Israel

Israel is discussed not as a setting for events but as a contested subject in arguments about political judgment and Jewish identity. The narrator describes hostility toward the country as pervasive among people he meets in England, while the conversation around him repeatedly questions whether that hostility is justified or antisemitic. His defense of Israel becomes inseparable from his sense of being judged through a political allegiance he shares with the United States.

Israel in political argument

The narrator says he now argues with people whenever he goes out and returns home furious, unable to sleep. He describes himself as allied, in one way or another, with what he calls the planet’s two greatest scourges: Israel and the United States. Even when invited to grant the premise that Israel is a terrible country, he insists that many countries are worse and that the hostility he encounters is nonetheless almost universal among his acquaintances.

The exchange turns on competing explanations for that hostility. The narrator’s interlocutor says people cite Israel’s treatment of Arabs, presented as the greatest crime in human history. The narrator rejects the sincerity of that rationale, calling it extraordinary hypocrisy. The conversation does not establish a neutral verdict on Israel’s conduct; instead, it stages a conflict over the standards by which that conduct is discussed and over the credibility of the criticism’s stated motives.

Competing accounts of prejudice

Asked whether the hostility is antisemitic, the interlocutor answers that, in the main, it is not, attributing it instead to fashionable left-wing opinion. In this account, critics demand that Israel meet the highest standards of justice and human rights, leaving it no room to respond to necessity. The interlocutor further argues that criticism falls most harshly on those who behave best, or least badly, and connects the pattern to a lingering romantic hatred. The same speaker qualifies the claim by saying that this hostility is not as strong in England as the narrator may imagine.

That qualification sharpens rather than resolves their disagreement. The narrator reports repeated encounters and sleepless anger; his interlocutor offers an interpretation that distinguishes political criticism from antisemitism and disputes how widespread the hostility is. Israel thus becomes the point at which questions of evidence, political principle, and personal experience collide, without the conversation settling on a shared account.

Jewish identity in England

Elsewhere, the narrator describes the lowered voice with which people in England say the word Jew in public, comparing the effect to the way many people say an obscenity. His observation makes the Israel debate part of a wider concern with how Jewish identity is acknowledged or softened in ordinary social life. The country’s political reputation is not the only issue: the terms used to discuss it carry implications for Jews who hear those arguments as something more than detached commentary.

The narrator’s account of an incident in Chelsea gives that concern a concrete, disputed form. Walking with his Israeli friend Aharon Appelfeld and Appelfeld’s son Itzak, he is confronted by a man who crosses the street, glares, and tells him that he does not even dress right. The narrator interprets the remark as antisemitic: because he is bearded and looks Jewish, he believes the man objects to seeing him dressed like an Englishman rather than in stereotyped Jewish clothing. Appelfeld cannot identify the meaning of the remark, while Itzak finds the man ludicrous and has never before witnessed an antisemitic incident.

The dinner guests to whom the narrator recounts the episode also deny that it was antisemitic, calling the aggressor eccentric or mad and treating the narrator’s interpretation as paranoia. The disagreement echoes the political argument about Israel: in both cases, the narrator sees prejudice that others explain away or classify differently. The Chelsea episode does not prove what motivated the stranger, but its contested interpretation shows why the narrator experiences discussion of Israel against a background of disputes over whether antisemitism is present at all.