Jonathan Freedland's article (Antisemitism does not always come doing a Nazi salute, 5 October) rightly pointed out how Jewish people and other ethnic and religious groups are discriminated against and criticised in many subtle ways. It is always deplorable. Whether or not the Daily Mail intended to be antisemitic we shall probably never know, but I wholeheartedly condemn that newspaper for its story about Ralph Miliband and its insensitivity towards his family.
What Freedland and many other commentators refuse to accept, however, is that criticism of Israel and Zionists who support that country is not antisemitism. It is anti-Israeli government, pure and simple. When I refer to Israel and the Israel lobby I mean just that. For me it has nothing to do with Jewish people in general. We are drawing attention to Israel's disregard of international law and its apartheid system at home, causing huge suffering to the Palestinians and danger to the wider Middle East.
Freedland does no favours to Jewish people worldwide to look for antisemitism where none exists. Many of them deplore the policies of the Israeli government as much as I do. To accuse people of antisemitism in these circumstances does a disservice to Jewish people and protects Israel from the condemnation it deserves.
Jenny Tonge
House of Lords
• Jonathan Freedland comments perceptively on the Daily Mail's attack on the late Ralph Miliband. A wider perspective is offered by David Nirenberg's magisterial study, Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg demonstrates the role that Judaism, as distinct from the activities or even presence of actual Jews, has played, and continues to play, in enabling Christian and Islamic societies to make sense of, and attempt to resolve, problems within their own cultures.
Historically, such problems tended to be religious, but in more recent times they are likely to relate to issues of economic and social power. Thus linking a generalised, malign representation of Judaism to either the control of economic resources (Jew bankers etc) or to a critique of economic power structures (communist/Jewish conspiracies) becomes a useful – indeed indispensable – tool for established elites, some of which may, indeed, include individual Jews. In this context it is interesting, for example, to reflect on the activities of Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, etc who were active during the period that Miliband and others were publicly developing and refining critiques of capitalist power structures. The Cambridge four (or five), undiscovered largely due to their impeccable establishment credentials, could indeed betray the country they hated for decades.
David Willow
Dublin, Ireland
• After such a successful Labour conference, no one can be surprised that the Daily Mail sought to discredit the Labour leader through association with a distorted version of his late father's Marxist politics. But this slur could have taken many forms. By falsely portraying Ralph Miliband as an eternal outsider who "hated Britain" and left an "evil legacy", doubt could be cast on whether his son is sufficiently "one of us" to become prime minister. To completely disassociate this portrayal from the long heritage of characterising Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans" in thrall to either international socialism or international capitalism would be like failing to make the link between those who cast doubt on President Barack Obama's birthplace with centuries of rampant racism.
Francesca Klug
London
• It was brave of Jonathan Freedland to write about antisemitism and I share much of his analysis. But, as one occasionally accused of just that because of my trenchant criticism, in and out of parliament, of Israel's policies and conduct in the West Bank and Gaza, may I mention three issues which, had he addressed them, would have afforded his article even more balance? First, the very many Jews (here and in Israel) who despair of what Israel is doing in Palestine and dare to say so publicly are apt to be blasted as "self-hating". Second, in my own experience, the charge of antisemitism is more often than not deployed to shut one up – aimed, if you like, at the person and not the issues. For one brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, such would-be censors know that the word carries uniquely vile connotations. Third, what Israel continues doing in the West Bank and Gaza is losing it sympathy far and wide, and in the medium- to long-term threatening its very existence. It also provides a cover for real antisemitism.
Andrew Phillips
House of Lords
• Your correspondent Josephine Bacon (Letters, 2 October) imputes to me hostility to Israel because I am critical and fearful of policies it pursues. Far from it: most of my immediate family are Israelis and my grandfather more than a century ago was an early protagonist for the Jewish state and a colleague of Theodor Herzl. My stance is simply that, until it comes to terms with and tackles the root cause of Arab and Muslim antipathy, the expropriation and colonisation of large swaths of Palestinian lands and its denial of justice to Palestinians, Israel will always be regarded as a pariah state and its long-term survival will never be assured. My desire and the object of my critique is to see an Israel in a secure peace and friendship with its neighbours and that will never be achieved in a perpetually militarised Middle East always on the brink of annihilation.
Benedict Birnberg
London
• I agree with Jonathan Freedland's analysis of the insidious antisemitic subtext in the Daily Mail's attack on the Milibands. The newspaper did, however, employ my German-Jewish grandfather, Frederic Manasseh, in the days when antisemitism was overt rather than latent. He reported the siege of Sidney Street for the paper in 1911, a media sensation when Latvian anarchists held a bloody standoff with police. Winston Churchill, then home secretary, was at the scene. "Who are you?" he asked my grandfather. My grandfather replied: "Daily Mail." Churchill responded: "I envy you." Not a response one would expect to hear, even from Michael Gove.
Jo Glanville
London
