Miliband’s father was a distinguished Marxist intellectual at a time when being of the Left didn’t mean you had to deny Israel’s right to exist. And though Ed called himself a bridge between Corbyn and New Labour, the bridge was not a particularly sturdy one. Still and all, he seemed to be at the center of a powerful personal storm when he stood shaking at the dispatch box last week and helped put clear blue water between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer in the matter of Israel. If Burnham looked even more uncomfortable than Miliband, that was because he had more to be uncomfortable about. It was he who kicked off his premiership with the promise to turn the clock back on Starmer’s caution in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when the then prime minister refused to bow to the Politburo anti-Zionism of his backbenchers and held fire condemning Netanyahu.

Yes, bugger Netanyahu. But it was a moral imperative, initially at least, to go after Hamas who had made it public that they couldn’t wait to rape and massacre again. Not an imperative, though, to Burnham, who I don’t recall mentioning his misgivings at the time but who now must win back the traditional Labour haters of Israel, who deserted to Zack Polanski, or just deserted full stop. Well, politics is a filthy business, and it might have been that very thought that troubled Miliband, causing his eyes to dilate blackly and the dark antagonistic clouds of Marxist principle and Jewish agony to pass across his face, as though presaging thunder.

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Philip Guston's fight against evil

By Howard Jacobson

“I am a proud Jew,” he said. Part confession. Part warning. Was it also part apology for what was to come? I don’t mind admitting that I shuddered. I am a proud Jew, but….

So how bad was it? Well, the roof hasn’t fallen in on us. We haven’t been thrown out of the country as we were in 1290. And the target was shrewdly selected. The settlers. Who loves the settlers? There is some argument as to how much of what we see on the forever discredited BBC News tells the whole picture, how many of the settlers on the West Bank are running riot, how much of what they do is encouraged by the government. But that they are there at all is hard to take. A number of the early Zionists had wanted to see the back of religious zealotry. Had I been an early Zionist I’d have agreed with them.

I visited the West Bank 30 years ago or more, while writing and subsequently filming Roots Shmoots, a journey into Jewishness and, I suppose, myself. I didn’t find any of myself on the West Bank. And while I don’t, as a rule, make the mistake of being ashamed of what Jews who are not like me do anywhere, the words, action and deportment of the West Bank Jews I met turned my stomach. A seemingly intelligent American woman talked to me at the door to the settlement she managed. After 10 minutes of rational conversation, she threw wide her arms and said God gave her all I saw before me. I told her we had a problem in that case as He’d also given it to me. I further witnessed a fringed, orthodox Jewish teenager mocking an elderly Palestinian woman and that was enough. I saw plenty more that was ugly. But sometimes one small act can tell you more than a thousand big ones. Get the hell out of here, I thought. Not me, him.

So all right, maybe sanctioning them is a good idea. But then again, maybe it isn’t. Too many fanatics — for the deranged can be found on both sides of any argument — had been calling for sanctions. You are a proud Jew, remember, Mr Miliband. Do you want to number yourself among the ignorant and the bigoted who chant outside Marks and Spencer and hiss at people who buy the wrong figs? Do you want to give them even a sniff of hope that they have not chanted in vain?

You don’t need me to tell you, Mr Miliband, son of a Marxist intellectual, that revolutions and other movements of great change don’t grow out of despair. The spark is hope. Cast your mind back to that October 7 Massacre, which your boss won’t allow himself to be too voluble about in case it cedes another robotic voter to Zack, and recall the way it stirred the settler-colonialist professors on the campuses of Oxford and Harvard to rise up and call for more of the same, more blood, more hostages, more rape, more death. Hamas are pleased with you. “So far so good,” they say. “Good start.” Did you answer them, Mr Miliband? Did you ring Corbyn to get advice on how to talk to terrorists? Did you say thank you, comrades, while reminding them you’re a proud Jew and that’s all they’re getting. Or is there more in the pipeline? Is Burnham, too, hoping you won’t stop there? As I write, a Labour MP is recommending military action against Israel, which could be stretching our armed forces if we’re also having to go protect the Falklands again. But that’s what hope does. It makes men greedy and unrealistic. Even the Bishop of York is calling for a few more targeted sanctions while you’re on the job, at the same time as warning, as you would expect of a senior Churchman of York — where long ago there was another famous massacre of Jews — against the perils of antisemitism.

Antisemitism! Tut, tut, none of us want that. But will telling it we don’t want it be enough to put it back in its box. You dropped a few of the catchwords favored by the river-to-the-sea marchers in your troubled address. Demo-speak. “The occupation”, without explanation. “Ethnic cleansing” which, though there are some in Netanyahu’s ultra-Right coalition who admit they think along those lines, suggests a more systematic program of removal and destruction than we can be sure exists. You are on the foothills of the biggest of all the lies currently doing the rounds, Foreign Secretary and, if you’re not careful, you’ll soon be putting the definite article before “genocide”. THE genocide. I think I see the phrase beginning to form on Andy Burnham’s lips, though he pointedly resisted it when he was merely Mayor of Manchester and had only tram-drivers to answer to.

There is no point, Mr Miliband, offering to be confident that people with a Jew-grudge will listen sympathetically to the nice distinctions you are making between the West Bank and Israel and Israel and the Jews and the Jews and Israel, if you are not yourself fastidious in the language you employ. You rose and addressed a tinder box of a nation. Maybe you knew it. Maybe that was why your eyes turned black as though swimming in pitch. I am a proud Jew. But what might I just have put a match to?

Here, with nothing but good will, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you. Worldly wisdom is as important a virtue in a politician as a good heart. So is knowledge of the hearts of others. It’s a fine thing to be a proud Jew. But what we need even more than that right now is an intelligent Jew.

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel is Howl (Jonathan Cape)

One of the Soho Society’s first concerns is the level of noise to which residents are subjected and will be subjected to still further if all the outstanding planning permissions are granted. I have had, and lost, a few fights with the planning and licensing arms of Westminster council on my own account, having failed to convince them that another all-night rooftop bar 20-feet from my bedroom will have an adverse impact on my sleep. “What you fail to grasp,” I try to explain, “is that rooftop drinking is noisier than any other sort. The twin exhilarations of being close to the moon and keeping other people awake will turn the most sullen and taciturn street-level drinker into a howler and screamer whose every laugh lands on your pillow, still sticky with craft beer and spittle.” They see me for what I am. An aging killjoy who shouldn’t be living in Soho at all if he cares about what lands on his pillow.

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Why Jews fear Zack Polanski

By Howard Jacobson

That I shouldn’t be here is a slur I find more than a little hurtful. I was a Soho aficionado long before many of those who see it only as a business opportunity had even started their Diplomas in Management and Profiteering. I came here in my brothel-creepers — I’m not saying where I crept I them — as a hopeful lad, not knowing if I had the courage to avail myself of all Soho had to offer, but in a state of heated curiosity — a scholar of hedonism and sensuality with a notebook in my hand — eager to understand its allure, and that allure had nothing to do with noise. If not exactly silent, Soho in those days was broody with the quiet of anticipation. You didn’t shout what you wanted. Your being here was a secret. You frequented empty alleyways. When you looked up to the solitary red light burning in a window, you didn’t yell what was on your mind. You didn’t know what was on your mind. It would reveal itself to you in good time, in silent nods and hushed whispers above which you could hear your every heartbeat, even those your heart missed. Be still, be still, you told yourself.

We have lost the clandestine arts. We get our idea of sex from film and television where love-makers imitate either the Malayan jungle or Jeremy Clarkson’s farm, screeching, wailing, snuffling. Orgasm was once an occasional secret shared by two. A small confidential triumph when attained. It is now proclaimed democratically on Dolby sound from any of the rooftop bars the council has given another license to. How else do we know we’re having a good time unless we shout about it? The word we once found too gross to use and were never sure how to spell has grown commonplace. The whole world c***s and wants you to know about it.

Pre-sex, unless it’s post-sex, unless it IS sex, the drinkers of all genders take to the self-pedaling bars, drunk on their own hilarity. They aren’t having a good time. If they were having a good time they would be savoring it more stealthily, letting a small light shine from eyes that shyly meet, communicating soft secrets through the darkest velvet. What we have instead is blatantly obedient, ersatz merriment. Simon says get bladdered. Simon says scream. Simon says guffaw. Howard says shut-the-f-up.

The hen-nighters have taken to the discotheque tuk-tuks, singing Kylie favorites. I have a soft spot for Kylie. I was once made honorary Australian of the year at a do where she was voted real Australian of the year. After I told how I had loved being called a bastard by Australians in my years in Sydney she leaned across the dinner table, parted the artificial vegetation and said, “You bastard, Jacobson.” It’s hard to forget a moment like that. But I am not obliged to abandon what I believe for nostalgia’s sake. Please no more tuk-tuks, no matter what Australiana the piss-pot passengers are belting out.

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After midnight the cars engineered to sound like tank divisions take to Soho’s Streets. Exhausts go off like rifle shots. When a door is closed you think a skyscraper has been hit by a missile. Some of them are still blowing off their exhausts in the early morning. On days I haven’t slept at all, I get up and run after them. “I hope you crash, you infantilized moron!” I shout and look to other fraught pedestrians for support. I get none. Since I am on my own, I act alone, running down the middle of Wardour Street shaking my first. Two motorbikes, both defying the one-way system, converge on me. They too have been souped up in hell to sound like the annihilation of the world.

So, is this the original raucous Soho which the business owners demand the Soho Society leave alone? They make an obvious and fundamental error. They think a racket is synonymous with authenticity. They think a love of life can be measured in decibels. Let me tell them what I want, and it isn’t staid sobriety. I want fewer shops selling sneakers, less bubble tea, no more fake jollity imported for the weekend from heartless towns in the West Midlands. I have lived here for 25 years and watched the life drain out of what was once gloriously louche and seedy. I’d like Francis Bacon back. And Brendan Behan. But the artists and writers have disappeared, as have their studios and attics. Words have abandoned the streets to grunts. The brothel-creepers languish unwanted on eBay. That’s what’s really gone wrong — Soho is in danger of becoming like everywhere else.

Early morning.  

The battlements.

Deprived of sleep, the once Director of Public Prosecutions, now mere Prime Minister, steps out in dread and smells the air. A cold Elsinore-like wind blows in, ruffling the laundered lace collar of his hero shirt. He speaks, knowing no one is listening. ‘The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.’

