Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Is Levy a victim of racism?

What with a Tory MP sacked by David Cameron from the front bench after saying that plenty of ethnic minority soldiers are "idle and useless", and with footage of policemen punching a young black woman outside a Sheffield nightclub, it was a vivid week for race relations. But there was one other story in that field almost more striking, one connected with the cash-for-honours affair.

After a failed attempt to stifle publication by injunction, we learnt the latest allegations about Lord Levy, Tony Blair's fundraiser-in-chief. And we heard another startling allegation from Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, Levy's friend and rabbi. Not only was Levy being made a scapegoat, the case had anti-Semitic overtones. "The Jewish community is becoming increasingly more sensitive that there's the one Jew seemingly being hung out to dry out here," he said. This has been said before. In The Guardian last year, Jonathan Freedland said the "Jewish community have long detected old-fashioned prejudice" in phrases such as "flamboyant north London businessman" regularly used about Levy. In yesterday's Independent, David Rowan, editor of The Jewish Chronicle, reiterated anxieties that Levy may be "scapegoated as the traditional outsider-turned-court-Jew whose casting out might finally purge the corrupt body politic", and deplored "the unashamedly anti-Semitic and conspiratorial rhetoric surrounding him".

No one reading this will disagree that anti-Semitism is odious at best and murderous at worst. If what Schochet said were true, and if the seeming apprehension of British Jews were justified, it would be a very grave matter. But is it true? Not that this is the first time that the question has been raised at Westminster. Rowan reminded us of Tam Dalyell's offensive suggestion four years ago that there was a "cabal" of Jewish advisers influencing Blair. At the time of the Westland affair in 1986, it was suggested that Leon Brittan was being made a scapegoat by Bernard Ingham, the Downing Street press officer, if not by Margaret Thatcher herself. Since Brittan was Jewish, at least one journalist detected prejudice in the way that he had been treated.

The spectre of anti-Semitism is, of course, much older, not least in British politics. We may like to think in a self-congratulatory way that Jews have been better treated here than in most other countries, but there is another side to it.

Although it was extraordinary that a man bearing the name of Benjamin Disraeli could reach No 10 as long ago as 1868, this was far from universally welcomed: the widow of another premier, Lady Palmerston, spoke for many in her class who were "very disgusted" to have a Jew as prime minister. Since then, other Jews in public life have enjoyed mixed fortunes. In the early decades of the last century, three men became prominent in Liberal politics, Rufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel and Edwin Montagu. Although they rose high, none of them was allowed to forget where he came from. Asquith's private sneering at "the Assyrian" Montagu, and Lloyd George's at Samuel, speak for themselves.

Samuel and Montagu, who were cousins (and both non-religious) embodied a fierce division of opinion about Zionism within Anglo-Jewry. Samuel became a strong supporter of the project, and then first high commissioner for Palestine when it was made a British mandatory territory after the First World War. But Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, was intensely hostile to the Balfour Declaration and the idea of a Jewish homeland, let alone state, bitterly asking colleagues why they disliked him so much that they wanted to pack him off to an oriental ghetto.

And the echoes of prejudice were more than audible at that time. Poor Samuel was mocked both by H G Wells in his novel The New Machiavelli as "Lewis, a brilliant representative of his race, able, industrious and invariably uninspired", and by Hilaire Belloc when he was chosen by "the Jews", as Belloc predictably said, as high commissioner.

When Isaacs was embroiled in the Marconi scandal, amid well-founded accusations of what we now call insider dealing and conflict of interest, it was he who attracted most of the obloquy. His conduct was certainly shady, but no more so than that of Lloyd George and Alexander Murray, also in on the deal. Yet no one said that their greed was characteristic of the Welsh or the Scottish. Only Isaacs was pilloried as a Jew.

Later in the century, Margaret Thatcher was famously philosemitic, to the degree that five Jewish ministers served in her Cabinets. This prompted Harold Macmillan's witticism that Tory Cabinets were once full of Old Etonians but now they were all old Estonians. That could be put more bluntly: Alan Clark recorded the complaint at a dinner of Tory MPs that there were "too many Jewboys in the Cabinet".

If some degree of anti-Semitism has persisted in England, isn't the suggestion that this is a factor in Levy's case at least plausible? Maybe, but not even everyone in the Jewish community agrees.

On Friday, Sir Alan Sugar said that Levy was a scapegoat who had "been set up as a bad guy", and observed accurately that Levy's "blind devotion to Tony Blair" had been ill-rewarded. But he also added that "I would steer away from the anti-Semitism thing".

It's one thing to say that Levy has been left "twisting in the wind", as his rabbi puts it. That would indeed be all too typical of the Downing Street junta. After all, six years ago Blair most unjustly sacrificed Peter Mandelson, his closest lieutenant, who was forced out of the Cabinet for reasons of short-term expediency and to gratify Alastair Campbell's appetite for news management. But the charge made by Schochet needs to be used with great caution. The more seriously we take the scourge of anti-Semitism, the more important it is that it should not be raised frivolously, and that it should not be a mere reflex to any criticism of an individual Jew - or of the Jewish state.

Many Israelis, and friends of Israel, will say in a formal way that such criticism is not inherently anti-Semitic, but that is not what visceral response always says about inner feelings. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and with Beirut controlled by the Israeli army, Phalangist militiamen were allowed to enter two Palestinian refugee camps and carry out massacres. An Israeli inquiry later made clear that the Israeli army, and in particular Ariel Sharon, bore indirect but unarguable responsibility for this, as most people had already concluded. But the reaction of the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, was to say that "goy kills goy and they come to hang the Jew". Those unhappy words might be a warning.

Interestingly, in a case across the Atlantic paralleling that of Levy the same spectre hasn't been raised. Lewis Libby, former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, has just been convicted of perjury, and there has been a vigorous debate for and against him. But in all the American coverage I have seen, no one has quoted what Jack Straw (of Jewish descent) said at the time he was Foreign Secretary: "On any given day it's a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Americans or the Israelis." Nor has anyone in Washington suggested he was being "hung out" because he is Jewish.

As to Levy, if the point is pressed, one has to say that he is a flamboyant north London businessman, a backslapping wheeler-dealing tummler who made his money from kitschy pop music. This is not, after all, some towering figure of the greatest cultural and moral stature in whom the whole nation as well as the Jewish community can take deep pride. Several people who are neither enemies of the Government nor touched with bigotry say the Prime Minister's patronage of the man is one more example of Blair's remarkable lack of judgement.

Levy was quite obviously a most unsuitable person to be a party fundraiser, and still more ill-chosen for his bizarre role as Blair's personal Middle East envoy. That is not a question of sinister cabals. An Asian British businessman might well contribute to the Labour party and also do true service to the state. But would a London millionaire of Pakistani origin, who was strongly committed to his ancestral land in the Kashmir conflict, be an appropriate envoy from Downing Street to the subcontinent? After what happened in the past century, it might seem vulgar or even crazy to speak of Jewish paranoia, but we all know that sensitivity to slights can sometimes detect them where they don't exist.

Some years ago, there was a cartoon in a Tel Aviv newspaper showing a mighty Israeli armoured column as it plunges deep into the desert of Araby. In the corner, a tiny old lady dressed in black is shaking her fist at the incursion. "You see?" one Israeli soldier in the leading armoured vehicle is saying to another: "Anti-Semitism even here." It's good to see Jewish humour and irony have survived in the Jewish state. It might not be a bad idea if Rabbi Schochet and David Rowan hung that cartoon in their offices.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include 'The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Continuing Jewish Dilemma', which won an American National Jewish Book Award, and the newly published 'Yo, Blair!'

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