Alex Comfort

Twice in the last half-century English 'progressives' have seen a similar historical event under similar circumstances. In 1916 [Patrick] Pearse and [James] Connolly captured the imagination of the world in the Easter Rising [Ireland - April 1916], and set in motion by that gesture the foundation of Saorstat Eireann [Irish Free State]. Today the Zionists have declared the State of Israel. Reactions among Englis progressives are, I think, similar to those which attended Easter Week — keen sympathy with a courageous attempt to secure freedom, contempt for the official attitude of the British government, and a measure of disquiet. The events leading up to each situation have been strikingly alike: terrorism and counter-terrorism are not new, nor are anti-Irish and anti-Jewish feeling. It is not a patronising or an unfriendly approach which makes the disquiet, nor is it a failure to recognise the achievement and sufferings of Jewry.

In historical and social terms, the Jews have many advantages over the Irish Republicans. They have created the most striking examples of social community in the present period. The importance of social societies such as the settlements, existing in a world which is increasingly asocial, is not confined to the people who live in them. It extends into far wider circles of study — sociology, anthropology, the planning of the free society in all countries. It is not too much to say that the future orientation of all anti-totalitarian planning will be determined by the fate of the experiments. The republicanism of the Irish has parallels — the practical achievement in Palestine seems to me unique. It is for precisely this reason that the hazards attending the birth of Israel seem to me greater than those which Ireland faced, and to some extent failed to overcome, after the deaths of Pearse and Connolly.

Non-Jews cannot expect to preach to the Jews — the suffering of Jew in recent years has no parallel in Irish history, or anywhere else, perhaps save in Jewish history. But the chronicity of that suffering is in itself danger. It has left Jewry a legacy which is far more important than Gentile anti-Semitism — in the attitude of mind which has developed between Jews and non-Jews, and the whole crop of psychological tensions which go with it. There is a radical difference between the ill-feeling which existed between Ireland and Britain in 1916 and the kind of ill-feeling which has existed between Jews and non-Jews. The real curse of anti-semitism is that it infects the attitude both of people who are not anti-Semitic and of Jews themselves. I think that if I were a Jew I would find it easier to know where I was with an anti-Semite than the studiously 'decent' Englishman who is so obsessed with anti-Semitism and with showing that he doesn't share it that he adopts the same insulting attitude towards Jews that some people adopt towards dumb animals. And the Jews themselves have over-reacted - it is hard to see how they could do otherwise: the 'decent Englishman hasn't had to put up with Jewish history, Hitler, the gas chambers, and Ernest Bevin. You need only compare the emotional effects of a comedian's gag about Irishmen with those of a comedian's gag about Jews to see the difference. Until comedians can make such jokes equally, and nobody feel uneasy, one cannot say that Jewish-Gentile relationships are at a natural level. Non-Jews have a substantial guilt-reaction to live down before then, though the autonomy of Israel is a step on the way.

Why am I uneasy about a Jewish State? Because I am uneasy about any State. I am never ready to support uncritically the birth of a new authority. Israel is still struggling to exist, it is surrounded by every kind of force and chicanery, by foreign intervention and by international intrigues. I can understand why a State was founded, but the very centralising of authority seems to me to be a threat rather than an aid to the victory of Zionism. The Jewish people have shown themselves uniquely capable of living together in a non-coercive, defensible, social society. If that unique pattern is replaced by the orthodox pattern of government, ministries, parliaments, presidents and prisons, the future of free institutions far outside the circle of Jewry will be at risk. An anarchist Israel would possess a far greater power of survival in present world circumstances than any centralised State based on power, and Jewry is uniquely able to found such a society. A State of Israel modelled upon orthodox power institutions will be drawn inevitably into the pattern of Great Power intrigue.

These are not unfriendly criticisms. It is because I recognise the immense significance of the experimental societies developed in Palestine that I make it at all — if the Jews had done less, one could be content to regard them as yet another people trying to secure equality of status with other national powers. Jewry is more than that — it is a moral force: not in the same sense that the Orthodox Jewish believer might use the word, but because the Jews are the sole civilised group who have learned through a long history of dispossession to retain the basic human pattern of mutual aid. Because they have lived in many States and owed total allegiance to none, the Jews are possibly the only whole human being in the social and biological sense, who still exist as a group in Western Europe. There is a strand of this wholeness in Ireland, and it is the only thing which has enabled Eire [Ireland] to survive. The infection of Israel with orthodox power institutions, under pressure of danger, would be a disaster. I do not think that defence and efficiency depend on the creation of such institutions. If the Palestinians have possessed the self-discipline to do what they have done so far, they are strong enough to defend themselves and to live without a system of political authority.