He has my sympathies. Compare the calamitous disorder confronting Hamlet and Keir Starmer and we have to say Hamlet had it easy. A dead father, a wanton mother, a wicked uncle, a ghost at large, and Fortinbras mustering his forces on the Norwegian border – pfft! Mere domestic inconveniences compared with the things rank and gross in nature that Starmer faces every day: the carping of courtiers calling for a brave new world but lacking the bravery to bring one about; irresponsible rivals tickling the sore spots of a confused and rumor-ridden populace; a ruthless commentariat no less divided but equally athirst for blood; voices prophesying war. Fie on’t, ah fie!

Of the external factions aligned against Starmer’s Labour Party in the coming local elections, the most dangerous — to Starmer and the country — are the Greens. Ask how the Greens have transformed themselves in so short a time from a smug but innocuous band of self-marginalizing activists to a smug but menacing army of agitators bent on power, and the answer explains what there is to fear from them. They are not what they until recently purported to be. In the image of their new about-facing leader Zack Polanski, they present a deceptively benign countenance. A party ostensibly for children, with policies of redistribution and fairness, promising goodies (even the naughtiest ones) for everyone, they are only a little less ostensibly a party for Jew haters. Yes, the Greens were always hyper-Gaza-concerned, today they are Gaza besotted.

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Reform has its own obsessions, too, but they are as they describe themselves on the tin. Farage comes over as of-the-turf-turfy and of the saloon-bar-boozy, and makes no attempt to attract voters who don’t like that look. His appeal will fluctuate, as it always has, according to the perceived level of immigrant threat. And yes, that makes the success he might enjoy hard to calculate. But essentially Reformers are old men who stoke one another’s fears. Those fears are by no means all irrational but they are aging. The Greens however are young, which means that whatever there is to fear from them there is to fear for longer. Against that, of course, is the fickleness of youth. Cheered by tens of thousands at Glastonbury but a blink of time ago, Jeremy Corbyn is now pushing “a new kind of politics” — Your Party, it desperately names itself — in company with Zarah Sultana. How the mighty, etc. But Zack Polanski has an advantage over Corbyn, at least when it comes to baiting Jews — he is a Jew himself. And the appeal to the Jew-uncomfortable of an actual Jew who is no less Jew-uncomfortable than they are, is incalculable. Rarely will a Green party candidate forget to rebut all charges of antisemitism with the reassuring lie, “We cannot be antisemitic. Our leader is a Jewish man” — the phenomenon of a Jew-hating Jew being new to voters who are wet behind the ears.

I don’t mind admitting to my own problem with Zack Polanski, over and above my suspicions about people who change their names and seek to make capital out of doing so. Over the centuries, Jews have changed their names from Mordechai to St John in order to join a golf club. That David Paulden should have changed his name to Zack Polanski is harder to understand, unless there was a Polish golf club in north Manchester that wouldn’t otherwise have considered him for membership. Not that the name Paulden immediately conjures up a Jew. The Pauldens — his paternal grandparents — were good friends of my mother and father. We lived next-door to them in Prestwich. I babysat their children, one of whom would have been the not-yet Zack’s father. My own father briefly drove a van for Benny Paulden who owned a small warehouse. My mother ran a fancy goods shop with Ethel Paulden in a rundown precinct in south Manchester. I had a schoolboy crush on her. The four lie close together for all time in a grim Jewish cemetery in Failsworth. I remember them with immense fondness. Modest, generous business people with a sense of humor, relaxedly Jewish. The Pauldens. A nice name, I think, every time I pause before their graves, on the way to visit my parents’.

So why did David Paulden change it? I am not privy to the particular psychology so must accept his explanation that it was a gesture of solidarity with the Jews of the old country. He seems to have taken a while working out who he was. Hence his years as a hypnotist offering to increase the size of a woman’s breasts. Wanting to be loved is as good an explanation as any. And maybe wanting to be taken for a person of high principle. Zack! Well, why not? Z for Zionist, perhaps? Doubt it. Let’s guess it was something more swashbuckling and piratical than that. “A proud Jew”, he has called himself. I wince at the description. What’s wrong with just “Jew”? It’s my experience that people who announce their “proud” adherence to a principle or a faith are usually defectors in waiting. And so it has turned out with this “proud Jew” who shuffles off any residual or complex Zionist or Israel loyalties, any sorrow, any sadness, any hesitancy when it comes to the genocide libel, and only the other day mused aloud that Jews were a little too quick to call out antisemitism while the danger they claim to be facing might be no more than “the perception of unsafety” — this while calling out Islamophobia.

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His callous “perception of unsafety” argument returned to bite him after the stabbings in Golders Green earlier this week. There is no room for antisemitism he remembered to say in the heat of the horror, careful not to lose a vote, but must have worried how those who rejoice in the killing of Jews would respond to such a remark, hence, as I understand it, another volte face, this time attacking the police for their brutal handling of the suspect. Whoever would face in two directions at once, might learn from Polanski né Paulden — how to be a Jew and not a Jew, how to express sympathy and deny it, how to say what you think, unsay it and then say it again, and how to keep everyone naïve enough to believe a single spurious word you say, on side for long enough to vote for you.

It is this transparent falsity cynically manipulating fears and libels and trading shamelessly on the ethnic hostilities of numbers of his supporters, that should concern everyone old enough to cast an intelligent vote. Even those whose identity is flattered by Polanski’s schmoozing should think twice before putting a cross beside his party’s name. Another day, another party, and you will be on the receiving end of equivalent defamations. We don’t need one group of citizens to feel good for a passing minute at the discomfiture of another. 

The time is out of joint. Yes, it’s hard to know how to put it right. But there is one way not to make things worse. We should not throw in our lot with false promisers and flatterers. We worry about the algorithms that enable social media to sell us the lies we already believe. Extreme political parties are learning to do the same. Whoever promises to give you what research tells them you want is not your friend.

That’s not quite the whole of it. After the Munich air crash, which I’d learned about in the school showers after gym, I got teary and possessive whenever United won anything. I’m not sure that either of these is a good reason for supporting a team, but then what is?

The game itself, whoever was playing, did not engage me once genius dribblers with low centers of gravity, like George Best, went out of fashion and commentators talked of “man-to-man marking”. Football as chess wasn’t as good, in my view, as chess as chess. The board grew congested. Players fouled one another professionally and would rather pass the ball than score. They made pretty patterns but didn’t stir the heart.

The game grew too rich for risk, and too international — every team a band of sponsored mercenaries from somewhere else. In what sense, as the money rolled in, was Manchester United Mancunian? And if sport in general lost its local roots, so too did it become more and more disconnected in ambition and technology from its origins in communal play. Tennis has become marvellously refined, but I no longer go to bed crying after a match as I did when Drobný defeated Rosewall in 1954 because I wanted both of them to win. Do I imagine that they each had only one racket? Djokovic, who breaks his back carrying a bag of hundreds, is an extraordinary player, but for years he has looked overstrung, as though every tendon in his body is about to snap. Yes, that makes him worth the cost of admittance, but the joy of winning seems, for him, to have long outstripped the joy of playing.

Call me a sentimentalist, but — speaking as a spectator — I miss the sport of sport. Players and athletes can become too good. It’s said of some writers that they tune language so finely that it becomes a barrier to communion. And so it is with sport, the commonality of recreation mortgaged to the madness of making history and money. Being the best. Being the best ever. Ought there not to be some faith kept with our first impulse to put up a net across the street and hit balls for the fun of it?

No, I am not going to say I enjoy women’s football because its players are less professional than the men. I love it because it has so far retained the original exuberance of play. This is not to damn with faint praise. Quite the opposite. What the women’s game shows is that exhilaration and skill can co-exist. Gusto and flair are no more second-rate qualities than the cynical lethargy of the men’s game is evidence of its superiority. I’m not going to call it innocence, because in a world of over-sophistication that sounds like condescension; but by keeping us in touch with why we played any game when we were young, the joy we experienced in discovering our skills (supposing we had any), women footballers narrow the distance between performer and spectator — even as they do things that at last we never could. This is what makes the Lionesses, whose flair and gusto would seem to be unmatched in the women’s game, so thrilling to watch.

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In their victories over Sweden and Italy they defied likelihood and, at times, justice, by an extraordinary combination of adroitness and ineptitude, messing up wave after wave of attacking verve with sloppiness and inaccuracy — only to land the coup de grâce at last with a deadly sharpness that any footballer would envy.

I don’t doubt there was method in those relentlessly attacking waves. More method still would probably get them off to better starts. But if coming from behind is what they do best, we should salute it. Never giving up is a species of artistry too. And whatever else, it keeps us on the edge of our seats.

“Finding a way to win” is how the Lionesses describe what they do. And to say they do that with resilience and energy is to underrate their invention. Not impossibly, that resilience and invention will fail them in the final. Whichever team they play will be better organized than they are. The Lionesses, I heard a commentator say, are not so good at “keeping their shape”. The phrase sent a cold chill through me. Shape. Woman-to-woman marking. An intimation of the future in which women’s football will, like the men’s game, have its spontaneity and vitality drilled out of it

So we must delight in the Lionesses while they are still wild.

The garden parties I don’t want to attend are those where vast crowds sway and sing-along in thrall to the same music, swept up in the frenzy of that like-minded togetherness Freud called “oceanic”. I can’t go to a football match for the same reason. A goal is scored or a penalty is missed and one half of the crowd rises as though impelled by a force beyond its control and becomes a single, unindividuated mass. Cricket doesn’t lose its mirth in this way. “Barmy Army,” cry the more vociferous of English fans, thereby making fun of fandom even while expressing it. Oh, for a Barmy Army at Glastonbury. But that would shatter the trance. The anthems that would agglomerate diverse thousands into a single mass can no more abide an ambiguity than their audiences can get a joke.

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It’s the agglomeration that should worry us more than whether or not the BBC should have pulled the plug or the police should take action. How do you take action against however many thousands were complicit — not by their silence but by their enthusiastic collaboration in Bob Vylan’s call for death to Israeli soldiers? And it’s those complicit thousands we should worry about. Is there any expression of hate they wouldn’t accede to once the festival madness is upon them?

In their submission to the authority of the performer on the stage, in their arm waving and obedient chanting, are they not reminiscent of the crowds that filled marching squares and beer halls not that many years ago? I say no more than “reminiscent”. I don’t claim that Glastonbury is Munich. And I don’t even say that what crowds will sing about euphorically one day, they will put into murderous effect the next. But music and crowds are a lethal mix, carrying us away, taking us out of our shivering individual selves into the warm arms of comrades who feel and believe as we do. Sacha Baron Cohen’s endearingly racist Borat famously persuaded a group of drinkers in an Arizona bar to join him in singing “Throw the Jews down the well”. For all the bemused discomfort some of the drinkers clearly felt, they were unable to resist Borat’s appeal. Who wants to be a party pooper? History teaches that the impulse toward individuation was a long time coming; it further teaches that it takes no time at all for that impulse to go into reverse.

