On Salade niçoise and other prejudices – Toby Lichtig in TLS:

‘It is well known that Roald Dahl was an antisemite. Less well known is the row that first brought this to attention.
In the summer of 1983, the British children’s author was at the height of his creative powers, on a phizz-whizzing run of publications, including The Twits (1980), George’s Marvellous Medicine (1981) and The BFG (1982). He had just finished writing perhaps his greatest, certainly his most disturbing, book of all, The Witches (1983).
Dahl didn’t just write children’s books, of course: there were the creepy adult tales and a couple of dodgy adult novels and the odd film script, and he was soon to branch off into memoir with the brilliant Boy (1984). He was a great campaigner for vaccines and could be politically outspoken, and he had opinions. Among those opinions was a great sympathy for the cause of Palestinian liberation – and a deep scepticism about the legitimacy of the State of Israel.
Cognizant of this position, the Palestinian-British publisher and backer of theLiterary Review, Naim Attallah, commissioned Dahl to review God Cried by Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton, a photographic book about the recent siege of Beirut by the Israeli army and the Phalangist Lebanese Forces. Dahl went on to write a passionate denunciation of the war, which broadened into an attack on Israel more generally, “the race of people” associated with it, the global “Jewish financial institutions” apparently underpinning it, and any Jew who failed to denounce it. A small outcry followed and, when pressed on his comments by the New Statesman, the author doubled down, with a remark about the “trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity” and his infamous gambit that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [Jews] for no reason”.’

(…)

‘Cautiously Maschler raises the subject of the article and its possible wider impact, in no way personally offended, merely practical. As he tries to leaven the mood with niceties, Dahl turns on him, playfully, nastily: “Such a bootlicker …. The Mightiest Spootlicker”. Maschler’s careful dance is upset when Stone arrives. “She one of your gang, Tom?” Dahl asks unpleasantly. (She is.) When she accidentally drops her copy of the article, scrawled with angry notes, her hand is revealed; some goading from Dahl further lays it bare. Stone is aghast at the piece and believes he must publically recant. When he lays into the IDF, she asks him if the British are so unimpeachable. What about Dresden? Maschler winces. Dahl explodes. Salade niçoise is served.’

(…)

‘There is pleasingly little speculation about whether Dahl’s antisemitism is present in his fiction (to my mind it is negligible, which is certainly worse than not at all, but nothing of the order of T. S. Eliot’s boorish Bleistein or “Jew … underneath the lot”), and no anachronistic moralizing about whether cancellation should occur, as it most certainly would have today. Waving away his publishers’ unease about negative press, Dahl scoffs: “Fantastic nonsense. Who buys my books? Children”. He is convinced the “hoo-ha” won’t make the blindest bit of difference to his sales. And he’s right.’

Read the article here.

The hoo-ha doesn’t make a difference to the sales. And so it is.

Nowadays, the accusation of antisemitism has lost some of its stings.

But the question where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins is still a burning question, at least in some circles.

This debate has become more and more a tribal debate, and islamophobia and antisemitism appear to be two communicating vessels. We are witnessing the triumph of tribalism.

Also, it’s not always clear whether certain antisemitic remarks are just convenient provocations. But maybe the distinction is futile. Are you a boorish provocateur or an anti-Semite is probably too judicial.

Being a bit blasé about antisemitism or other forms of bigotry doesn’t hurt, I would say. After all, you should pick your enemies carefully.