The job of press attache at the Israeli embassy in London is traditionally a tough one, the equivalent, I imagine, of being sent to the salt mines in Tsarist Russia. Their task is not so much to identify and call out antisemitism in the newspapers – hooked-nose caricatures of moneybagged Jews have become mercifully rare – as to ensure that it does not mutate into a more politically acceptable but still insidious anti-Zionism. This is the book for these press wranglers: the transition from ancient Jew-hate to 21st-century Israel-hate is the subject of Jake Wallis Simons’s Israelophobia, which is part polemic, part handbook for dealing with anti-Zionism.
The book kicks off with a neat bit of reportage outside the Israeli embassy in London. Demonstrators
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