Whether or not Borat’s singalong resulted in any immediate harm to Jews in Arizona, I have no idea. But then that was 20 years ago. Words like Israel, Zionist, Jew were not quite so dirty then. I have already heard it argued that no harm will come to any Israeli soldier on account of Bob Vylan’s chant. They operate too far from Glastonbury Tor. But this fails to acknowledge how lies are spread and how hate is augmented. It is said that a music festival should give voice to controversy, but in the sense of expressing new thoughts or asking us to see familiar things differently, there was nothing remotely controversial about Bob Vylan’s words. You can hear them every weekend in marches through London and every day on university campuses across the Western world. Hence, you might say, the uncomplaining assent they were given by the Glastonbury crowd. It knew the words. This version of uneducated, unthinking, received unwisdom, has been normalized to the point of being commonplace. Who doesn’t wish ill on Israel now? And so it starts. Not to join in is to put a damper on the day.

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An entertainingly lightweight weekend presenter on LBC to whom I sometime listen before bed, though not on the subject of the Middle East if I can help it, offered the view that the furore over Bob Vylan and Kneecap was a sort of snobbish denial to the populace of the artistic license unquestioningly granted to literature or the stage. Such remarks as “Death, death to the IDF” he suggested, would pass unnoticed in a West End play. Which, I wonder. Somewhere along the way, our presenter has confused the freedom to speak hate with the freedom to make art. I cannot think of a play where it would be acceptable, legally or aesthetically, for a character to walk to the front of the stage mid-action and ask the audience to join him in calling for “Death, death” to anyone.

In fact, there is a marvelous play on in London at present — Giant, in which the Jew-obsessed children’s writer Roald Dahl is given enough rope to hang himself 10 times over and manages it even more than that without trying. He delivers far more bitter diatribes against Israel than Bob Vylan and Kneecap manage because he has more words. What makes the play art as opposed to propaganda is its dramatic form, questioning, testing, playing this off against that, weighing all that’s said in the light of the speakers’ psychic compulsion to say it. When Dahl’s self-destruction reaches its apotheosis in a riff of violent Jew mania that makes the Glastonbury lot sound like kindergarten name-callers, the audience audibly gasps. Gasps.

I take great comfort from that gasp. Somewhere, what is shocking still shocks. Somewhere, the individual heart still refuses the blandishments of the mob. Unfortunately, terrifyingly, that somewhere isn’t Glastonbury.

Of the tortuous and tragic conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Lineker has chosen to see neither the tortuousness nor the tragedy. “People say it’s a complex issue,” he has declared, “but I don’t think it is.”

What then does Lineker see that others don’t? Or is it a question of what Lineker doesn’t see that others do? Either way, he has consistently promulgated an unwaveringly unsubtle pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist position, for which he has doughtily refused to apologize. Why should he? Wherein has he sinned? It is not as though he is an antisemite. Has not truth alone — truth at its most simple and unvarnished — been his guide?

But to go to war armed only with simplicity is to go to war naked. Not everyone will notice. Those whose nakedness you retweet certainly won’t. And in your own eyes, there is no knowing what richly-attired heroism you see. But in the eyes of those who believe, with the poet Donne, that on a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her about must and about must go — the once prolific goalscorer looks ill-equipped to be a traveler among the rocky uplands of veracity.

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“A rat, a rat!” Not a real rat, but an emoji. There, unashamedly wagging its tail for all to see, in the body of another of Lineker’s retweeted pro-Palestinian posts. “An antisemitic trope so brazen,” in the words of The Sunday Times commentator Matthew Syed, “that I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining why this is so.”

Brazen it might be, but Lineker misses it. Doesn’t see it. Doesn’t get it. Knows nothing of the long history of the rat in the iconography of Jew-loathing, a motif of particular appeal to the Nazis who could depict their ambition to wipe out the Jews as hygienic, since rats, as we all know, spread disease.

Which matters in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict why? Because whoever would talk of Zionism should know a little of what it was invented to save Jews from.

It isn’t difficult to see why the post in question initially excited Lineker’s interest. “Zionism explained in two minutes,” it promised. A bit long, given Lineker’s refusal to see complexity, but the explanation when it comes takes only two seconds. “They take the land claim that it’s theirs.”

Gross enough as history without the rat emoji, with it there can hardly be any doubt, unless you’re Lineker, about the status of this two-second “explanation”. The rat, so potent a symbol for the Nazis, has a new home in Arab propaganda. The Jew is once again the object of exterminationist ambition.

Whatever causes Lineker to realize at last what he’s put his name to — he a man, remember, with no malice against the Jews — he deletes the post and apologizes. Bish, bash, bosh. No harm done. He didn’t know, that was all. Maybe all he saw was a cute mouse, wagging its tail. Credit where credit’s due. He acted. And said sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But sorry for what exactly?

For being found out? For not recognizing one of the Nazis’ most infamous images? For briefly seconding the words of a Palestinian with whom the idea of the Jew as vermin sits easily.

None of us are as educated as we should be. And Lineker’s ignorance matters only because he charges into the fray of a bitter conflict without knowing, or wanting to know, anything of it apart from what can be gleaned from a two-second video produced by a party to one side whose only aim is to debase the other.

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Lineker shouldn’t have needed the rat to tell him that the thing he “shared” was odious. But you never know what form enlightenment is going to take. So listen to the rat, Gary. This is what it was trying to tell you. Dislike Zionism in its present iteration all you like, but to comment on what or why it is when you have scant knowledge of the murderous hatred that made it necessary — the desperation of exile and longing for home that finally brought it about — is like passing judgment on Black Lives Matter unaware there was a slave trade. You feel for the agony of the Palestinians, you say. Your compassion is admirable. Though compassion with understanding would be more admirable still. To be silent is to be complicit, you say. That is not a free pass to froth and fulminate all you like. To be ignorant is to be complicit too.

And now that you have admitted and apologized for what you were unaware of on this occasion, what about an apology for all those earlier know-nothing interventions you have made? Close your eyes and imagine a rat waving its tail at the bottom of every page you’ve posted. That’s a thousand sorries you owe us, Gary.

Oh, and put some clothes on.

***

A version of this piece first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

Dear Mother and Father,

Shame you can’t congratulate me. I am, I know, a disappointment to you. You hoped I would follow in your footsteps and become a literary critic or expositor of abstruse texts. Instead, I stand before you as winner of the 2025 Paddy Power World Darts Championship, for which the prize-money far exceeds all you’ve earned from the 22 books you’ve written together over the course of 40 years. I don’t gloat. I seek only your approval and your love. Millions of adoring fans around the world applaud my skills and call my name — Frederick “Fatboy” De Selincourt — but you hang your heads in shame every time I enter the arena to Morrisey’s You’re the One for Me, Fatty. I have dedicated every nine dart finish I’ve ever thrown to you, yet still you disown me.

Where did it all go wrong, you ask. Well, the answer to that is straightforward. It went wrong when you, daddy, saw me plucking feathers from my cot pillow and throwing them at mummy. “I’ll buy the boy a set of plastic darts,” you said in an unlikely fit of populism. I remain surprised that you even knew where to buy darts from. Didn’t you once say you only ever shopped at Foyles. “And don’t forget a dartboard,” mummy said, out of concern for the furniture.

Do I need to remind you that I threw my first maximum from the pram and regularly hit nine dart finishes before I could walk. “One hundred and eighty!” were the first words I ever spoke. You could have stopped me then but you were too busy touring Third World universities for the British Council. Faute de mieux, I became a darts player on the altar of your careers. When I told you I was to be apprenticed to Jocky Wilson you raised no objection, thinking horse riding — while not exactly the career you’d wanted for me — at least opened doors to a better class of person than I was ever likely encounter in the Ally Pally.

For 18 months I sharpened Jocky’s arrows and fluffed his feathers and for a further 18 sat at the oche to watch where he placed his feet as he threw. I know what you’re thinking, but had those been Nureyev’s feet you’d have applauded the conscientiousness of my studies. But what’s the difference?  Is not excellence excellence? When people refuse to call darts a sport or even an art because — they say — it amounts to no more than chucking a primitive missile at a narrow strip of sisal fibre, I remind them of Jane Austen’s description of writing as painting with a fine brush on two inches of ivory. How often did you read me that passage when I was growing up! How well I remember you arguing with each other about its applicability to Jane Austen’s prose at its best. You scoffed at me when I said I believed Jane Austen played darts with her sister Cassandra in the garden of the Austen house at Chawton. But could she have described those two inches of ivory had she not been familiar with that narrow band of dartboard in which I earn my living? How many maximums did Jane Austen throw? Which was her double of choice? Those are discussions for another time.

Let’s not argue about nomenclature — sport or art or neither, darts enable the human spirit to achieve greatness not by spraying grand gestures around but by fixing on a fine detail of existence and concentrating all its fire power there. Jane Austen or Tolstoy? Your preference was always for Jane Austen. As is mine. You can keep your Olympics and your Test Matches and your Cup Finals. Give me darts at the Alexandra Palace any time. Precisely because of their smallness, those tiny treble bands on a dartboard are more challenging to creativity than a wicket, a goalmouth or a finishing line. Or the Battle of Borodino, come to that.

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You have commented over the years on my adiposity. How can a pair of fleshless neurasthenics such as you, who chew their fingers to the bone for art’s sake, have produced someone my size? Eat less, you have pleaded. Exercise more, you say, forgetting how many miles I walk every day from the oche to the dartboard and back. My dear mother and father, do not think I am fat because I am indolent or because I cannot say no to cakes and ale. I am fat because I love darts.

You don’t need me to tell you that Julius Caesar wanted men about him that were fat. “Sleek-headed men” he feared because they thought too much. Sleek-headed men, for that very reason, make poor darts players. There comes a moment in the life of every darts player when he loses his instinctive rhythm, cannot remember how he throws, how tightly he holds his darts, how much flight he gives them.  Many a promising career has ended that way.  Had listened to you, I would not be Champion of the World today. Let a darts player lose his insouciance and he’s finished. And whoever saw an insouciant thin man?

Our bulk belies our subtlety. More than that: our bulk is integral to our subtlety. Some law of nature decrees that for one dart to follow another into those two inches of darting ivory which determine the difference between success and failure, between genius and mediocrity, they must be thrown by fat men. You cannot think darts into a treble or a bullseye. You dare not pause long enough to give reflection a sniff. You must throw with a sort of cultivated disdain that is not given to the thin.

If only, my dear parents, you had snatched enough time from your cerebral labours to watch a game of darts. Actually watched one. You would, had you done so, I am sure, have marvelled at the contrast between the overflowing physical abundance of the man throwing and the refined and dainty precision with which he throws. It is a contrast at once aesthetically satisfying and philosophically baffling. How can it be? See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. Would you not imagine the thrower of such a missile to be a person of near supernatural exactitude? And now look who he is!; ‘Tis I, your clumsy and in all other regards bumbling and maladroit son.

