Roald Dahl’s genteel anti-Semitism is tragically all too alive in today’s Britain

One of the many confounding contradictions in the Jewish experience is that, on the one hand, Jews are made to feel as if they are making everything “about themselves”, when really, we are often told, “nobody cares”.

But on the other hand – and this is especially obvious following major military action by Israel – everything points to a genuine, quantifiable global obsession with us, so powerful it can shift policy, culture and even the law itself.

In British politics, 2,000 miles from Israel, four pro-Palestinian independent MPs were elected last year on a platform of antipathy towards the Jewish state.

And on stage, the most buzzed about play in London right now is Giant – Mark Rosenblatt’s drama about Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitism. After its acclaimed run at the Royal Court last autumn, it is opening in the West End in two weeks’ time.

The play is based on an imagined conference with his Jewish publishers, convened to manage the fallout of the 1983 review Dahl wrote in the Literary Review of the book God Cried, about the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982.

Gathered are Dahl’s real-life London publisher, Tom Maschler, played by Elliot Levey, and the fictional fiery New York progressive Jessie Stone, plus Dahl’s conflict-averse lover Liccy.

The conversation takes place in Dahl’s Bedfordshire home, which is being renovated. He has divorced his wife, is about to marry Liccy, and is on the verge of publishing The Witches. He is not particularly worried – rightly. He never did have anything to fear by way of consequences.

This despite the fact that Dahl’s anti-Semitism was straightforward and explicit, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. He made clear that he bought every last trope, from blood libel to effeminacy and cowardice, to control of the world’s purse-strings.

“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” wrote Dahl. “Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion. It is as though a group of much-loved nuns in charge of an orphanage had suddenly turned around and started murdering all the children.” Charming.

Mourning his rose-tinted memories of pre-Israel Muslim Palestinians, he blames “the Jews” who “came pouring in with American money and American guns and created the State of Israel and out went the Palestinians”.

He goes on and on with his deranged version of history: “We also know all about the wars with Egypt and Syria which need never have taken place if only Israel had stuck to her part of the bargain and been willing to share the land with those she had kicked out. We know all that. But what we had not seen until June 1982 was a new and violently aggressive Israel whose armed forces moved in Lebanon and murdered more than 25,000 people, mostly civilian men, women and children, and severely injured…” The latter canard, about Israel as thirsty for the blood of innocents, is achingly familiar.

Good for Rosenblatt for zoning in on the review. It has it all, showing how Israel functions as an irresistible magnet and obsession for anti-Semites. As recalled by the priest and writer Michael Coren, a real-life off-stage character in Giant, Dahl moved easily between loathing of Israel in full-throated anti-Semitic language, to not even bothering with the Israel bit.

Coren wrote recently about an interview he had with Dahl for the New Statesman, following the publication of the review, in which the author of James and the Giant Peach noted: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

All this might have seemed shocking once. But no longer. The bit excusing Hitler could be found on any number of social media accounts, including by public figures, in recent years. Reading Dahl’s review, I felt recognition and familiarity, the sense that Dahl is just saying with bluntness what our culture swims with, from high to low culture: the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel (as opposed to “criticism”), and with that, the implication that “never again” should be struck off the list of post-Holocaust ethical axioms.

Israel is the backstop and the guarantee for “never again”, so those whose passions equate to denying Israel security and safety at best, and at worst (though they mean the same thing), saying the whole Jewish state is an illegitimate and evil enterprise we ought to commit ourselves to punishing or dismantling, are the children of Dahl – just with less talent.

So the play, which I have no doubt is as finely crafted as the reviews say it is, is not one I plan to see; I’d feel like I was sitting at a real dinner table in 21st-century Britain or America, and not in a good way. That Dahl is humanised and his genius not underplayed or diluted is welcome, but it’s not a spectacle I’d choose for a night off.

What Rosenblatt is doing admirably is forcing a kind of reckoning. Dahl’s anti-Semitism never seemed to cause him, or society, any real trouble – apart from the roiling rage it inspired in Jews who knew of it, but who (like my parents) none the less continued reading his stories.

Today too, vicious expressions of anti-Zionism, which slip into clear anti-Semitism, only leave a short-term ripple of disapproval, if that. At most there is some not-really-cancelling of its starrier proponents. It’s good that the artwork of both Dahl and his anti-Semitic successors remain uncancelled; it’s just a shame that his lifelong obsession with Jews and Israel, to the point of speaking defensively of Hitler, is not nearly as unfamiliar as it ought to be.