Who has got our backs?

29th October 2023

My name is Greg and I am a Jew.

By a quirk of fate, I was born into one of the calmer periods of Jewish history. If you look back over the past couple of millennia, there have not been many comparable runs of stability for us Jews through the exiles, the pogroms and the genocide. This fortunate timing engenders an enormous sense of gratitude. But also a keen sense of history.

Of course my 50 odd years have not been without Jewish fears. There's always been a whiff of antisemitism in the air, but for the generations growing up in Britain after the Holocaust we were able to ignore it most of the time, holding our noses when we had to. But of late, it feels like something has shifted. With the CST recording unprecedented levels of antisemitic incidents in Britain. With my son’s Jewish state school encouraging pupils to not wear the blazers which publicly identify them as being Jewish outside school. With people being afraid to go into town for fear of getting caught up in the latest intimidating demo. It’s getting a bit noxious again, this longest hatred. We’re not choking, but we are starting to politely cough.

We’re all sorts of Jews, made up of different combinations of culture and religion, food and guilt, and it’s undeniable that antisemitism has had its own role in shaping our identities. Just look above - by my second paragraph I’d already mentioned the Holocaust, which was one of the two formative Jewish events of the past century.

The other was the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Israel gave Jews hope and strength in the aftermath of our greatest tragedy. And much of the world welcomed this – with the UN voting Israel into existence and waiting for it to become a light unto the nations.

But something flipped. As Amos Oz, the brilliant Israeli novelist and peace activist wryly noted  - when his parents were young, the walls of Europe were covered with graffiti saying “Jews, go to Palestine.” Now the same walls demand “Jews, get out of Palestine”.

It’s worth acknowledging that Israel’s establishment did not turn every Jew into an ardent Zionist. For any number of reasons – as a matter of ideology, of religion or of embarrassment, there are some who actively oppose Israel. Others are agnostic and dismiss Israel as a country in the Middle East with nothing to do with them.

But for me and, I will boldly assert, for most Jews, for the mainstream - our Jewish identity is intertwined with our relationship with Israel. We have close friends and family there. We holiday and gap year there. And, lets be completely frank about this – we take enormous comfort in knowing that there is one country that will always be there for us on an unconditional basis. Given our history, that is a very big deal for Jews.

It is a country with faults like any other. It’s had good governments and bad, with the recent Netanyahu coalition with the far right and religious parties being the very worst, deserving of derision and the huge weekly opposition demonstrations that took place every weekend until 7th October.

And Israel has deserved plenty of criticism for the way it has conducted itself through the years, including in relation to its occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territory. There is plenty to say about what Israel could and should have done differently. But any reasonable analysis of how it became an occupying force and how it has behaved since then must incorporate the existential threat that Israel has faced for the past 75 years, and its legitimate security concerns.

But Israel is not treated like any other country. For all its flaws, Israel is fundamentally the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, a bastion of free speech and free love surrounded by dictatorships, but anti-Israel activists have sought to frame the only Jewish state as irredeemably evil, to be treated as a pariah. And sadly they’ve had a fair amount of success in these efforts, with animosity towards Israel increasingly being worn as a badge of honour in “progressive” circles. Only one country, the only Jewish state, gets this treatment. You have to ask yourself why that is.

Lets get a bit of perspective. Israel is very small. A slither of land about the same size as Wales, but longer and narrower - you could drive from the river to the sea in about an hour. It has a population of around 7 million, including, rather symbolically, 6 million Jews out of 16 million of us worldwide. In a planet of over 8 billion souls, we are a demographic rounding error.

You wouldn’t know it though. If you were to guess Israel’s size and population based upon its media profile and the assertions of its malignant influence on world affairs, you would conclude that it was a superpower, dominating the landscape through sheer numbers, money and power. That’s just not the case. It’s bloody tiny.

Israel does have a relatively strong military presence. By necessity. It’s in a tough neighbourhood, surrounded by countries with vastly bigger populations and resources that were, from Israel’s inception, committed to its destruction, so Israel’s very survival has depended upon having sophisticated armed forces and a fundamental commitment to defending its borders and its people.

Israel currently has a murderous, fascist regime on its border. Hamas, backed by Iran, took control of Gaza after Israel got out (and lets hold that thought – Gaza was not under occupation, Israel completely withdrew nearly 20 years ago). Hamas has its own commitment to Israel’s citizens. To kill all of them, and to murder Jews everywhere. It’s right there in their founding charter.

Three weeks ago, Hamas were as good as their word. The terrorists who stormed into Israel went on a rampage of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping. They targeted civilians. They didn’t just kill them, they went out of their way to inflict agonising deaths on innocents. And to be fair to Hamas, their murder spree was inflicted on an equal opportunities basis – they killed Jew and Arab, Ukrainian and Thai, gay people and straight, peace activists and right wingers, old women and baby boys. Some with a simple bullet, others by unimaginably gruesome means. More than 1,400 dead at the latest count. More than 200 taken hostage, kids, pensioners and invalids amongst them.