The crowd who cheer me don’t bother their heads with any of that. They pour beer down their throats and sing Stand up if You Love the Darts. But you, mother and father, aficionados of art in all mysterious manifestations, are just the people to understand dart’s artistry and yet, out of small-minded snobbery, you look away. And so you miss the marvel and the rare beauty of it. A cheetah can run, a tiger burns bright in the forests of the night, but only your fat, clumsy son can, without raising a sweat, hit a treble-20 from eight feet away whenever he wants to.

Shame you aren’t here to see me lift the trophy.

Your loving son and Champion of the World,

“The Fatboy”

Adapted from Howard Jacobson’s substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

Laughing for the camera. An unintentionally pointed preposition. I think I meant only to say at, but what if it was performative, either in response to a cameraman urging the women to vandalise a photograph of an unknown and possibly already slaughtered Jew, or an act of bravado on the women’s own parts? You never know for sure what you are looking at on film or how it came to be there. But the brief scene was unforgettably hateful in its callous insolence, however one interprets it. Scrawling with a marker — a marker bought for the occasion? — over the face of someone you don’t know. Someone in desperate trouble. A small act of terror in itself, I thought. And then, in tearing it off the wall, as though to say “may you never be found’, a smiling act of collusion in the abduction, the disappearance and, perhaps ultimately, the murder. A message to the family who invested hope in that poster: may you be eternally disappointed!

I have wondered — sitting this past year in the cowardly sanctuary of my London apartment, listening to the warlike whirr of the helicopters and the scarcely less warlike yells of the weekly peace protest — whether the women have ever seen that footage of themselves. And, whether they have or they haven’t, if they’ve regretted it. They did what they did very soon after the massacre, while the smell of blood and rumour lingered still in the air, when every charge was met by denial, and it was all too easy to read events according to the rigidities of one’s politics. Even the evidence of our eyes became handmaidens to falsehood. Rape? What rape? Rape didn’t suit the prepossessions of the hour. But is it not possible, now that time has passed and certainties have been shaken, that the women recall what they did with shame and maybe even reproach each other with it? “It was your idea.” “No it was yours.”

What if — while we are wondering — they wondered, when they saw pictures of released hostages, whether one of them was their hostage? Would that have made them feel better? Or what if, when they saw pictures of murdered hostages, they wondered if one of those was theirs? Would that have pierced their carapace of mirth? Or was the original defacement an expression of inexpugnable loathing?

Which brings us back to what is for me the greatest mystery of all: how the slaughter and, in some cases, dismemberment of innocent Israelis, men, women and children can have delighted educated people around the world to the point where there was no further violence against them — not even genocide “in context” if we read Harvard’s President correctly — that they couldn’t countenance with joy?

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Yes, it was hysteria and many of the more publicly hysterical have since rowed back a little on their frenzy. But why, at any stage of the massacre, was there irrationality on this scale? We were back in the Middle Ages, some said, when the Jew was in league with the devil and hatred of him was unquestioned and contagious. But wasn’t that hatred begat from ignorance? Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?

To the two grinning women I ask this question: what did you hate so much about that hostage? That he or she was a Jew? That he or she was a Zionist? I am going to assume you will say that towards Jews, as Jews, you entertain no animosity. You are not racists. What is it about Zionists, then, that you will tear at their faces and call for their obliteration? Their colonialist endeavours? You look educated; you will know, in that case, of Zionism’s origins in 19th-century thought (the novelist George Eliot was an early advocate), that it was a movement to help a beleaguered refugee people achieve self-determination not unlike that sought by Palestinians today and supported by you, and who, to begin with, had no colonial or exploitative ambitions. Yes, there were exceptions. Pioneers might not be colonists but that doesn’t make them saints. Nor are refugees above fighting dirty to grab a better life. But a minority of overweening, hard-hearted Jews does not a Zionist Empire make, any more than Hamas makes a Palestinian People.

I harbour no ill will towards Palestinians, so when I say that they made life hard for the first Zionists, I am not blaming them. I understand why they feared for the future of their land when largely European Jews, however weakened and peaceable, began their return to a country they — not without the justification of history — considered theirs too. In answer to Palestinian fears and resistance grew Zionist fears and resistance. Why apportion blame? We wouldn’t have the word “intractable” if we didn’t need it to describe conflicts with no simple solutions. And this is one of them.

There are bad Zionists. There are bad Palestinians. I am a Jew and on the side of Zionism, which doesn’t make me an enemy of people who aren’t. I understand Zionism’s original necessity. Any student of history should. But I do not seek the obliteration of Palestinians because they opposed Zionism almost from the start, waged continuous war on it, and butchered every Zionist they could lay their hands on one year ago.

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All right, October 7 was Hamas’s doing. You didn’t look like Hamas to me. And you might or might not have been Palestinian. But you too revelled in the destruction of a Zionist who was unknown to you and of whose political beliefs you were ignorant. He might, for all you knew, have been a passionate advocate of peace. There are many such Israelis. But every Israeli was a Zionist to you and every Zionist a devil. Explain that to me. What does it feel like to hate so irrationally, to so relinquish your independence of judgement that you will hate on someone else’s say so and make an enemy of a poster?

See if you can find that clip. It might have originated as a selfie, so you could just have it on your phone still, along with your holiday snaps. Or you could have confused it, after the event, for a fashion shot. Voguish outfits, voguish opinions. If you do find it, take a long look. I can’t recall whether the incident took place in the course of a peace march, but if it did, ask yourself how it might have contributed to the peace, how it might have saved a single life, not of a Zionist (since you hate Zionists and so don’t care), but a Palestinian.

You may choose to accuse me of Jewsplaining. Fine. Better that than having my face scratched off. Understand, however, that it is not only as a Jew but as everything else I am that I ask you to acknowledge the barbarism of what you did. To hate without knowing who you hate, to de-person a stranger, is to let ignorance be your tutor. And once ignorance rules, darkness descends on everybody.

Erotic, I thought. The hottest words a woman could ever speak to a man. “We did it, Joe.”

It roused and upset me all at once. Here was a moment I would never experience. No woman would ever tell me I was going to be the next President of the United States.

I can’t speak for Donald Trump, but I guess he must have been pretty upset too. Not only because Biden winning meant that he had lost, but because no one was ever going to say “We did it, Donald.”

“We”?

Is there such a word as “we” in the small, cruel Trump lexicon? With whom would Trump ever share a victory? There, in one brief clip, as Kamala Harris’s joy exploded into the phone, was the tragi-comedy of Donald Trump’s whole existence: the thing his crazed-egoism would exclude him from forever — the sound of warm companionable laughter. The music of sharing.

At the time I half-wished the world would end there and then. Not only so that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden would be spared the inevitable anti-climax of what “doing it” entailed, but so that we too could go to sleep with the sweet smell of success in our nostrils. “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,” says Othello when he is reunited with Desdemona. Some moments are so incontestably happy — seeing a beloved’s face after a long absence; writing the last words of Middlemarch or Little Dorrit; beating Donald Trump — they should not be spoiled by any aftermath. See Naples and die.

To ask for Biden to step down is to remember him as he was and conserve his past victories against the havoc wreaked by time. You would think that very thought must have crossed his own mind more than once. Only losers want a re-match. Tell him that, Jill. Tell him to sit in his chair, put his old feet in a bucket of Radox therapy soak, smoke a cigar, sip an Irish whisky and drop off, savouring the glory that was. Tell him not to give Trump even a sniff of getting the last laugh. Unless, of course, there is some jealousy of Kamala Harris in play and this time Jill wants to be the one who says “We did it, Joe.”

But there is another way of looking at this. The reasons Biden should not go on are, if we choose to take the world ironically, the very reasons he should stick it out. Even slurring his words at 81 he makes more sense than Trump ever did at 40. Despite his lapses and confusions, with Biden you feel his words had meaning once upon a time. They reach back to a world of intelligibility he once moved in. They are what’s left after a catastrophe. They are the noble ruins of an edifice that once stood proudly. With Trump, on the other hand, nothing is forgotten because nothing was ever there. He is not the trace or ruin of anything grander. He is the ruin of a ruin.

So how about staying with Biden for the sake of keeping faith with what he no longer is? I hold this to be a principle that should guide us with the old generally. Yes, their slowness of gait is exasperating if you happen to be behind them on a crowded street; and yes, waiting for them to form a coherent answer to a question you haven’t asked can make you feel your own life blood is ebbing away. I know. I am one of the slow myself. But if the alternative is the young pushing you aside as they run marathons in the park, whizzing past on e-bikes which they discard when they’ve run out of places to speed through, like children throwing toys out of the window and, when it comes to serious matters, jumping to conclusions which are invariably erroneous, then give me the old any time.

Where is the virtue of youth if it’s wasted on acceleration and where is the virtue of acceleration if there’s nowhere we want to go tomorrow let alone today? When the young know nothing, we have a duty to revere the old who at least took the time to know something once.

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But it’s not only for lacking youth and urgency that the 81-year-old Biden matters. We value him, no less, for the absence in him of a single oratorical gift. In a world of shysters and liars, Biden can proudly boast he is neither mountebank nor rabblerouser. Ask yourself what heart Biden ever quickened into rash action. That’s right — you can’t recall one. Neither can he.

Consider the times we live in. On marches and in protests all over the world the gullible gather, mouths open, eager to be told what extremist position to take up next. Did any good ever come of a political rally? The public speaker who can’t be heard, who freezes and forgets his lines, is a Godsend in an inflammable world. “So I ask you, comrades, to join me in condemning . . . something or other, I can’t remember what. Good night, go home, love one another, and don’t forget to feed the cat — or do I mean the dog.”

Armageddon is only round the corner whatever we do. So let’s shut the jabbering world up and send time into reverse. Let’s pretend that the words “We did it, Joe” haven’t been spoken yet. “We’ll do it, Joe. One fine day we’ll do it.” This way, at least, we’ll have something to look forward to.

***

This essay first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack.

What are we seeing? Are the terrible scenes from Gaza the projections on a bloody screen of one brutal and clumsy man’s baffled obstinacy — the last days of a demented Roman Emperor — or do they show, as anti-Zionists would have it, indeed as anti-Zionists have had it ever since the Jewish longing to return to Zion gave itself a name and the anti-Zionists called it colonialism, that something is rotten in the soul of Israel?

