How can I, as a leftwing Jew, show support for both Palestinians and Israelis?
To speak out as a leftwing Jew on any aspect of this century-old conflict is to risk isolation and hate from both sides. That much I know, having directed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaigns and called out the antisemitism of that period. So, on 8 October, absorbing the emerging details of the Hamas massacre the previous day, I feared the consequence of speaking out again.
It turned out that in such circumstances I could not have been in a more supportive place during the Labour party conference than at a joint-faith meeting organised by a Jewish and Muslim women’s group in a Liverpool synagogue. Grief shared in such a setting was great comfort and some relief for all of us together – Muslims and Jews.
It used not to be difficult to support both peoples who live in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as I did, by distinguishing their needs and aspirations from those of their leaders. But the rise to power of former rightwing terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir to the highest office in Israel was where a supremacist philosophy began to take hold in the politics of Israeli Jews. It appealed, as far-right politics always do, to those who felt let down or ignored by their governments, as Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern or north African heritage) and more religious Jews did by the secular Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Labor Party establishment.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza also began to lose trust in their leaders from Fatah and the Palestinian Authority who were seen as self-serving, even corrupt – a shift that benefited more religious candidates and Hamas. Tensions increased within and between both communities.
However, the Israeli left is not without its share of responsibility. In Israel’s prehistory, those who led the Jewish government-in-waiting before the state’s establishment observed the Holocaust from British-administered Palestine. Their attitude to the 6 million murdered and the 1 million survivors who found their way to Israel can be characterised by the phrase they used to describe the manner of their deaths: “They went like sheep to the slaughter.” A contempt for weakness was embedded in the Israeli left, which now in the hands of its far-right successors, has created a culture of permanent war that is supremacist and authoritarian towards Palestinians. A culture mirrored by Hamas.
And so, in the war that was certain to follow the Hamas attacks, how can a leftwing Jew best maintain support for both peoples when your family, friends and comrades take opposing sides?
These two peoples are crammed into a tiny space in the former British mandate of Palestine, about 7 million of each. Each of them astonishingly resilient after almost a century of con