It was an abomination, one which played into all Jewish fears, and which illustrated the horrific reality of what Israel’s enemies will do when Israel lets down its guard. Israel and the entire Jewish world were deeply traumatised by these massacres. 

And even before the dead bodies were cold, activists got active. Protesting. Demonstrating. Against Israel. Against the victims.

Because Israel is treated differently.

How to express just how sickening that was to see? It would have been unthinkable if the attacks had been carried out against the civilians of any other country. As a Celtic fan, I was outraged but not surprised to learn that a small group of Celtic fans managed to get a banner out in support of “the resistance” on the Saturday afternoon before Hamas had even finished murdering and raping. They shamed themselves and they shamed Celtic.

I mention this example both because of how personal it felt, but also because it illustrates the grimly cynical prism through which so-called progressives now view events in Israel and Palestine. Some, like these Celtic fans, celebrated. Others “root cause”d the hell out of the massacre, as if the plight of innocent Palestinians somehow provided an explanation for the evil that was perpetrated on 7th October. And many others, quick to show solidarity over 9/11, Charlie Hebdo and the Ukraine, maintained a silence so very loud to Jewish ears.

Because Israel is treated differently.

Israel is now at war, fighting back against Hamas in Gaza. We watch every update, feeling absolutely sick. The news of chaos, the loss of innocent Palestinian lives, the terrible danger that Israel continues to be in, it’s simply heartbreaking. The calls for a ceasefire grow. The families of the 200+ hostages in Gaza are also putting pressure on Israel to hold back until they are released. What’s the right thing to do? I honestly don’t know. It is right to expect Israel to respond in a way that is proportionate, and that minimises the loss of innocent life. But I’m not an expert on exactly what Israel needs to do to defend its borders, on what is proportionate given the threat that Israel faces, and neither are you. If you do not afford to Israel the same right to protect its citizens that you would fully expect of your own nation if it found itself in the same tragic predicament, then you are treating Israel differently.

Here's a difficult truth. Israel has to defend itself, because if it doesn’t, it’s finished. To turn the other cheek against Hamas’ pogrom will simply encourage Hamas and Iran, ultimately leading to more of the same – more innocent Palestinian deaths and more innocent Israeli deaths. Plenty of those out demonstrating against Israel know this. Their “from the rivers to the sea” chant makes it clear that they share Hamas’ desire to put an end to Israel. They encourage escalation of the chaos. For those of us who do want a resolution and peaceful co-existence, there are sadly no good outcomes available in the short term. Only degrees of awfulness. That is a very difficult thing to process and to accept.

I’m not writing this piece for the “rivers to the sea” brigade, the hostage poster rippers, the Hamas supporters – for most of them, the hatred is irredeemable. I’m writing it for you. You may not feel you know enough or have skin in the game. You’re rightly horrified by the plight of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. But those awful events on 7th October have maybe woken you up to just what it is that Israel is facing.

Where does this all end? I wish I knew. I fear that it will get worse before it gets better. There will certainly be no peace, no better lives for Palestinians in Gaza, while Hamas rules there, using the territory as a war platform from which to attack Israel then hide behind the civilian population, grimly determined to maximise casualties amongst its own people. But I try to be optimistic, that in the longer term these awful events will lead to a new paradigm, for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the region. How exactly could that happen? You’d need to ask a smarter person than me.

I take comfort that all the main party leaders have shown solidarity with Israel over the 7 October atrocities, and with British Jews. When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party, the Jewish community here reacted with a fear that many could not get their heads around. “What exactly are you frightened of?” we were asked. We pointed to the antisemites that he promoted and supported. To his fondness for Hamas, who he described as his friends and as a force for peace. These fears were dismissed as alarmist, as “weaponisation”. Many good people ignored our concerns and supported Corbyn anyway. However awful the past few weeks have been, it would have been so much worse if Corbyn had been so close to power. Nobody can now claim ignorance of what Hamas is, or of what Corbyn and his ilk represent.

But right now for British Jews, there is appreciation for the support we have received, a mixture of determination and a certain sense of dread. Watching the footage of the mass demonstrations, in which countless people chant for a free Palestine “from the rivers to the sea” – that is, for the destruction of Israel, walking side by side with demonstrators openly supporting Hamas, calling for death to Jews, nobody challenging it. Kidding themselves that this is nothing more than a progressive human rights movement.

I do believe that it’s time for all of us to pick a side. And we need to be nuanced in that choice. Fundamentally, the choice should not be between Israelis and Palestinians, or Jews and Muslims. For all our futures, we need good people to stand up for liberalism and enlightenment against the dark forces of fascism, aided and abetted by those who call themselves “progressive” but who have completely lost their way. Weep for lost innocents of whichever religion or nationality, but be honest about who is deliberately targeting them. And understand that they may be coming for the Jews first, but it doesn’t end there. It never does.

Because this really isn’t just about Jews or Israel. It’s about all of us, our values, what we stand for. We want to know that you’ve got our backs. I promise we’ve got yours.

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