It’s hard right now, if you are a Jew who has always believed the founding of Israel to have been necessary and in many ways miraculous, to hold your nerve. Jews are a contradictory people, at once certain of themselves and faint-hearted. “The Jewish ability to internalise any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves”, said the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in an interview with Philip Roth, “is one of the marvels of human nature”. We can outface so much criticism and then no more. Will the gathering storm of rage be too much for us this time? Or will we feel obliged to go on salvaging the truth from the noise and cacophony of war, even as those who don’t want to hear us — the libellous, the malevolent, the misinformed and now the usually friendly who are running out of patience — grow in number and in volume?

Some truths aren’t hard to save from the moral fog that fell on southern Israel six months ago, a six months that have been like no other, collapsing a half year into a seeming sleepless day and night, not simply because shock unravels time, but because along with the horror of the massacre itself came the horror of its delighted reception. King Duncan’s horses were said to have eaten one another the night Macbeth had their master murdered. It was nature’s way of telling us that something unfathomably horrible had happened. The cries of “Kill Jews!” that were heard around the world in the aftermath of the murder of more than 1,000 Jews on October 7 exceeded in unfathomable horror the cannibalism of Duncan’s horses. Did we know that humans could openly rejoice in the rape and murder of people they did not know? Isn’t dancing in the blood of others itself a species of cannibalism?

To borrow from Macbeth again, tears were meant to drown the wind. But all we heard was cheering. The Hamas massacre inverted the norms of pity.

And here is another of the truths we save from that most terrible event. That we do our humanity a great wrong when we let theories of power rule our politics and politics rule our hearts. Nothing that Zionism had done or ever could do would justify this glorying in the torture of individual Israelis. That so many of those doing the glorying were, on the face of it, highly educated put paid to our sentimental faith in education as our final and most reliable bulwark against the hysteria of race-hatred. Voice for voice, the educated out-sang the ignorant in bigotry and bloodlust. As did the highly principled out-sing the more ideologically easy-going when it came to such causes as the inviolability of a woman’s body.

Hadn’t the teaching of the past half-century warned against even tentative intrusion into a woman’s space? Yet here, confronted by the grossest intrusion of them all, rape — brutal rape — the same preachers against the most micro of microaggressions refused to voice even the faintest disapprobation. Some, high up in the world’s great universities, wanted to “contextualise” what had happened. Others, wary of falling into that absurdity, asked for more proof, though had any woman other than an Israeli Jew so much as cried foul, they would have been believed because the prevailing ideology holds that to doubt a rape is to violate a woman a second time.

Let’s not beat about the bush — Israeli-Jew hate trumped all other academic considerations. When all was said and done, the great absolutes of the gender-playbook turned out to be contingent and crawled under the desks of the committed like dormice.

In the long sleepless day and night following the massacre, in which Jews of different nationalities and political persuasions, orthodox and unorthodox, tried to make sense of what had happened, the terrible realisation, that “Never Again” meant nothing, dawned. There would never be a “Never Again”. Those we imagined would be our allies — the informed, the progressive, the liberal — were not progressive when it came to us.

Ironically, it was Israel — our bolthole, the country that gave us the stability of self-worth, our old, all-embracing home — that now felt insecure. With uncanny prescience, Hamas understood that to make Jews feel unsafe in Israel was to weaken them in their own and in others’ eyes. More than ever now, it seemed to me, was it imperative to reaffirm the founding necessity of Zionism. The more empowered the lettered illiterate felt to trash Zionism, the more important was it to wrest the story back from them. A great lie had been allowed to prevail for too long. The lie that Israel had no legitimate rights or ties to the Holy Land. The lie that Zionists had stolen it from defenceless Palestinians. The lie that Zionists had turned up not as refugees from the pogroms of eastern Europe but as colonist-settlers hell-bent on getting every Palestinian out.

Is that to say I understand nothing of Palestinian forebodings in those early years as Jews continued to arrive? No. And while I think history bears out good and even utopian intentions on the part of the first Zionists, pioneers who wanted only peace and safety, without doubt there were also those who dealt less than even-handedly with their neighbours. Whether in sufficient quantity to justify Palestinian fears that a takeover was imminent, and that their Holy Places were soon to be over-run, history cannot decide. But, with whatever justification, Palestinians could not let the new arrivals live in peace. There were raids and counter-raids, running battles and massacres. The 1929 massacre by Palestinians of pre-Zionist, scholarly Jews, long resident in Hebron, was not a blueprint for the massacre of nearly 100 years later, but it was, by all official accounts, brutal.

I don’t want to be sentimental about Israel, but it’s enjoyed no peace from the beginning. It is a country that has lived under arms since before its declaration of independence. And on the very day independence was granted it was attacked once more. No, no, and no again. No to Jews. Not here. Not ever. No, no, no.

For Israel to have thrived in the face of a hostility with no end is remarkable. But there can be no denying that the fighting, the conscription of almost all its citizens, the having to live cheek by jowl with a people who cannot and will not accept its presence anywhere “between the river and the sea” has been a toughening, not to say desensitising, experience.

In defence of last year’s massacre, it was argued that it could not be understood independently of the circumstances that led to it. Hamas’s attack, its apologists insisted, was the child of the Israeli occupation. I have always resisted the word “occupation” because it suggests a pre-planned policy, rather than — as I see it — the consequence of all the wars between the two people, most of them instigated by the Palestinians, after which Israel found itself with territory it needed to demilitarise for its own safety. But alright — an occupation it became. After which, what were Palestinians expected to do?

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The elusive two-state solution was presented to them several times. Not equitable enough, they said, even when it was the United Nations that had done the divvying up. “Don’t accept,” the cosmopolitan Palestinian writer Edward Said urged from the comfort of his home in North America. “Demand more.” Was he right? Wouldn’t an inequitable divvying up have given Palestinians better if not perfect lives? Well, it’s not for one person to tell another what’s fair. But right or wrong, there was to be no deal.

And so the bloody impasse — a tragedy, as Amos Oz saw it, of two rights. Later, a tragedy of two wrongs. For calling it a tragedy, Oz’s erstwhile Palestinian supporters deserted him. Tragedy meant there was no villain. And the Palestinians needed a villain.

Netanyahu fitted the bill. Netanyahu put his hand out and took. In retaliation for which — though nothing in the history of the two people would ever justify its extreme and twisted violence — the massacre of October 7. But if Israel must take some blame for the massacre, the Palestinians must, by the same token, take some blame for Netanyahu, the lumbering, unsubtle child of unrelenting war, a man hardened in suspicion and fear who does not know the difference between justice and revenge.

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To hold out against the Palestinian narrative of dispossession, while allowing that not all of it is fantasy or self-pity, has necessitated, these last few years, more flexibility of mind than dedicated anti-Zionists are willing to try. That’s how we know they are wrong: they do not attempt to understand their enemy and do not cry for him. Did Gazans — educated in their schoolbooks to loathe Jews — dance in the streets on October 7? Whatever the truth, may Israelis never dance the dance of blood.

The heart breaks, seeing the destruction of Gaza. But seeing the destruction of Tel Aviv will hurt no less. Do I fear that? Yes. I sense a change of mood. The constant chanting on the streets of London and elsewhere has, to a degree, contributed to that change. One lie, endlessly retold, can weaken the cause of truth eventually.

But, all on his own, Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency. Oh, what the hell. Enough of them. So those are swastikas. So what? It’s all just a matter of context.

I fear they — papers and commentators and politicians — are losing interest and sympathy at the same rate. They’ve heard it all before. We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling. We’ve tried losing. We’ve tried winning. I’m not sure what’s left.

Otherwise, the retrospective is admirably respectful of the artist’s work and the people who come to see it. There are none of the admonitions against colonialist and sexist looking, for example, that marred The Rossettis at Tate Britain. Guston looks at whatever he wants to look at and — barring that brief allusion to antisemitism and the Ku Klux Klan as you enter — we are left in peace to do the same.

If anything, it is a bold curatorial stroke to begin the exhibition, not with examples of the young Guston’s early forays into social realism and surrealism but with a single full-blown, late-style comic-book canvas — “Legend” — in which the sleeping painter lets his nightmares spill across a flat mental plane so messy you can see why he has no desire to get out of bed. Here are objects that will become familiar as the exhibition continues: cigarettes, empty bottles of booze, bricks, a baton, a hoof, but also himself, the dreamer and hallucinator, all but crowded out of his own painting, wrapped up against the waking world, his brow rumpled, one boxer’s ear attached to his head like a can-opener, his spidery eyelid shut tight. Disturb him if you dare.

The artist’s mind rendered as a kitchen in which nothing has been washed or put away is more beguiling than disturbing, for all the violence of the brush strokes and the delusional pinks and scornful reds of the palette. I cannot explain the spindle-shanked horse running out of the picture, brandishing his tail like a scourge as he leaves, unless he’s a she — quite literally a nightmare. But the artist sleeps on, for all the sound of hooves smashing broken glass. “A world in turmoil,” the note on the wall comments. Yes, turmoil within and without — but too intriguing, not to say comic, for the turmoil to turn to anguish. However deranged the painter, the painting is all very bearable — a sort of joyous bonfire of the madnesses, as though Guston were painting himself sane. And then, having got you “emotionally prepared” for what’s still to come, the exhibition sweeps you back in time to Guston’s many false starts, that’s if it’s fair to call the means by which an artist discovers what he really wants to paint “false”.

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Guston was good at this and that. Dipping his toe into the Italian Renaissance, surrealism, social realism, muralism, abstract expressionism — you name it, he could do it. He was born Phillip Goldstein, a name he changed for the usual reasons, to parents who had fled persecution in Ukraine. Just when or where is it a good time or place to be born a Jew? His reclusive father hung himself when Guston was still a boy, though what part the anti-Jewishness of early 20th-century America played in that — the alienation, the restricted opportunities (collecting junk was the best job he could find), the threats from the KKK — is a matter for speculation. But the Klan doesn’t haunt Guston’s imagination for no reason, and depression, in his greatest works, is only a dive under the covers away.

Not long after his father’s suicide, his brother died in a horrific car accident, after losing both his legs. The recurring motifs of nooses and twisted limbs need no more explaining than do the hoods of the Klan and the mountains of anonymous shoes. And maybe the name-changing accounts for the atmosphere of obsessive guilt. A bad start in life for the boy was a good one for the painter.

Crises of confidence and conscience nudged Guston from one sort of art and artistic commitment to another. He painted and won acclaim, but not from himself. “What kind of man am I,” he asks, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything” — he means Vietnam and the brutality of the world in general — “and then going into my studio to adjust a red to blue?”

