From Dr M. R. Mehdi
Sir: Your correspondent Henry Adler (Letters, May 20) contends that there are restrictions, either official or unofficial, on the numbers of Jews admitted to Britain's public schools, commercial firms or political parties. This practice of segregation, if true, is scandalous and one would have expected Mr Adler to condemn it utterly as Jews have always done. But Mr Adler accepts it. Indeed he writes, "And I sympathise with it. Toleration is not impugned by the right of a nation to keep its character, whether that nation be Britain or Israel."
It is a dangerous game to throw a mantle of respectability on racial or religious prejudice, doubly so when it is done in the name of the Jews. In this emotional, explosive domain of human relations it is folly to expect that a line could be drawn, that a safe dose of prejudice could be licensed.
Mr Adler's plea for racial/ religious discrimination could easily be used by neo-Nazi parties, again raising their ugly heads in Germany and Italy, or by groups such as the National Front in this country to provide a respectable facade for their policies and action "After all, the Jews themselves agree that . . , are in favour of it . ." It could be used to condone Nazi Germany's measures to keep the racial character of their nation: the banning of marriage between Germans and Jews, dismissal of Jews from university chairs, schools, commerce and finance, the arts, etc. Mr Adler's theory would also seem to justify the apartheid policy of South Africa and Rhodesia and what Powellism has come to mean in Britain.
These fears of likely abuses of utterances by Jews on preserving racial characters are not mere speculation. A recent study by an American scholar, Benyamin Matovu, has shown that a large part of the material that fed the Nazi propaganda machine between 1923 and 1945 was taken from ideas similar to Mr Adler's (or worse) contained in the numerous and fat volumes of speeches, letters, diaries and other writings of the leading German Zionists. The major war criminals at Nuremberg and Eichmann in Jerusalem adduced, in justification of their crimes, similar statements by leaders of Zionism.
Your readers may be puzzled by theparadox that discrimination against Jews should be supported, defended, exonerated or whitewashed by pro-Israelis. (Mr Adler's letter is just one example, a tactful and diplomatic one, among hundreds.) This is a big question that cannot be gone into here. But a short answer was given in your Ian Gilmour: "Zionism has almost own columns many years ago by a vested interest in racial discrimination" (Spectator, June 24, 1930). Raking over and fanning the dying embers of prejudice may be good for keeping a trickle of immigration to Israel going but it is bad for the Jews, bad for the Arabs (and this is why I am writing this letter) and bad for the prospects of settlement of the Middle Eastern conflict with all its attendant dangers for the world.
M. R. Mehdi Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1
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