The Jews

by Hilaire Belloc

The characteristic of all this feeling is two-fold. In the first place, as would seem to be the case with convention, though in a much greater degree, it dams up and enormously increases the latent force of anger against Jewish power both real and imaginary. It is like the piling up of a head of water when a river valley is obstructed, or like the introducing of resistance into an electric current. The suppression of resentment, though that suppression is the act of the men who themselves feel the resentment and not directly of their opponents, is a fierce irritant and accounts for the high pressure at which attack escapes when once it is loosened.

I speak only of hostility and of attack, for it is in these least rational examples that the strength of the thing is to be found. But it applies also to mere discussion. There is hardly anyone to-day who does not desire to discuss as an urgent political problem the present position, the present power, the present disabilities, the present claims of Israel. But for one that will openly discuss these things there are ten who, in varying degrees, forbid themselves so plain a freedom of speech in dread of what consequences might follow. It has, like all panic, a ridiculous element. It is informed by the most absurd illusions; it suffers from grotesque imaginings and phantasms. In some this dread of the Jewish power has very plainly passed the line which divides the stable from the unstable mind and even the sane from the insane. But it is none the less a formidable element in our problem. This obstacle, much more than that of convention, bears a character of rigidity. It works for a certain time, then it breaks down and releases a flood.

That is why the first expressions of hostility in our time were so exaggerated and ill-proportioned. That is why so many of them were plainly mad. This very character of exaggeration, this very wildness in proportion, rendered those against whom the attack was delivered more contemptuous of it than they should have been.

The forerunners of the present movement—I mean, of the movement hostile to Israel—were not calculated to excite the respect of their opponent or even to carry with them the men on their own side. They lacked that "common" sense which is the first quality of leadership. For the power of leadership implies a soul in common with those who are led. The enthusiast can lead permanently, but the extravagant man never for long.

I say that these first attacks were on that account despised: they were unduly despised by those whom they menaced.

There lay in reserve behind all the exaggeration and wildness a great bulk of very different opinion; the opinion of men normal in their appreciation of values and of proportion, not given to "seeing things," fully in touch with reality; men who know that they have hitherto only been silent through the action of fear, who despise themselves on that account and who are the more ready to act. For the sense of fear not only degrades but angers: at least in our race. The European who admits to himself that he has restrained an instinct not from religion, nor from a general sense of right, but from cowardice, is always angry with himself and awaits the moment when he can take his own revenge upon his own past and clear himself of reproach in his own eyes.

Herein lies the peril to Israel of such a state of affairs. But with that I am not here concerned. I am only concerned with its effect upon ourselves. So long as we degrade ourselves, so long as we humiliate ourselves by our own cowardice, so long as we shirk all reasonable discussion, let alone all expression of hostility because we dread the consequences at the hands of our opponents, so long there are present in rising intensity two evil things: first, the postponement of the right solution; secondly, the turning of a reasoned policy into mere hatred with all the consequences that flow from such evil emotion.

The longer we maintain whatever remains of that barrier to free speech (happily it is already crumbling) the longer do we produce the two fatal results of postponing justice and of creating enmity. The destruction of that barrier, the ridding of ourselves of fear in the matter, is, as is always the case in the exercising of this unmanly thing, a matter for individual effort. As the proverb goes, "Some one must bell the cat," which is another way of saying that if each man waits upon his neighbour, things will only grow worse and worse.

It is for each in his place, before it is too late, to approach the Jewish problem and to discuss it openly; to preface that discussion by a frank interest and a general expression upon all those things in the minority which directly concern its relations with the majority; to deal with the Jewish nation exactly as one would with any other.