He isn’t the first artist to have asked himself that. And it could have been the end of him as a painter. Political engagement had already taken up much of his time; what would another bout of engaged solemnity have yielded? As it happened, the artist in him found a way to make the refined aesthetics of “adjusting a red to a blue” a means of confronting the unrefined brutality he saw everywhere. As though to recreate the exhilaration of that creative resolution, the exhibition ushers us, along a narrow corridor, from the self-questioning Guston of earlier rooms, to the blazingly confident pink light of “Dawn”, a sublimely airy comic-strip send-up, firstly of the Ku Klux Klan and, by implication, Guston’s own early fear of them. Can there really be anything to be afraid of in these gormless hooded figures out driving in the early morning like children in a toy car, pointing out the sights of the city to each other, seeing the world for the first time, a lollipop sun just rising, candy-floss clouds floating in the sky, birds kissing on the telegraph wires.

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It’s a glorious painting of the world waking up to wonder. So innocent does the jaunt feel that we can’t bring ourselves to ask whose twisted feet are sticking out of the boot of the nursery car. The Klan’s latest victims? Guston’s brother? Every menace and pained remembrance are grist to the mill — but ask what, in fact, is so illuminating about the painting and we have to root around in our own untidy kitchen of words to find the right ones. The painting takes the strain, let’s try that for starters. The painting disburdens — but disburdens whom of what?

There follows, in the next four rooms, one magnificently disburdening painting after another. “City Limits” depicts three hooded Klansmen hugger-mugger in another children’s car with giant Swiss-roll wheels, staring ahead in a bemused sort of way, excited to be out and about for all that their masks limit what they can see, if they can see anything. One is, of course, smoking, in the style of Groucho Marx, which doesn’t seem to bother the others. The painting is gorgeously claustrophobic, suggesting that the Klansmen enjoy one another’s company so much that being cramped is a pleasure to them. If the car is a prison, they are too stupid to mind and too impotent to do anything about it.

What world is this? Laurel and Hardy? Keystone Cops? The cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’?

Guston famously said of the Klansmen that “they are self-portraits” and in “The Studio” he goes the whole way with that fancy, standing a hooded figure at the artist’s easel, puffing black smoke, painting himself. It’s sublimely funny — the painter as Klansman engrossed in painting the painter as Klansman, an infinity of perpetuation, the crazier for the painter-Klansman having only two prison-door slits in his hood to see through, but reproducing those prison-door slits on the canvass with loving care. If Guston is somehow redeemed in the act of seeing himself behind the hood, is the hooded Klansman redeemed in the act of seeing himself as Guston? I don’t even know what sort of question that is. Does it bear on the nature of art or the nature of evil?

Here is the joy of the show, anyway. We look, muse, laugh, speculate, writhe a bit, which might be our own redemption from solemnity. How seriously to take Guston’s further identification with the Klansman — “I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan…what would it be like to be evil?” — I don’t know. Is Guston a metaphysician of evil? Is he Dostoevsky with red paint on his hands? Or are we closer to Chaplin guying Hitler?

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I have to say I don’t experience the fear and trembling before these works that others report. Guston has so successfully eviscerated all horror from the Ku Klux Klan, so sublimely, if you like, made them himself in the course of making himself them, that we are taken to another plane of visionary delight. Not of aesthetic insouciance — there is no opting out of seriousness in these paintings — but of quizzical exuberance, as if to cast seriousness in a new light. Each of these late canvasses is a kind of obstacle course of memory, in which victory over evil is achieved by celebrating the absurd plasticity of evil’s presence, a random and yet purposive inclusiveness that takes in the artist and his perturbations, for the act of worrying is now his subject too.

Even “Flatlands”, which appears to show the artist’s imagination after the Flood — the scattered real and delusional detritus of his thoughts and associations: clocks telling different times, books, pointing fingers, legs without a body, a setting sun, Klansmen losing their way like malfunctioning robots, what might just be the chimney of an Auschwitz oven puffing its own cigar smoke — is calming, perhaps because it’s all over now, mastered in its random, godless profusion. Not “Look, I have come through,” but “Look, I am still looking.”

Almost the last painting in the exhibition is “Couple in Bed”. I don’t know if any artist more frequently painted himself asleep, but none surely painted a more poignant study of sleep and love in the service of art. Clutching his quiver of paint brushes for dear life, the painter buries himself into the safety of his wife. It’s a bed the poet Donne might have imagined — one little space an everywhere of devotion and achievement, a place of peace but not forgetfulness.

It is not unusual for art to make us happy. Mellow vistas and golden sunsets do the trick every time. What is far more rare is for happiness to be conjured out of horror.

***

The Philip Guston exhibition is on at Tate Modern until 25 February 2024.

I am brooding over words I wrote several weeks ago when describing that species of social embarrassment called not knowing where to look when you pass a school playground of children. “It takes me a moment to remember,” I wrote, “that a man wandering on his own must no longer pause to look at children running races in their mirth.” I did not, I now think, adequately register the sadness of that loss. Scurry from a playground for fear of appearing sinister and we might as well be scurrying from the vitality of life itself.

The worst part of being told you’re sinister for no other reason than that you’re a man out wandering on his own is that, eventually, you begin to fear you might be. But sinister how? What’s the dread clutching at society’s heart? And why is it now clutching at mine?

I hear the children laughing and scuttle past. Here’s the tragedy of it: I am severed from the time when I laughed in a playground myself. The wistful music of continuity is stopped.

How many things are we no longer trusted to look at and admire? I dare not freely name them because that too can be a species of offence. So, I pace the streets with my eyes down, in order not to be surprised by beauty I must not let myself appreciate. The long, brown legs of high-stepping city women in their summer dresses? Eugh! The billowing of someone’s national dress, a fantastical headdress; a lovely child skipping in its self-absorption? Eugh, eugh!

The street’s forbidden fruits, waiting to ambush us the minute we lift our faces. Who are you looking at, mister? Wanna photograph?

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Look up, then, if looking ahead is so fraught. There’s a sculpture on the BBC building by Eric Gill. Prospero and Ariel. Old and Young. Eugh! Or quit the street, on which we all once promenaded, sometimes flagrantly if the night was hot, and seek refuge in a cinema or art gallery. They’re showing an old Woody Allen here. Oh, God — it’s Manhattan. Eugh! And here — we’re in luck — is a Gauguin exhibition, the great painter and his young Tahitian bride. Young! How young? Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!

First the streets are denied us, then art. But take the risk out of art and what’s left but decoration? Do we not look to art to probe the borders of the acceptable? Risk is what explains art’s fearful symmetry. Tiger, tiger, burning bright…

I don’t pretend that there’s nothing on those walls to fear. It makes perfect sense to keep a tiger at arm’s length. Art is dangerous and we are right to stand in trembling awe of it. But what we fear is also, much of the time, what we love. We police the borderland, losing in adventure what we gain in safety. Will we one day have to ban beauty itself, shamed by the desires it will unloose, outraged by the liberties that have already been taken to produce it? Am I — one halting, harmless, rheumy, apologetic, mature man — really that inflammable?

Better I stay indoors. Close the windows against sounds that are not mine to hear and draw the curtains against sights that are not mine to see. That way I cause no one discomfort by appearing to take too avid an interest in what they look like, what they’re wearing, how old they are, or where they come from. Walk on, my children, unmolested by my declining sight.

I am not asking for pity. I have lived my life and looked my full. I won’t say no to looking a bit more before my eyes close altogether, but it’s not only on my own behalf that I lament our visual timorousness — there are those who come after who must also be granted the right to stare and be stirred.

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There is, I grant you, nothing new about being told to look away. Or suppressing art, come to that. The Puritans tried to close the theatres in the 16th century, blamed the plague on the lasciviousness of theatre-goers, and finally got their way in 1642. But is there not a specific problem with the idea of men looking — as though the eyes of men are configured differently from women’s — that probably dates to the Seventies when John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was published and the conceit of the “male gaze” elaborated? It was after Berger, anyway, that men began to be perceived as gazing suspiciously, and after the film theorist Laura Mulvey’s analysis of looking as an act of male oppression, that their gaze was pronounced out-and-out exploitative. Where the likes of Francis Drake had circled the globe looking for worlds to conquer, men had now only to lift a paintbrush or wander in off the street to look at a painting to be charged with ravishment and pillage.

Ok, ok, cheap shot. Nothing any of us do is wholly innocent. We are all culture-laden whether we know we are or not. The scrutinising eye can be possessive or pornographic — what man can say he has never looked possessively or pornographically? — and it does make sense to talk of some sorts of representation as invasion. Only consider the shape of the paintbrush or the pen. “The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world,” wrote Laura Mulvey. Oof, yes. Or, at least, oof maybe.

Had I been a woman worn out with being prodded by those instruments of male possessiveness, I’d have bought willingly into that. Call a man phallocentric and you had him every time. The more he shouted and bullied that he wasn’t, the more he was. I remember it well. I was there, denying it loudly myself. Of course, there were some — the Andrew Tates of the age — who pumped their muscles and wore phallocentricity as a badge of pride. But the rest of us knew we were on borrowed time. All right, all right, we said, hanging our heads, but how will we ever again let our senses off the rein? When will the fun return? It won’t, Mulvey told us. Fun had done damage enough. Fun had run its course. Thus was Puritanism revived in another guise.

With nothing that was fun or safe to look upon at home, a number of us did what the beaten have done for centuries, kicked the dust of Europe from our feet and travelled to exotic places. But, in the rush to delegitimise, that pastime, too, lost favour. The very word “exotic” marked us as imperialists. Orientalism, the critic Edward Said called it. Colonising what was foreign by finding it picturesque. Byron and Matisse, Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Bell, Leonardo and Stendhal, the entire fourth form at my school — all guilty. Old and young, men and women — Orientalists the lot of us.

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There are accusations of Orientalism and its implicit privileging of whiteness all over the walls of the Rossetti exhibition currently showing at Tate Britain. I am in two minds about notes on the walls of exhibitions. Because I am a word obsessive, I read them conscientiously to the degree that I sometimes forget to look at the paintings they describe. Good wall notes can be engrossing and informative. Bad ones — which might be bad for a variety of reasons but are always bad if they conspicuously promote the pieties and prohibitions of the hour — can spoil the show. The notes accompanying the Rossettis swarm around the works like flies, letting nothing alone that might be construed as ideologically outmoded. Rossetti’s painting “The Beloved” is accused of “misimagining” North Africa, while another painting is guilty of “dehumanising” a North African. Just a question, but as these are value judgements: shouldn’t they be up to us to decide?

Remember Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, so hectored and harried by his elders at a family dinner that he might have been an “unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena… [he was] so smartingly touched up by these moral goads”. Exactly how I felt after two hours of curatorial finger-pointing at Tate Britain.

