Daniel Finkelstein: How to argue for Israel
Supporters of Israel can begin to win arguments by returning to first principles: the Jewish state exists as a safe haven and there is no evidence suggesting that it is no longer needed
WHY DO Palestinian activists so often raise the Holocaust in arguments about Israel? Sure, it’s partly about finding the most wounding, offensive thing to say, and partly about a grotesque failure to appreciate what the Holocaust was. But there’s something else, too.
I think they raise it because they appreciate that of all the arguments for the state of Israel, the Holocaust is the most powerful moral and political point that Zionists have. If they can undermine that, they can undermine anything.
This thought struck me when I was debating Israel on television with a considerably younger Jewish person who opposes Israel’s existence (she says it is an ethno-state and she is against all ethno-states) and accuses it of apartheid. I explained my own position by starting, as I always do, with the Holocaust.
I said that my grandparents had not been Zionists partly because they anticipated that a Jewish state would be violently resisted in the Middle East. But that the Zionists had replied that staying in Europe would be violently resisted too. The great tragedy of the Jewish people is that they were both right. But, I said, the Holocaust settled the argument between them. Jews needed a state, at least one place to call home.
In reply, my interlocutor raised the question of my age. She said that my argument became less powerful the further we were away from the Holocaust. She was a generation further removed. And certainly, the attitude of some younger Jews to Israel rather supports her view.
Nonetheless, I think the Holocaust makes three points that are really hard for opponents of Israel to counter.
First, it is impossible to read the history of the period and conclude that Israel was not required. The Nazis made people stateless before persecuting them. The existence of somewhere that would have accepted Jewish refugees in the 1930s would have prevented possibly millions of deaths, certainly hundreds of thousands of them.
And now many of the children and grandchildren of what remained of exiled Jewry live in Israel. Where does the
Free Palestine crowd wish them to go? The replacement of an “ethno-state” with a “binational” one is just strangled left wing talk for letting Hamas take over the whole land mass.
Second, it is impossible to look at antisemitism in Europe and America and conclude that pogroms against Jews are inconceivable. The argument that Israel is unnecessary depends on an absolute confidence that Jews can live safely anywhere, that things aren’t like they were in the 1920s and 30s.
All I can say is that anyone looking at the world and saying confidently that the liberal democracies can be relied on to look after their Jews and take in any fleeing ones are showing an extraordinary lack of imagination.
And this links to a third point. I like to look at events using statistical thinking. World history is punctuated every few generations with really serious massacres against Jews. How likely is it that we happen to live right at the end of this series? That something that has been going on since the beginning of civilisation has suddenly just stopped? I think the probability of this is vanishingly small.
These arguments are all about whether Israel should exist, and that is the strongest ground for us to fight on.
We all know that the protests about Israeli action aren’t really protests about Israeli action. They are protests about Israeli existence. They are a rejection of Israeli existence. We must pull the argument back to that every time.
And we must make sure that young people, who are under tremendous peer pressure over Israel, appreciate this is what the argument is about and understand the calamity which Jewish people face if we lose the argument over the right of the Jewish state to exist.
Our opponents always want to start the argument in the middle and we often let them. We argue for Israel retaliating because they are firing missiles and someone has to fire back. This is the argument our critics want us to have, and it is one they are winning, I’m afraid.
The right ground to fight the political battle is to start with the historical need for a Jewish state. The need to protect it, flows from that.
Daniel Finkelstein is associate editor of The Times
We all know that the protests we see about Israeli military action are really protests about Israeli existence’