The novelist Howard Jacobson had already written a number of books, many of them about the British Jewish community, when he won the Booker Prize for “The Finkler Question,” in 2010, which the New York Times’ Janet Maslin called a “riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity.” In a review in this magazine, James Wood was more critical than the consensus, writing that the novel was “always shading toward the atavistic and reactionary,” and adding, “Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying.” Jacobson is also a prolific writer and commentator on current events, and on Judaism in the United Kingdom; he’s spoken out against Brexit, and raised concerns about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. His most recent novel is called “What Will Survive Of Us.”

Since Hamas’s attack on October 7th, which killed approximately twelve hundred Israelis, Jacobson has been increasingly outspoken about antisemitism, and critical of those who question Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than forty-two thousand people. Earlier this month, in a controversial piece published in the Observer, Jacobson wrote that the sustained media coverage of children being killed in Gaza was functioning as a new “blood libel” against the Jewish people. “Such bias as I have described—conscious or not—has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live,” Jacobson wrote. “The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.”

I recently spoke by phone with Jacobson. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his views about Israeli military tactics, his concerns about how Jews are being treated in the U.K., and whether the coverage of dead children in Gaza is the result of antisemitism.

What is it that you have wanted to get across to readers since October 7th?

I was in such a confusion of fear and stress and upset and then rage. The fear and the upset—and the heartbreak—was the massacre itself. And then the speed of the response to the aftermath of the massacre was so hideous, so unexpected, such a kind of topsy-turvy version of what we normally expect a response to a catastrophe to be, that it just threw me into half confusion, half fury. What the hell was going on that people could turn like that on the people who’d been attacked? All those people who said, “No, no, hang on, don’t talk about antisemitism. This is anti-Zionism.” All that went as the people attacking Israel couldn’t remember if they were attacking Jews, Israelis, Zionists. I thought, The world that I live in is not the world I knew. It’s changed and I still feel that. I’m living in a world I don’t recognize and find it very hard to comprehend.

After October 7th, there was a rise in antisemitic incidents in many countries. But there was also strong support for Israel, including diplomatic and military support, from almost every powerful Western country.

It was ambiguous but certainly stronger even than what I’ve just suggested. And here was another extraordinary phenomenon: suddenly you could trust the government but you couldn’t trust the people. Governments were sound; people were flaky. Much of this irrationality was coming from institutions of higher education. That was the bewildering thing. And I suppose because I’m an academic at heart and was a lecturer for many years before I became a full-time writer, I looked to that.

After the war in Gaza started and there were all these civilian casualties, we saw Israel intentionally denying humanitarian aid to people who were starving. What should the response from people have been at that point?

That’s not something I can say because I don’t know what my own response should have been. I trusted no one and I trusted no report. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t see some pictures on television. The BBC has been appalling. It just showed you pictures, unbearable pictures, heartbreaking pictures of dying babies every night, but any war would look appalling if you just showed the suffering of the women and children.

So, I thought, Who am I to believe here? I read a lot of people; I believed some, and I didn’t believe others. It’s turned out very badly and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is contemptible. I have no doubt about all that, but that didn’t mean that something didn’t need doing. There was no alternative to it. Israel had to try and get Hamas. I thought Netanyahu’s belief that he could wipe out Hamas was stupid. So I felt that this war had to be prosecuted. If a war is prosecuted, it will be ugly.

I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like “Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I can’t really comment on that.” Is that right?

Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant. One got accounts and accounts and accounts and it was very hard to know what was the truth.

Well, just for example, the American government, which has been very supportive of Israel and has kept sending them weapons, has tacitly acknowledged that Israel intentionally denied humanitarian aid. Lots of humanitarian groups have said the same thing.

Well, if Israel was doing that, then what can one feel except that it’s monstrous? I’ve said one has to balance these things. This thing has got to be done. Did it have to be done quite so cruelly? No. Did it have to be done so . . . See, I’m very worried about the indiscriminate and the disproportionate. I’ve got snagged up on the disproportionate argument and the indiscriminate argument. The disproportionate one I can’t buy because I don’t know how you’d measure what you have to do after that massacre. We know we can’t measure life for life. I don’t buy the disproportionate. I don’t buy it.

So you’re saying the idea that twelve hundred Israelis were killed and now forty-two thousand Gazans have been killed—that comparing the two in itself is not any sort of argument?