And so we walk the street of pitfalls and perils, eyes averted, shrinking from the finger. But I guess it’s fair enough: what goes around comes around. Now I know how generations of women felt being touched up by the eyes of men. I get it. Mea culpa. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have mis-gazed.

This essay was first published on Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

We didn’t read it as we read polemic — the characters were too vivid to allow us to forget we were reading fiction — but it was conjecturally high-risk in a way that other novels weren’t. Laughter and Forgetting: the very concatenation of those words promised an original ride. So we hung on, rubbing our eyes as though waking from a long sleep, curious to read whatever Kundera had written earlier and impatient to read whatever he would write next. Today, the laughter has fallen silent and, except among a few aficionados and readers without an axe to grind, Kundera himself is all but forgotten.

The forgetting of Kundera’s title is the state-sponsored forgetting essential to totalitarianism, allowing that totalitarianism insinuates its way into the most private corners of our lives. The novel’s opening reads like a fairy tale told by a historian. “In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace…” Next to Gottwald on the balcony is the Foreign Minister, Vladimir Clementis. It is cold and, noting that Gottwald is bareheaded, Clementis takes the fur hat off his head and puts it on his leader’s. Four years later Clementis is hanged for treason and “immediately airbrushed out of history”, which means being airbrushed out of this and all other photographs as well. Inspect the photograph today and the only evidence that Clementis was ever on that balcony is the fur hat on Gottwald’s head. So tellingly comic is the image that one wants to push it further into surrealism and remove Gottwald too, leaving only the hat to hover Magritte-like in the snow.

We have our own vocabulary to describe what the Czech Communist party did to Clementis 70 years ago. We say it “cancelled” him. It is, I think, instructive to trace cancel culture’s political origins in the mindset of totalitarianism. The cruel irony is that Kundera’s novel has itself become the object of the very cancelling it describes. Little by little, whether by malevolent design (which is hard to prove) or by subtle changes in the literary/political zeitgeist (also hard to chart) Kundera and his novels fell out of favour.

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He had left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 and never returned when it was safe to do so. Why was that, some wondered. A willing exile is not the same as a forced one: did he remain in France in order to keep his distance from people who could reveal a secret? Rumours of his having earlier sold out a colleague to the Communist authorities began to circulate. Vehemently denied and never proved though this accusation was, a whiff of deception, not to say betrayal, remained. Not impossibly, some people wanted it to remain in order better to sell or explain a disaffection that had other causes. A Kundera who forged his own biography was a Kundera whose books might also lie to us.

The world was changing; subtle re-evaluations of the contributions of Soviet Communism among those very intellectuals who would once have been Kundera’s admirers, compelled them to think again about him or, as was more convenient, to forget about him altogether. Ideological enemies of the Left were no longer automatically embraced. New sorts of crime, more insidious but not necessarily any less terrible than those which Kundera had made his reputation excoriating, required new and no less vigilant policing. Universities began to take on the aspect of commissariats. You might say that Kundera’s ironic tone, once so bracing, now sounded stale, tactlessly assertive and masculinist. No one was going to ask this question in so many words, but did irony even have a place in literature any longer?

In a marvellous flight of inspirational fancy in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera describes two kinds of laughter: the Devil’s, which denies “all rational meaning to God’s world”, and which by its very maliciousness permits “a greater latitude in living”; and the Angel’s, which is no laughter at all, but a horrible fabrication of it, declaring the beauty and goodness of everything on earth.

Once a longing for unitary meaning turns into a cult or ideology of that meaning — as Soviet Communism was — any dissenter from that cult becomes its enemy. To cancel, in our culture, is to deny such dissent the space to breath in.

“I too danced in a ring,” Kundera writes. “It was the spring of 1948.” That has the wistful tone of a confession — an allowance that the yearning to join such a dance is inescapable if you are young — albeit the confession of someone who dances in a ring no longer. 1948 was the year of the Communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia. A time of victorious celebration if you were of the Angel’s party, and for that short time, who wasn’t?

You held hands, your hearts overflowing with joy, and danced in a ring of perfect unanimity. It might remind us of the rapturous welcome Jeremy Corbyn was given in Glastonbury by thousands upon thousands of popular music orgiasts, already gathered to dance in a giant ring, and for whom adding Corbyn to their objects of unquestioning worship was a small step. Kundera’s dancers, “fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time”, finally grow wings and soar above the earthly Prague. The fantasy that buoys them is the same fantasy that briefly enabled Corbyn’s supporters to believe they were flying.

Discussing the surprising omission of Kundera and his long-time admirer Philip Roth from the list of Nobel Prize winners, the French Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut speculates that the charge of misogyny levelled at both writers has something to do with it. “The Stockholm jury was ‘woke’ before the word appeared,” he says. I wish to stay out of using ‘woke’. Words when they come with poisoned tips promote hostility, not accommodation. We all have our sore spots.

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Myself, I bridle at expressions of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, I don’t think even the clearest evidence of it in this or that novelist’s work disqualifies them as novelists. A ferocious, convicted anti-Semite the French writer Céline might have been, but he wrote a couple of fine novels. He made us see the world as we previously had not. Sometimes, in the discomfort we feel reading or looking, is to be found art’s true purpose.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia weakened itself when it airbrushed out Valdimir Clementis but kept his hat. To cancel is to forget, and to forget diminishes not only the forgotten but the forgetter. It is also, as Kundera’s great novel demonstrates, to forgo the liberation there is in laughter — laughter not as the Angels understood it but as the all-disparaging Devil did — the power to question and criticise and scorn, to leave the dance of shared conviction and refuse the ecstatic fantasy of flight.

This essay was originally published on 20 December, 2021

But sharing a urinal reminds even warring parties of the humanity they have in common and I suddenly wanted to make a gesture of peace. “Hello, Salman,” I said as we converged on the wash basin. “I have an apology to make.”

I wasn’t going to recant on finding his novels jocose. But I did want to confess to expressing less than unequivocal support for him at the time of the fatwa against The Satanic Verses. Less than unequivocal support didn’t mean thinking he had it coming, as some commentators and even fellow novelists did. I was outraged by the pronouncements against the novel and the threats to Rushdie’s life; but I hadn’t felt I could wholeheartedly endorse the spirit of his apotheosis as champion of free speech.

The argument put forward by John Berger — that Rushdie should have thought harder about the dangers his novel posed to those involved in its translation and dissemination and asked his publishers to “stop producing more or new editions”, if only temporarily — chimed with what I’d been thinking. Berger spoke of a “terrifying righteousness on both sides”, and to me that fairly characterised the Holy War that had broken out between the clerics who wanted the book destroyed and a literary elite for whom its existence had become sacrosanct.

“Elite” is an envious word. You don’t speak about elites if you are in one. And I don’t doubt that a sense of exclusion from a charmed circle of the righteous explains why so many writers who might have been expected to be vocal on Salman Rushdie’s behalf weren’t. The Holy War didn’t only pit the righteous against one another; it pitted people unable to imagine the justice of any position but the one they held. The clerics closed minds, and Rushdie’s coterie of literary admirers closed ranks. Both sides claimed the support of angels.

But the angels arrayed against The Satanic Verses were armed and heaven-bent on destruction, while Rushdie’s angels were only smug, and that should have persuaded me to sing along, if only faintly, with them.

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As we washed our hands, I told Salman that. Coming clean, you see. I also told him I admired his courage in trying to live a normal life and speak up against those who wanted him silenced, a courage that wasn’t diminished by his having 24-hour police protection. That, too, must have taken some living with. He patiently allowed me to unburden my conscience and we shook on it.

It’s nice making friends and had I only been able to find a generous thing to say about his next novel we might have remained friends to this day. As it turned out those were the last warm words we exchanged.

I don’t today, in the light of the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, feel pulled this way and that. Today there is only horror and sorrow and hope for his recovery. One doesn’t have to be a member of a free-speech elite to know that no books should ever be destroyed and no authors attacked for what they write. From the understandably lavish outpourings of praise for Rushdie’s work over the last week, you could form the impression that the attack on him was particularly heinous because it was an attack on genius. But genius is irrelevant to this. It was an attack upon a living soul. And upon living words. The sacrilege would be as great were the injured writer merely mediocre.

“Free speech”, nevertheless, remains a forever self-contradicting concept. “Free” is a weasel word. Nothing is free of consequences, whether seen or unseen. To uphold this person’s absolute freedom we might make unacceptable inroads into someone else’s. Indeed, it would seem that we are able to revere free speech and abominate it in a single breath.

Witness last week’s extraordinary decision by the Pleasance Theatre — a self-proclaimed champion of free expression and scourge of censorship — to pull the comedian Jerry Sadowitz’s show because it “did not align with the theatre’s values”. The Pleasance’s defence of its actions, that Sadowitz had gone too far, has been rightly ridiculed. Championing free speech until it goes too far is not championing free speech. And the theatre seemed to forget that, as this was a Fringe Festival of Alternative Comedy, the platform it had originally granted Sadowitz was necessarily exempt from the usual civic inhibitions: its decision was an assault on the very principle of sacred space, without which there can be no carnivals, circuses, clowns, comedians or, of course, novelists.

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But it’s for requiring a performer’s material to “align with its values” that the Pleasance will long live in infamy. The theatre has not put a bounty on Sadowitz’s head. Cancelling a booking is not the same as a death threat. But demanding alignment with its values puts it in the same camp morally and intellectually as regimes who silence critics of their values. And, at the other extreme, universities and publishing houses who demand conformity with the truisms of the hour.

Until we learn to be more accomplished equestrians, freedom of speech is too hobbled a nag to carry us safely into the uplands of open discourse. We inch along and stumble often. In the meantime, what must be insisted on is that while the offended enjoy the same rights to speak out as the offenders, they do not enjoy more. To be insulted, outraged, hurt, or otherwise assailed by someone else’s words does not confer the privilege of silencing them. Nor is it a university’s job to provide sanctuary from language that does not “align” with its values or those of its students. To the contrary: its most important intellectual function is to teach how to engage with alien ideas and discomfiting emotions. An education that doesn’t prompt radical changes in us is of doubtful value.

It seemed for a number of years that something, somehow, had changed for Salman Rushdie. The fatwa fell silent. Someone had relented or just forgotten. That it had all along been biding its time, awaiting the right moment and the right assassin, is devastatingly depressing. It throws us back into the mouldering inevitabilities of ancient tragedy, where grievances are passed on like the plague and a curse, once made, can never be rescinded. The freedoms we trumpet are an expression of a new hope in a less cruelly fatalistic world. But freedom is a conversation or it’s nothing, and free speech is wasted on us if we won’t take up the challenge to listen freely too.

It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic. In tone intimate and ironic, it seemed to take its readers into its confidence, assuming a high level of curiosity and scepticism, large-mindedness and mirth, but also anxiety, lest waking from one nightmare was no guarantee that we wouldn’t fall headlong into the next.

