I am using today’s posting to recommend a landmark new book by Anthony Julius, one of Britain’s top lawyers and academics. “Trials of the Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England” (see link below), is the first comprehensive study of English anti-Semitism ever to have been published.

At more than 800 pages it is a tome to be reckoned with. But do not allow its length to put you off. It is magnificently written and can be read either from cover to cover or as a reference book to be dipped into whenever the need arises.

this exhilarating work nails a defamation which to humanity's discredit, persists to this hour. Indispensible. (Howard Jacobson)

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A rare voice of sanity in the British establishment, Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, has mounted another devastating defence of Israel. In a speech at the annual dinner (which I attended) of the UK’s Zionist Federation in London last night, Kemp even revealed that prior to his deployment in Afghanistan a four hour briefing by a top Israeli general had been instrumental in formulating British tactics and strategy on how to deal with Taliban suicide bombers.

To my knowledge, such an intimate strategic relationship on such a sensitive matter has never before been revealed. If it has, it has certainly not received widespread coverage in the UK press.

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In an interview with the French newspaper Journal du Dimanche on Saturday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner outlines his views on the Dubai assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. He also talks about the desirability of Europe and the international community recognising a Palestinian state regardless of whether Israel gives its consent and even before agreement has been reached on the state’s borders.

I offer my translation from the original French of those parts of the interview which deal with Israel and make some comments of my own below it. I submit that both the questions and the answers provide stark illustration of many of the guiding assumptions of French policy in the Middle East.

Here is my translation with the headline and the questions in bold:

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There is something very strange going on in Britain, and Israel’s detractors are hopping mad. Not, I hasten to add over the apparent use by the Mossad of six British passports in the assassination in Dubai of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Criticism on that score is both reasonable and necessary. No country can allow its passports to be used by a foreign state, let alone in the course of a secret service hit job. Britain is no exception.

What vexes them is not so much the use of the passports per se as the fact that the kind of hyserical public furore that we have come to expect whenever a stick presents itself for the beating of Israel has singularly failed to materialise. On the contrary, large sections of the British press have responded with barely disguised awe at the audacious operation that the Israelis had the balls to carry out.

The usual suspects in the Guardian and the BBC look uncommonly isolated. Witness BBC MidEast Editor Jeremy Bowen on World Service Television this morning.

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In a rare piece of good news from the UK, Baroness Tonge has been dismissed as spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat Party in the House of Lords after suggesting that Israel should investigate claims that members of its relief team in Haiti had been harvesting bodily organs and selling them on the black market.

Tonge has a sordid record of anti-Israel extremism. In 2004, she even went on record as saying she might have become a suicide bomber had she been born a Palestinian.

In her latest outburst, she associated herself with a medieval-style blood libel which was started last year by Sweden’s top selling newspaper Aftonbladet. The paper claimed that Israeli soldiers were murdering Palestinian children in order to harvest their bodily organs and sell them on the black market, possibly in conjunction with Jews in the United States. After Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt refused to distance his country from the story it spread like wildfire across the Muslim world and beyond.

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