Financial Times legitimizes ‘dual loyalty’ trope

An April 19th Financial Times review, by John Sawers, of a book by former US official Steven Simon, “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East”, includes the following:

Ensuring Israel’s security has been a point of continuity between US administrations. But attempts to find a solution to the Palestinian question were left until late in the day — and all of them foundered. Simon, who is Jewish himself, raises the sensitive question of whether the largely Jewish team that led US policy on Israel-Palestine through successive administrations was so committed to meeting Israel’s goals that they were never able to deliver a result.

Simon’s Jewish background doesn’t excuse the fact that he evidently promoted the dual loyalty charge – the accusation that Jewish citizens of the US, UK or elsewhere are more loyal to Israel than their own country – a toxic trope that is casually legitmised by the FT writer.

The reason why the IHRA Working Definition defines, as an example of antisemitism, “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations”, a variation of the more general antisemitic accusation that Jews can’t be trusted, is because its been used for centuries to discriminate against, vilify and massacre Jews.

As we’ve noted on these pages, the dual loyalty charge was previously employed by the Financial Times in 2017 – a fact that was noted in CST’s annual report on antisemitic discourse in Britain.

Dispiritingly, polls show that the dual loyalty trope still resonates in many democratic countries – including in the UK, where one-third of the population believes that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/to the countries they live in]”.

Moreover, the FT is wrong on the facts.  The failure of the US sponsored peace talks in the late 90s and early 2000s was not because of the religious background of many of President Clinton’s negotiators, but because Yasser Arafat said no at Camp David in 2000, and at Taba in early 2001.  He said no to offers that would have created, for the first time in history, a sovereign Palestinian state.

So, not only did the FT journalist casually legitimize an antisemitic trope, he embraced the illiberal ideology which holds that any group perceived as the weaker side in a dispute can’t be held responsible for their bad decisions, and that, instead, there must be some external or systemic explanation for their social or political failures.

The reason why the US wasn’t able to “deliver” peace wasn’t due to the fact that Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, Robert Malley and Daniel Kurtzer were Jewish.  It was because a belligerent Palestinian leader decided that continuing the war against the Jewish state was far more appealing than making the compromises necessary to achieve peace.

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