Well, all right, Isaac, what’s the figure you’d choose?

I was just trying to clarify what you meant.

I don’t know how you do the mathematics of this, and I’m not going to say the “mathematics of revenge” because, while of course there was an element of revenge, and you wanted it not to be revenge, you didn’t want it to be a punishment either. I hated that word—“punishment.” I think the justification for what Israel did was to try to make sure that this never happened again. And I think in the attempt to make sure that this never happened again, the numbers were going to inevitably have to be high. If you’re a terrorist, you do hide yourself in schools and hospitals. So if the Israelis are going to get you, they’re going to have to attack those things.

If it’s a war crime to hide in a hospital, it’s also a war crime to indiscriminately bomb a hospital.

Well, you’ve just used rhetoric. Indiscriminately. Well, what’s indiscrimination? If you’re trying to go after people who are hiding there, how do you get them if you have to be discriminant? What do you do?

You have to make a judgment about balancing civilian casualties with war.

I’d like to think that Israel has in the main done that.

Does how they have fought the war in the past year, let alone what members of the Israeli government think of Palestinians, make you think that they’re trying to do that?

I would like to think Israel has done its best. Some people will laugh in my face, but I haven’t been convinced that they have been wildly indiscriminate. One or two people in Netanyahu’s cabinet have said the most appalling things. And if they were just taken out right now, removed from government, I would be perfectly happy. The current Israeli administration has no imagination for what it might be to be a Palestinian, I feel that with a great passion. There has been cruelty in this government.

Your piece brings up the number of children being killed in Ukraine and the number of children being killed in Gaza. And you say that the news coverage of the two has been very disproportionate. Can you talk about that?

Yes. It’s interesting. Of all the pieces that I’ve done, this is the piece that seems to upset people most. I’ve thought about writing it for many months and didn’t, and then I thought, Well, no, I’m going to have to do it and just risk it. And it upsets people because the minute you talk about the death of children, not only every word, but every comma, is scrutinized.

Crazy how that works.

Well, I get it, and now think I should have trusted my own feeling at the beginning: don’t go there. But I wanted to record the experience as a Jew, and it was shared by many of my Jewish friends. Night after night after night after night, the BBC showed pictures of a beautiful Palestinian child alive one minute and dead the next. That is the most monstrous thing. We shed tears, we couldn’t bear to see it. Were some children targeted? If children were deliberately targeted, that is absolutely monstrous and indisputably a war crime. If some were targeted, I don’t know. But when a plane flies overhead, it doesn’t deliberately target the Jew. It cannot—there’s no such plane, and there’s no such pilot. And to turn the war into nothing other than the murder of children made me sick, made me not want to trust the news. I was happy to say, This is like watching Hamas propaganda. Look what the Jews do. Look what the Jews do. Ring the bell, folks. Jews kill children.

You compare this with Ukraine, and asked why there is more coverage of children in Gaza. About two thousand children in Ukraine have been injured or killed in two and a half years of war. This year, in Gaza, more than fifteen thousand children were killed.

How do we explain that?

Some Ukrainian children were able to leave many of the front-line areas. Gazans, including children, are not allowed to leave. And Israel has fought an incredibly intense war that has killed a ton of children because they’re not trying to avoid civilian casualties as well as they should. That’s how I would describe it.

And how careful do you think the Russians are to avoid civilian casualties?

I don’t think they’re being careful. And in fact, a lot of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia. But you were talking about the media. And way more children have been killed in Gaza. So that could explain some of the discrepancy.

Why should this be a matter of numbers? I’m not saying that the media should underestimate the number of Palestinian children killed. It’s a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed. Forty-five children were killed today. Thirty children were killed today. Fifteen children were killed today. It became an obsession. It became, and still is.

What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?

I’m not talking about those days. This was every single night. I’m telling you I saw a dead baby every single night.

You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.

Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.

You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.

Second thought?

And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?

I am not saying that if all those children were being killed that we should not know about it. But it’s perfectly possible now for people to call Jews in the streets of London child-killers. Child-killers. Exactly as we would’ve heard seven hundred bloody years ago.

In April, you wrote, “Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency.” Did you mean the mission to defeat Hamas?

Yeah. I can’t remember. That’s a long time ago. But certainly my feeling, I think it’s fairly well agreed that often the pressure has been brought on Israel to stop it now.

