I am writing as a warm supporter of Peace News, in the anticipation that my letter will appear in an issue highly critical of Israel.
If so, my beliefs are not fundamentally at odds with yours. I have thought and read quite a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict, and know it to be very complex; but my politics on it are simple: ‘End the Occupation’.
I believe the Occupation (of the West Bank) has caused Israel to lose its soul. In doing so, it has destroyed the hopes raised by the Oslo peace accords, and scuppered the best chance Israel had of achieving security through peace.
Despite this firmly- and clearly-held opinion, I believe that a pro-Israeli and also a pro-Jewish (obviously I make the distinction) point of view needs to be heard. To hear is to seek to understand. It need not mean to condone, to excuse, or to justify, but without understanding there cannot be peace.
Partly this is emotional: many of my closest friends from childhood days are Jewish, and are passionately attached to Israel as a Jewish home. They are also reasonable, generous, warm and compassionate individuals, no matter how great our political differences.
This puts me in the unenviable situation of being unable to speak about Israel/Palestine with those same close friends, who see me as uncritically pro-Palestinian.
At the same time, I invariably feel unease in conversations on the subject with my many co-activist friends in Britain and France, whom I see as systematically and sometimes dogmatically pro-Palestinian.
I know the counter-arguments to all the points I will make below, and do not minimise the sufferings of Gazans now and of Palestinians for 75 years. Nevertheless, I believe the below points need to be made.
For all the military might of Israel, and the not infrequent appearance of arrogance of its leaders and people, it is important to accept the reality both of Jewish and of Israeli feelings of vulnerability, of being targeted.
The Holocaust is a raw, poignant, living memory for millions, and is certain to shape the feelings, thoughts, and collective unconscious of Jews for centuries to come.
While its memory can be politicised, none but the most insensitive and hardened anti-Zionist protestor would deny its importance. The antisemitism which led to the Holocaust is a dominant, ubiquitous strand in human history, not an occasionally resurfacing exception.
Whether right is on its side or not, Israel is a small country, surrounded by hostile states and even more hostile peoples. Hamas’ vow to destroy Israel is not a passing aberration; it is the reality of what Israelis experience.
It is the experience I want to focus on, not rights and wrongs.
The IRA may have had a just cause; but I remember the irrationality, fear and hatred which surfaced among English people when there were just a few bombings in London in the 1970s.
In Israel, bombings and missile attacks are weekly, if not daily, occurrences. That, millennial antisemitism, and the Holocaust explain the trauma caused by the 7 October killings. The trauma is present now, it is not an item of history.
Another area in which I feel sympathy with Jews concerns the suspicion of double standards. This takes different forms.
Undoubtedly, it was a terrible historical injustice for 750,000 Palestinians to be forcibly evicted from their homes during the 1947 – 1948 war. As a matter of historical fact, almost comparable numbers of Jews were forced to leave their ancestral homes in countries throughout the Arab world in the aftermath of that war.
Sometimes, their departure was more or less voluntary, a straightforward migration in search of a better life. But in many if not most cases it was made necessary by discrimination, aggressive hostility, and persecution, and was attended by dispossession and tragedy.
Of course, it is legitimate to ask where the injustice started; but the answers are not in every case so simple, nor do they always point unequivocally to the same guilty party.
More serious double standards to my mind operate in the degree to which Israel attracts opprobrium and hostility, as compared to the mildness of the outrage felt and expressed with regards to other unjust situations and other regimes.
I understand – particularly at the moment of course – the condemnation of Israel; but why is it so much more vocal than the condemnation of Myanmar for the treatment of the Rohingya, of China for its cultural genocide of the Uyghur, of Syria for the brutality of its regime?
I have often reflected, without finding a satisfactory answer, as to why the Israel-Palestine conflict arouses passions not just stronger, but of a wholly different order, to those aroused by any other conflict on earth.
Partly, of course, this is because Israel is seen as the neo-colonial embodiment of Western imperialism and so, in criticising Israel, we are criticising the neo-imperialism of our governments. This is perfectly consistent. Perhaps though other more or less conscious forces are at work also.
We are distressed – myself included – to see that a people who have been the victims of so much oppression historically, turn so easily into oppressors when they are victorious and strong; but are we also secretly pleased to be able to shift the blame away, and back onto Israel?
We know our blame: the millennial antisemitism and persecution perpetrated by Europeans which made a Jewish homeland necessary; and, as British people, our specific responsibility for having, by our ineptitude and short-sightedness, made that necessity become a reality in the worst possible circumstances.
Whatever its causes, the single-minded focus on Israel and its wrongdoing, in a world of many evils, is bound to be experienced as antisemitism by many Jews.
As promoters of peace, we have a duty to be unequivocal in our condemnation of antisemitism, wherever we find it. I hotly dispute that to be anti-Israel or anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic; but the corollary needs to follow: opponents of Israel no matter how implacable need to be resolute in fighting antisemitism (and of course, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination or racism too).
Aggressive actions against Jews have increased 15-fold since start of the current war; this has to be denounced unequivocally.
No one need renounce their views as to Israel’s primary responsibility for the non-resolution of the conflict in the Middle East. But we need to be even-handed in our condemnation of other and equally bad or even worse evils perpetrated in the modern world – nor do I accept that they all stem from the West, though obviously the most powerful have the greatest responsibility for the state of the world.
The only glimmer of hope one can possibly find in the current catastrophic situation is that it might at last focus minds on the need for peace, and for a fair peace.
I do not believe that this will be achieved just by United Nations resolutions and the isolation of Israel on the international scene.
It can only happen if men and women on both sides step forward and call for peace. They must be prepared to make concessions for it, and be able to bring the majority of their people with them.
For this there has to be a dialogue, and you do not start a dialogue by saying: you are guilty, recognise your guilt, or there can be no dialogue.
The trauma and horror awakened in Israelis by the 7 October killings is real – and understandable, even if disproportionate retaliation is not. If we cannot put our political opinions to one side to feel compassion for all victims, even momentarily, I am sceptical that peace will ever be attained.