We didn’t read it as we read polemic — the characters were too vivid to allow us to forget we were reading fiction — but it was conjecturally high-risk in a way that other novels weren’t. Laughter and Forgetting: the very concatenation of those words promised an original ride. So we hung on, rubbing our eyes as though waking from a long sleep, curious to read whatever Kundera had written earlier and impatient to read whatever he would write next. Today, the laughter has fallen silent and, except among a few aficionados and readers without an axe to grind, Kundera himself is all but forgotten.

The forgetting of Kundera’s title is the state-sponsored forgetting essential to totalitarianism, allowing that totalitarianism insinuates its way into the most private corners of our lives. The novel’s opening reads like a fairy tale told by a historian. “In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace…” Next to Gottwald on the balcony is the Foreign Minister, Vladimir Clementis. It is cold and, noting that Gottwald is bareheaded, Clementis takes the fur hat off his head and puts it on his leader’s. Four years later Clementis is hanged for treason and “immediately airbrushed out of history”, which means being airbrushed out of this and all other photographs as well. Inspect the photograph today and the only evidence that Clementis was ever on that balcony is the fur hat on Gottwald’s head. So tellingly comic is the image that one wants to push it further into surrealism and remove Gottwald too, leaving only the hat to hover Magritte-like in the snow.

We have our own vocabulary to describe what the Czech Communist party did to Clementis 70 years ago. We say it “cancelled” him. It is, I think, instructive to trace cancel culture’s political origins in the mindset of totalitarianism.

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The cruel irony is that Kundera’s novel has itself become the object of the very cancelling it describes. Little by little, whether by malevolent design (which is hard to prove) or by subtle changes in the literary/political zeitgeist (also hard to chart) Kundera and his novels fell out of favour.

He had left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 and never returned when it was safe to do so. Why was that, some wondered. A willing exile is not the same as a forced one: did he remain in France in order to keep his distance from people who could reveal a secret? Rumours of his having earlier sold out a colleague to the Communist authorities began to circulate. Vehemently denied and never proved though this accusation was, a whiff of deception, not to say betrayal, remained. Not impossibly, some people wanted it to remain in order better to sell or explain a disaffection that had other causes. A Kundera who forged his own biography was a Kundera whose books might also lie to us.

The world was changing; subtle re-evaluations of the contributions of Soviet Communism among those very intellectuals who would once have been Kundera’s admirers, compelled them to think again about him or, as was more convenient, to forget about him altogether. Ideological enemies of the Left were no longer automatically embraced. New sorts of crime, more insidious but not necessarily any less terrible than those which Kundera had made his reputation excoriating, required new and no less vigilant policing. Universities began to take on the aspect of commissariats. You might say that Kundera’s ironic tone, once so bracing, now sounded stale, tactlessly assertive and masculinist. No one was going to ask this question in so many words, but did irony even have a place in literature any longer?

In a marvellous flight of inspirational fancy in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera describes two kinds of laughter: the Devil’s, which denies “all rational meaning to God’s world”, and which by its very maliciousness permits “a greater latitude in living”; and the Angel’s, which is no laughter at all, but a horrible fabrication of it, declaring the beauty and goodness of everything on earth.

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Once a longing for unitary meaning turns into a cult or ideology of that meaning — as Soviet Communism was — any dissenter from that cult becomes its enemy. To cancel, in our culture, is to deny such dissent the space to breath in.

“I too danced in a ring,” Kundera writes. “It was the spring of 1948.” That has the wistful tone of a confession — an allowance that the yearning to join such a dance is inescapable if you are young — albeit the confession of someone who dances in a ring no longer. 1948 was the year of the Communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia. A time of victorious celebration if you were of the Angel’s party, and for that short time, who wasn’t?

You held hands, your hearts overflowing with joy, and danced in a ring of perfect unanimity. It might remind us of the rapturous welcome Jeremy Corbyn was given in Glastonbury by thousands upon thousands of popular music orgiasts, already gathered to dance in a giant ring, and for whom adding Corbyn to their objects of unquestioning worship was a small step. Kundera’s dancers, “fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time”, finally grow wings and soar above the earthly Prague. The fantasy that buoys them is the same fantasy that briefly enabled Corbyn’s supporters to believe they were flying.

Discussing the surprising omission of Kundera and his long-time admirer Philip Roth from the list of Nobel Prize winners, the French Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut speculates that the charge of misogyny levelled at both writers has something to do with it. “The Stockholm jury was ‘woke’ before the word appeared,” he says. I wish to stay out of using ‘woke’. Words when they come with poisoned tips promote hostility, not accommodation. We all have our sore spots.

Suggested reading

How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

Myself, I bridle at expressions of anti-Semitism. On the other hand, I don’t think even the clearest evidence of it in this or that novelist’s work disqualifies them as novelists. A ferocious, convicted anti-Semite the French writer Céline might have been, but he wrote a couple of fine novels. He made us see the world as we previously had not. Sometimes, in the discomfort we feel reading or looking, is to be found art’s true purpose.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia weakened itself when it airbrushed out Valdimir Clementis but kept his hat. To cancel is to forget, and to forget diminishes not only the forgotten but the forgetter. It is also, as Kundera’s great novel demonstrates, to forgo the liberation there is in laughter — laughter not as the Angels understood it but as the all-disparaging Devil did — the power to question and criticise and scorn, to leave the dance of shared conviction and refuse the ecstatic fantasy of flight.

Many of the world’s leaders employ this greeting but along the same plane as a handshake; Boris Johnson offers his elbow with a sudden and even feral twist of his torso, as though it’s the first step in an elaborate South Sea courtship ritual he has still to learn the rest of. Above his mask, his eyes are smiling like those of a child who knows he has been bad but hopes he will be loved for it.

I recall seeing him do this on television — perhaps for the first time — just before the national lockdown in March 2020. He was about to shake hands with someone — something tells me it was Matt Hancock — then remembered that shaking hands wasn’t allowed, swivelled, stuck out a hip, and did his elbow jive. From the expression on Matt Hancock’s face you’d guess he thought he was being given the elbow in the being-dumped-by-a-lover sense. A look of impending catastrophe he’s carried ever since.

Suggested reading

Where will Boris Johnson lead us?

By James Kirkup

Most of us had been elbowing one another for weeks by the time Boris Johnson got going, and had progressed to more sedate, and safer, forms of salutation. My preferred method was to maintain a distance of three elephants with extended trunks and throw my arms wide in cosmological bafflement, much as Moses must have done when he came down from meeting God on the mountain and found the Israelities dancing round a cow. Otherwise it seemed both prudent and befitting the solemnity of events simply to wave or incline one’s head. There is a limit — is all I’m saying — to how long you can go on finding bumping elbows entertaining.

But not for Boris Johnson. Thirteen months down the line he is as delighted by it as ever, his capacity to be amused by himself inexhaustible. One has to be churlish indeed not to find this beguiling. The boy in the man will always charm and the boy in the holder of a serious office of state will charm still more. I speak for many who were never little boys even when they were little boys when I say I marvel at the resilience. How, when all around is stress and sorrow, is it possible to find so much fun in so little?

There is, I accept, no point longing for the days when Prime Ministers and Emperors were philosophers and men of letters. They seem like relics of another humanity — Benjamin Disraeli who wrote more than a dozen novels before he became Prime Minister;  Vaclac Havel who wrote plays and essays prior to assuming the Presidency of the Czech Republic; the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius who said “Pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.” Voters today would rather elect a clown than a serious writer or a thinker. As witness the clowns and comedians who have taken to the political stage in Ukraine, Guatemala, Slovenia, Italy, America — if you allow that a clown can still be a clown even if he isn’t funny — and now here.

Suggested reading

The creation of Boris Johnson

By Tanya Gold

Boris Johnson’s clowning has been in evidence for decades. He can do slapstick without trying, whether trapped on a zip-wire above the Olympic Park, or just climbing onto a bicycle in shorts that ride up in a way that no man should ever want them to.  He can be little-boy-lost to his female constituents and suggest an erotic incorrigibility beneath the bumbling that his male admirers find comfort in. For the sake of a laugh he will dump his dignity. He is the fool that gets the girls and the buffoon that wins high office. Is it, after all, too much to expect him to be Prime Minister as well?

Given that his clowning has always felt opportunistic — as calculated as the precisely tousled hair or the bungled notes — are we to think of Johnson as a clown who prat-fell his way backwards up the ladder into politics or a politician who tripped himself down the snake into comedy? I suspect the uncertainty partly explains why he see-saws violently in the opinion polls. He catches us on the way up and on the way down. For a week or two after he contracted the Virus it looked as though the experience might have made a philosopher of him. “He has lines in his face he didn’t have before,” I told my wife. “I believe I detect something in his bearing that could be gravitas.”

“That’s the medication,” she said. And she turned out to be right. Soon the elbows came out again and the eyes resumed their roguish twinkle.

For the ethos by which he lives is not after all that of the Athens of Pericles or Octavian but the circus where White-faces and Augustes exchange insults, fall over buckets and bump elbows. If he is guided by a single motto it is that the show must go on.

Admirable words, were this a show and Prime Ministership a comic interval between the acrobats and trapeze artists. But the pandemic is and always was of a seriousness that mirth might on occasions have alleviated, but should never have been allowed near at the outset. For mirth, in those early days, stood in the way of serious fears and sensible precautions. It is true that Johnson did not play the hooligan and capsize the ship of state as Trump did, but he told us not to worry, showed us how he’d shaken the hands of nurses and doctors in hospitals and, as chief of the “Jumblies,” escorted us to the shore line and put us to sea in a sieve.

Suggested reading

Has 'Long Covid' left us leaderless?

By Mary Harrington

Pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments, and levity, when it is not moderated by circumstances, is lethal. A good Prime Minister would have moderated his extravagances to these circumstances. Cometh the hour, cometh the leader; but cometh this hour, cometh the Clown. “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage,” proclaims Fortinbras in the final speech of the play. “For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royally.” It is a sad realisation of wasted gifts.

Given his talents as an entertainer, Boris Johnson might have proved most Prime Ministerial had he been tested in another sort of production. But then again he might not. If any further proof were needed that he would sacrifice the whole world to please a roomful of his auditors, it came when he told a meeting of the faithful the other night that the undoubted success of the vaccine production and roll-out was due to “greed, my friends”, thereby demeaning the achievement and good-will of thousands of scientists and volunteers, and showing that he is stone deaf to the national mood. No Prime Minister thinking like a Prime Minister would ever make a mistake of that magnitude or assume that an elbow-jig could redeem it. Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister we do not have.