0 or 95.5 (which of the two is stronger seems to depend on wind direction) to 95.2. In Ma’ale Adumim itself, this gives good reception in most of the city, although Mitzpe Nevo is, in this as in so many things, a bit of a law unto itself. Poised as we are on a ridge running between Jerusalem and the Judean Desert, our ears are competed for by Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian stations. However, 95.2 will serve you pretty well within MA.

Or at least it did until last week, when, suddenly, the signal became weaker in various locations, including our street, and 95.0 and 95.5 became louder. If this reflects a permanent change, then it may well turn out to be a good thing, since it will render obsolete retuning to 95.2 on entering the city and from 95.2 on leaving. However, where was the memo from the broadcaster? I can’t be doing with these unannounced changes.

Note to Bernice (the rest of you can skip this paragraph): Are you listening? I can’t be doing with unannounced changes.

Then, the following day, I bent down to retrieve my ground coffee from the freezer. (Yes, I pre-grind my beans once a week, and keep the ground coffee in the freezer. I know at least one of my readers needs smelling salts at this point, but there it is.) I opened the middle drawer of the right-hand side and there the little Tupperware container wasn’t.

It was mere seconds after that, as I staggered, distraught, around the kitchen, that Bernice blithely informed me that she had needed the room in that drawer and had therefore moved the coffee to the drawer below, without telling me. Even as I typed that last sentence, I needed to pause to breathe deeply into a brown paper bag. (I wonder, incidentally, about people who don’t bake their own bread and store it in brown paper bags – more, to be honest for the frisson of nostalgia than for any reason connected with keeping the bread fresh. What do these people breathe into when they need to calm down?)

Then I discovered that America may not be named after Amerigo Vespucci, who set foot on what was to become known as American soil in 1498. However, it was John Cabot who first explored, and set foot on, coastal North America, a year earlier, under the commission of Henry VII, King of England. Cabot’s sponsor in Bristol was Richard ap Americ ( a good Celtic name). The continent may well be named after Richard rather than Vespucci.

Why should we favour Richard over Vespucci as the origin of the name America? One good reason is that one cannot imagine the Medicis, Vespucci’s patrons, being ecstatic when he returned from ‘discovering’ the New Word, and proposed naming it after himself, a mere navigator.

On the other hand, we have the evidence of a humanist, Martin Waldseemüller, who, in 1507, reprinted the “Quattuor Americi navigationes” (“Four Voyages of Amerigo”), preceded by a pamphlet of his own entitled “Cosmographiae introductio,” and he suggested that the newly discovered world be named “ab Americo Inventore…quasi Americi terram sive Americam” (“from Amerigo the discoverer…as if it were the land of Americus or America”).

On the third hand, Richard ap Americ was the man who paid for Cabot’s voyage. Arsenal still play football in London, but their new stadium is known as Emirates Stadium. ‘Follow the money’ is a reasonable working practice in these cases.

Anyway, if my further research confirms the Cabot theory, then this will be right up there with the revelation, several years ago, that bears don’t actually hibernate, a fact that still has me occasionally waking up in a cold, gaslighted, sweat.

To round off what has been a very tough week, while we were out in the car yesterday, we saw a teenager with mauve hair. A little disturbed, if not in the least surprised, by the warmth of Bernice’s admiration of this, I tentatively inquired whether she was considering something similar herself. She pointed out, very fairly, that when, a couple of decades ago, she had wanted to dye her hair aubergine, I had expressed my opposition. (2024 David is, of course, shrieking: “And just what do you think it has to do with you?” Unlike John Osborne, I tend to look back mostly in acute embarrassment.)

In response, the best I could think of by way of belated apology was: “You shouldn’t really have married me, should you?”. I’m not sure exactly what response I was expecting, or indeed hoping for, but whatever I was expecting was a bit wide of the mark. What she actually said was: “If I’d known you were always going to be a miserable old ****, I wouldn’t have.”

Blogger’s Note: I feel I must explain that **** represents a word much less shocking that what you are probably thinking, although more shocking than Bernice’s Mum, z”l would have thought.

Since then, 18 hours have passed, and we’re still together, so I expect our marriage will survive this particular hiccough. I know that the lesson to take from this is not to ask a question to which you are not prepared for the answer. I also know that I won’t take this lesson. I also know that Bernice didn’t really mean what she said. And I also know that she meant every word.

What is a mystery to me is how somebody who knows so much can feel so often as though he doesn’t know anything, and as soon as he does know something, somebody moves his cheese. Ah! Sweet mystery of life!

As far as I can ascertain, the list below contains the names of all those, Israelis (Jews and Bedouin), and foreigners, still held captive by Hamas, and possibly other terrorist organisations, in Gaza on Day 331, and believed to still be alive. Pray for them; think of them; read their names. Behind each name is a person and, by extension, a complete world.

If you have any capacity for prayer left after that, pray for the families of those slaughtered by Hamas, whose bodies are still held in Gaza.

If you have any capacity for prayer left after that, pray for the future of the State of Israel. It needs your prayers no less than the hostages and their families do.

I have no other useful words to add today.