From the essay:
We are drifting towards some pretty bad times, drifting, that is, with a little help. Meanings drift or, rather, are being shifted, from what were once reasonably secure positions (no meaning is ever completely secure). So the state that in 1972 was pointed out to me by a mild anarchist tutor as a left-stage societal model has, since 1973 and the petrol crisis that put Europe under pressure, found itself being shifted into the wings of the unspeakable right, and is now regarded by some as genocidal, fascistic, racist, not simply now, but from its very origins; not just in its actions but in its very being.
The products of drifting are loss of focus, blurring, the creation of a haze in which to point at one part of the blur is to point at the whole. So blur becomes smear. So a senior academic last year showing me a batch of poems, including a satire of sorts against Israel, could confide in me: ‘That’s one in the eye for the Jews.’ For Israel is indeed a Jewish state and people naturally grow tired of trying to make fine distinctions between a religion and a state comprised primarily of people of that religion. When I hear Sue Blackwell talk of the ‘centuries of oppression’ of Palestinians, I can see the shifting on a larger scale. I see heavy and monstrous tags being dragged across various fine distinctions, until the distinctions no longer matter.
I don’t think I need to refer to the circumstances of the creation of the state of Israel. That history is better discussed by others. What I know, and know deep in my nerves, is that Jews always are, always have been and are likely to continue to be an endangered species: endangered in Europe above all. Israel is not in Europe. It is however a small country surrounded by hostile others that would wish to be rid of it and its people. That has been the case since its founding and is the case now.
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