Melanie Phillips, the renowned British journalist, has spent hundreds of hours in television and radio studios defending Israel and the Jewish people against ignorant and sometimes malicious accusations.
From those countless sessions, she has had to develop the ability to parry and refute the whole spectrum of anti-Israel and often antisemitic charges routinely flung at her: that Israel is an apartheid state, that it committed genocide in Gaza, that it targeted women and particularly children, that it used starvation as a weapon, that it is a colonialist interloper in the Middle East, that it is illegally occupying Palestinian land, that Zionism is racism, and much, much more.
Her many media appearances, her posts on social media, and her extensive print journalism mean that she must already have reached and, it is hoped, favorably influenced millions of people. Now, with blatant antisemitism spreading like wildfire after Israel’s response to the bloodthirsty Hamas attack on Israel of Oct. 7, Phillips has decided to make available to an even wider public her painfully acquired expertise in how to counter the anti-Israel arguments currently dominating the democratic Western world.
She has also chosen to propose strategies – both individual and community-based – aimed at transforming the reactive, defensive attitude she observes in much of the Jewish Diaspora into a proactive, positive, supportive pro-Israel and pro-Jewish stance. She urges the Jewish world to cast off “the Diaspora mentality of cultural cringe.”
In her book Fighting the Hate, Phillips provides both the solidly based factual material that can be used in effectively challenging anti-Israel sentiments, and the techniques she has found helpful in deploying it. “Jews in Western society,” she writes, “should rediscover the ancient Jewish fighting spirit.” She calls her work “a handbook of resilience,” intended to demonstrate “how the forces of sanity and decency can fight back.”
She strikes the reader as a prime exponent of the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, renowned as the author of The Art of War. She is a strong advocate for his well-known saying “Know your enemy.” His full quote is: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Philips explains that what drives anti-Israel sentiment in many people who occupy the “middle ground” may well be admirable feelings: compassion for victims and the vulnerable, a passion for justice, and a hatred of oppressive power. “It’s just that they assume Israel is on the wrong side of all those good things and ‘Palestine’ is on the right side,” she writes. “And that’s because the entire cultural discourse from those in public life who they believe are well-informed people of integrity, such as human rights lawyers, the UN, or doctors serving in Gaza, continuously feeds them this narrative, with virtually no public pushback based on the facts.”
'Jews are facing overt Jew-hatred'
She identifies a whole range of anti-Israel opponents and is clear that each needs to be approached in its own way. “Jews are facing overt Jew-hatred or hostile confrontations over Israel in a wide variety of situations,” she writes. “Every one of these involves a different dynamic requiring an approach tailored to that situation.”
Among those she lists are politicians, media interviewers, social media, students and faculty on university campuses, colleagues in the workplace, friends and acquaintances, family members, other faith members, the far-left and the far-right. She provides an approach likely to prove effective for each.
When defending Israel, she cautions against accusing people of antisemitism. “It’s extremely inadvisable to level the charge of antisemitism at anyone who’s telling lies about Israel,” she writes. “It may make you feel better to do so, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
Against genuine antisemites, she says, the accusation makes no impression, while many voicing anti-Israel rhetoric may not be antisemitic at all, merely woefully uninformed. Indiscriminate use of the antisemitism charge is, moreover, counter-productive because nowadays, the charge that Jews use antisemitism as a shield behind which to hide the crimes of the Jewish state is widespread.
Another invaluable bit of guidance is to be aware that trying to educate opponents about facts about Israel and the Middle East will fall on deaf ears.
“The Jewish world has been trying to answer these preposterously unanswerable accusations for decades,” writes Phillips, “and then wonders why it keeps losing.”
The way to gain these foes’ attention, she says, is to put them on the defensive. They need to be challenged on their own grounds of justice and conscience, and be revealed instead as standing for everything they claim to despise. “Many of these opponents aren’t innately bad people, but are being driven by a set of groundless and wrong-headed assumptions,” she writes.
She urges her readers to believe in themselves as Jews, to be proud of Israel and of Judaism, and she provides the facts and arguments they can use to do just that. Fighting the Hate is a call to arms. Phillips believes the widespread and growing denigration of Israel and the Jewish people can and should be countered. Drawing on her wealth of experience, she offers her readers the motivation, the methods, and the material to do so.
This volume is an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to protect Israel and the Jewish people from the calumnies that have become so prevalent in the Western world.
Follow the writer at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.
FIGHTING THE HATE: A HANDBOOK FOR JEWS UNDER SIEGE
By Melanie Phillips
Wicked Son
160 pages; $19