You yourself said they weren’t going to completely defeat Hamas. But I want to bring this back to what you said about the streets of London. One of the things that has been so disturbing about antisemitism, especially after October 7th, is American Jews or British Jews being blamed for what the Israeli government is doing. I agree this is disgusting, but it seems that this has somehow led a lot of American and British Jews, like yourself, to support whatever the Israeli government is doing.

I take your argument. But it’s a bit of a quagmire when you say, “Well, don’t confuse us with the Israelis. We’ve got nothing to do with that.” Because the next stage of that is: all the terrible things that you say about Israel are allowed to be true.

I castigate myself all the time. I know lots of Jews who castigate. I wake up and I think a hopeless war is over. I want it to stop. And then I castigate myself because I think that’s weak. And then I wake feeling quite different, and I want the war to be pursued. I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. I castigate myself for feeling apologetic and I castigate myself for feeling bloodthirsty. Look, the war isn’t about me and the war isn’t about my nature.

Who the hell knows what’s the right thing to do? Why can’t we admit that? We just don’t know. That’s not a carte blanche for the Israelis. If war crimes have been committed, then let them be tried when it’s all clear. But at the moment, in the fog of war—

The fog of war is a year later. I hear what you’re saying about how tortured you are by all this, and you don’t know what is to be done—

No, no. I’m not tortured. I’m not tortured. I’m not tortured. The people who are tortured are the Jews who were tortured and the poor Palestinians. I’m just a Jew living in a safe space at the moment, watching it all, wishing it wasn’t happening. But trying to distinguish what might be true from what’s not true and listening, from where I live, to the helicopters going overhead and people marching through the streets, shouting gibberish and accusing Jews of being genocidal and apartheid and child-killers and the rest of it, and getting very angry. Feeling unsafe. Feeling sorry for Jews. You get that?

Yeah, of course. I guess my fear is that your anger about antisemitism in Britain is leading you to a place where basically nothing the Israeli government can do will be seen as too far. And you may say you feel torn about it, but fundamentally you are going to support this Israeli government whatever it does.

No, I won’t. No, no, no. There’s no “whatever it does.” I don’t know what they’re going to do tomorrow. And I’m not prepared to say I support it.

But fundamentally you think this war should be supported and that the West should continue giving Israel weapons. Is that accurate?

I think the West should continue to give them weapons because I think they are an island surrounded by enemies. They’ve got a lot of fights on their head. But just to be clear: I do not support anything that they might do. I do not support everything that they have done. But I get why they have to do it. I get why they have to do it.

What are things you don’t support but that you think that they have to do?

Well, I didn’t support the whole notion from the start of going in and wiping Hamas out. That looks a bit pitiless, but how do you show pity? This is the problem. How do you show pity when you have to remove an enemy that wants you dead?

I think you should show pity to civilians.

Well, of course you do. And if there’s any suggestion that they are, if you are telling me that you know for sure that the Israelis are going out there and they’re picking off civilians for the fun of picking off civilians, I agree with you. That’s unforgivable if that’s what they’re doing.

They intentionally denied humanitarian aid to people who didn’t have food. We can start there. If we know for sure that’s what they did, then, A, that’s cruel. And, B, that’s stupid.

I would tell you it’s been all over the news, but I feel like you’re not going to trust me when I say that.

Well, I don’t trust. I know, I know. That sounds as though I’ve just turned myself into somebody that puts his head in the sand. I am unwilling on all sides, actually, to trust anybody at the moment. This is what I support: I support the Israeli government’s attempt to wipe out Hamas, to kill them all, to get rid of them all. I support that.

Despite thinking it’s unrealistic?

Despite thinking it’s unrealistic, I want them to do the best they can. I remember Amos Oz saying about a previous war, What do you do if the people you are trying to get to because they are trying to kill you are holding up a child in one hand and shooting at you with another? You go wrong is what you do. You go a little bit too far is what you do. You are forced into cruelties is what you are. Yeah.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk.

I don’t know how this is going to come out, but my fear is somehow or other I’m beginning to sound hysterical or overexcited or extreme. I think that I have been so thrown by the topsy-turvyness of people’s response to the massacre. When people denied that children were killed and women wereremovedd. That was denied. I think the attitude towards that has made me a different kind of person. ♦