The novelist Howard Jacobson had already written a number of books, many of them about the British Jewish community, when he won the Booker Prize for “The Finkler Question,” in 2010, which the New York Times’ Janet Maslin called a “riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity.” In a review in this magazine, James Wood was more critical than the consensus, writing that the novel was “always shading toward the atavistic and reactionary,” and adding, “Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying.” Jacobson is also a prolific writer and commentator on current events, and on Judaism in the United Kingdom; he’s spoken out against Brexit, and raised concerns about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. His most recent novel is called “What Will Survive Of Us.”
Since Hamas’s attack on October 7th, which killed approximately twelve hundred Israelis, Jacobson has been increasingly outspoken about antisemitism, and critical of those who question Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than forty-two thousand people. Earlier this month, in a controversial piece published in the Observer, Jacobson wrote that the sustained media coverage of children being killed in Gaza was functioning as a new “blood libel” against the Jewish people. “Such bias as I have described—conscious or not—has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live,” Jacobson wrote. “The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.”
I recently spoke by phone with Jacobson. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his views about Israeli military tactics, his concerns about how Jews are being treated in the U.K., and whether the coverage of dead children in Gaza is the result of antisemitism.
What is it that you have wanted to get across to readers since October 7th?
I was in such a confusion of fear and stress and upset and then rage. The fear and the upset—and the heartbreak—was the massacre itself. And then the speed of the response to the aftermath of the massacre was so hideous, so unexpected, such a kind of topsy-turvy version of what we normally expect a response to a catastrophe to be, that it just threw me into half confusion, half fury. What the hell was going on that people could turn like that on the people who’d been attacked? All those people who said, “No, no, hang on, don’t talk about antisemitism. This is anti-Zionism.” All that went as the people attacking Israel couldn’t remember if they were attacking Jews, Israelis, Zionists. I thought, The world that I live in is not the world I knew. It’s changed and I still feel that. I’m living in a world I don’t recognize and find it very hard to comprehend.
After October 7th, there was a rise in antisemitic incidents in many countries. But there was also strong support for Israel, including diplomatic and military support, from almost every powerful Western country.
It was ambiguous but certainly stronger even than what I’ve just suggested. And here was another extraordinary phenomenon: suddenly you could trust the government but you couldn’t trust the people. Governments were sound; people were flaky. Much of this irrationality was coming from institutions of higher education. That was the bewildering thing. And I suppose because I’m an academic at heart and was a lecturer for many years before I became a full-time writer, I looked to that.
After the war in Gaza started and there were all these civilian casualties, we saw Israel intentionally denying humanitarian aid to people who were starving. What should the response from people have been at that point?
That’s not something I can say because I don’t know what my own response should have been. I trusted no one and I trusted no report. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t see some pictures on television. The BBC has been appalling. It just showed you pictures, unbearable pictures, heartbreaking pictures of dying babies every night, but any war would look appalling if you just showed the suffering of the women and children.
So, I thought, Who am I to believe here? I read a lot of people; I believed some, and I didn’t believe others. It’s turned out very badly and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is contemptible. I have no doubt about all that, but that didn’t mean that something didn’t need doing. There was no alternative to it. Israel had to try and get Hamas. I thought Netanyahu’s belief that he could wipe out Hamas was stupid. So I felt that this war had to be prosecuted. If a war is prosecuted, it will be ugly.
I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like “Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I can’t really comment on that.” Is that right?
Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant. One got accounts and accounts and accounts and it was very hard to know what was the truth.
Well, just for example, the American government, which has been very supportive of Israel and has kept sending them weapons, has tacitly acknowledged that Israel intentionally denied humanitarian aid. Lots of humanitarian groups have said the same thing.
Well, if Israel was doing that, then what can one feel except that it’s monstrous? I’ve said one has to balance these things. This thing has got to be done. Did it have to be done quite so cruelly? No. Did it have to be done so . . . See, I’m very worried about the indiscriminate and the disproportionate. I’ve got snagged up on the disproportionate argument and the indiscriminate argument. The disproportionate one I can’t buy because I don’t know how you’d measure what you have to do after that massacre. We know we can’t measure life for life. I don’t buy the disproportionate. I don’t buy it.
So you’re saying the idea that twelve hundred Israelis were killed and now forty-two thousand Gazans have been killed—that comparing the two in itself is not any sort of argument?
Well, all right, Isaac, what’s the figure you’d choose?
I was just trying to clarify what you meant.
I don’t know how you do the mathematics of this, and I’m not going to say the “mathematics of revenge” because, while of course there was an element of revenge, and you wanted it not to be revenge, you didn’t want it to be a punishment either. I hated that word—“punishment.” I think the justification for what Israel did was to try to make sure that this never happened again. And I think in the attempt to make sure that this never happened again, the numbers were going to inevitably have to be high. If you’re a terrorist, you do hide yourself in schools and hospitals. So if the Israelis are going to get you, they’re going to have to attack those things.
If it’s a war crime to hide in a hospital, it’s also a war crime to indiscriminately bomb a hospital.
Well, you’ve just used rhetoric. Indiscriminately. Well, what’s indiscrimination? If you’re trying to go after people who are hiding there, how do you get them if you have to be discriminant? What do you do?
You have to make a judgment about balancing civilian casualties with war.
I’d like to think that Israel has in the main done that.
Does how they have fought the war in the past year, let alone what members of the Israeli government think of Palestinians, make you think that they’re trying to do that?
I would like to think Israel has done its best. Some people will laugh in my face, but I haven’t been convinced that they have been wildly indiscriminate. One or two people in Netanyahu’s cabinet have said the most appalling things. And if they were just taken out right now, removed from government, I would be perfectly happy. The current Israeli administration has no imagination for what it might be to be a Palestinian, I feel that with a great passion. There has been cruelty in this government.
