Talking with conservatives

Walking into a friendly room with an adversarial script is the fastest way to lose somebody who was already with you. Almost everything on this page follows from that. You need no title and nobody’s permission, and you can decline any of these conversations.

The good news, and it is the reason this is worth your evening. Most of what you need is already in the room. That a people with a homeland is entitled to govern itself. That a rule applied to one country and nowhere else was never a rule. That a minority gets left alone to worship, and that the long history counts for more than the current news cycle. You are not importing an argument into a hostile tradition. You are asking it to run its own principles over one more case, and mostly it will.

So the register is the risk here, not the argument. This page carries no facts about the conflict, which is what the claim entries are for.

The values to argue from

You move people by showing that their own framework, applied consistently, already contains the answer. Here you are not fighting it.

A people entitled to a state. National self-determination needs no selling in this tradition. The move is to ask for consistency rather than sympathy.

“You believe a people with a shared history and a homeland is entitled to govern itself. I’m asking you to apply that to one more people, not to make an exception for one.”

The rule of law, and rules applied evenly. Scepticism about international bodies that reach for one standard and then a different one lives here already. Use it as their argument, not yours. The entry on singling out argues it properly, so send that.

“Either the rule applies to everybody or it isn’t a rule. That’s your principle. I’m asking where else you’ve seen it used.”

Religious liberty, and minority communities left alone to practise. A tradition that defends a congregation’s right to worship unguarded already has a reason to care what happens outside a synagogue.

“A community that needs security on the door of its primary school is not a community with too much power.”

The long historical view. This lands here more than anywhere else, and it is where an advocate is most likely to get a date wrong in public. Hand it over rather than perform it. The historical case is the strongest part of this, and sending it beats a half-remembered version.

Say the plain thing about the record

There is a true sentence about the recent record that advocates deliver in euphemism, and the euphemism is why it does not land. Say it with the date and the finding in it.

In October 2020 the Equality and Human Rights Commission served an unlawful act notice on the Labour Party, finding it responsible for three breaches of the Equality Act 2010, one of them unlawful harassment of Jewish members. A statutory regulator, not a newspaper and not a campaign group. No British party of the right carries a finding like it.

“I’ll say the obvious thing rather than dance round it. The only party a regulator has found liable for harassing Jews is one I’d usually have voted for. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

Now the sentence that follows it, in the same breath. That finding is about one party at one time, and it is a clean bill of health for nobody. Antisemitism in this tradition is real and two sections below is about it. Say the specific thing that is true, and do not let it swell into the general thing that is not.

Somebody who hears you refuse the easy version will believe you on the hard one.

What the support rests on

A warning before you use any of this. Refusing an offer in public turns a private judgement into a fight you did not choose, and the people watching will not have your context. Decide privately, early, and once.

Start with what is not a problem. Christian Zionist support for Israel is substantial, long-standing and overwhelmingly sincere, and steadier than most of what is on offer. Some Jews are uneasy about the theology behind some of it, and that unease is worth understanding, because it explains reactions a Christian friend may otherwise find hurtful. You are allowed to accept support you find theologically uncomfortable, and to say so if asked.

Concern about Islamist antisemitism is not a problem either. It is rational, evidenced, and shared by the people who compile the incident figures. The page on modern antisemitism names Islamist movements as one of three streams and says why. Somebody raising it is telling you something true, and hearing it as a position to be managed is the fastest way to lose them.

The narrow thing that is different. Research on the far right’s turn towards pro-Jewish positioning describes it working as a shield against accusations of racism, making a politics about immigration look respectable. There, Jews are the character reference rather than the point. That is a claim about one positioning and nothing else.

How to tell the two apart. One question does most of the work. Does this person talk about antisemitism when the perpetrator is not a Muslim? Somebody whose subject is antisemitism names it wherever it comes from. It is fair in both directions, worth asking of anybody who names it in one place only, whichever place that is, and plenty of people pass it easily.

People who are loudly pro-Israel and openly hostile to Jews. Older than it looks. Historians of the far right describe a recurring good Jew and bad Jew distinction: one kind praised as authentic and national, another condemned as cosmopolitan or disloyal. Support for the state alongside contempt for the neighbours is not a contradiction inside that framework. It is the framework.

Two more questions, and a test

1. Does it survive disagreement? Say something they will not like and watch. Allies argue with you. Users go quiet or get cold.
2. Does it need somebody else to be the villain? Support that stops making sense once you remove the hostility to another group was never support for you. Disliking a movement is not that. Needing an enemy is.

And one to remember. The read-aloud test: find what that person has said about Jews when Israel was not the subject, and read it out loud. If you would not repeat it to the people you are asking to trust you, do not stand next to it.

Taking the help without buying the reason

Almost always you can accept a vote or a signature without signing up to anybody’s motives. Say what you are accepting and what you are not.

“I’ll take the vote and I’ll thank you for it. I’m not signing up to the reason, and I’ll say that if anybody asks me.”

Refuse when the association is the point. If what is wanted is a photograph or your name beside theirs, that is the whole transaction.

“I’m not going to appear alongside you. I’d rather tell you why myself than let you hear it second hand. It’s what you say about Jews when this subject isn’t in the room.”

Antisemitism on this side, argued from inside it

The version that arrives here is about hidden financiers behind visible events. The Anti-Defamation League’s work on the power myth records “globalist” functioning as a codeword for Jew. The replacement narrative, casting Jews as engineering demographic change, is the same architecture with a new front on it.

Argue it from inside the tradition, because the tools are there. A person who believes in individual responsibility and in loyalty to a country can refuse a story that explains the world by a hidden hand.

“You don’t accept that argument anywhere else. When somebody says the system is rigged and nothing anybody does makes a difference, you call it an excuse. This is that argument with a name attached to it.”

“Tell me the person and what they did, and I’ll argue about it with you. Once it’s ‘they’, I can’t tell what’s being claimed. I don’t think you can either.”

Where this backfires, and it does. Delivered as instruction about somebody’s own tradition it fails on contact, however right it is. Most people repeating a coded phrase are using it rather than defending it, so ask before you tell. The entries on Jewish control and dual loyalty do the arguing. Your job is the question.

Four moves that lose the room

Assuming hostility from somebody on your side. They notice, and it lasts longer than the argument did.

Lecturing somebody about their own tradition. You are a guest in it.

Treating support as suspect until proven clean. Almost all of it is meant, and word gets around about people who audit their friends.

Accepting an alliance without asking what it is for. Not asking is itself a decision, and it is the one that gets discovered in public.

The hard part

Now and again what is offered is really about something else, and Jews are there as proof that a politics is respectable rather than as the reason for it. That is rare, and it is not the same as an ally whose reasons are not yours. Telling it apart early is worth far more than finding out later with cameras present.

Finding this depressing is the correct response, not a sign you are unsuited to it.

What you would accept, and what you would not

Fill in the blanks166 words

Two questions from memory. Which of their three principles are you arguing from, and can you say it in the words they would use? And what is the read-aloud test, and what does a failure of it sound like?

Then, thirty minutes. Take the written-down offer of support in your materials. Run the questions over it, then the read-aloud test. Write one sentence on what you would accept from that person and one on what you would not. Do it alone, or with two others who would tell you if you were wrong.

Your plan. If somebody offers help on grounds I am unsure about, then I will thank them, say nothing about the grounds in the moment, and run the questions the same evening before I reply.

Your coping plan. If a coded phrase comes up in a friendly conversation, then I will ask what they mean by it and stop there, rather than name it and lose somebody who would have thought about it.