Why Israel is part of me

Published in the Evening Standard, 21 February 2005

What’s been the big story of the last month? Charles and Camilla? Alastair and his Blackberry? Not for me. The news event that had my pulse racing was – wait for it - the apparently successful peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh between Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

For most people that would count as inside-page stuff, foreign news about a faraway country of which we know little.

But I’m part of a community of people who feel differently. I’m a British Jew and, for as long as I can remember, what happens in Israel hasn’t felt foreign at all. I have a distinct memory of my family gathering around the TV set, the children hushed, to see the latest BBC despatch on the Yom Kippur war. I was six years old.

What explains this sense of attachment in me ­– a proud British citizen, born, raised and educated in Britain? I’ve been asking myself that question a lot recently, a personal quest which has now yielded a book, Jacob’s Gift. It is, among other things, a family memoir, telling the stories of three relatives whose lives spanned the last century. Each one of them, I discovered, had somehow been shaped by the Jewish state — whether they were born in Palestine, as my mother was, or had moved there from London, like my great-great uncle Nat, or had opposed the very idea, like my Communist great uncle, and East End garment workers leader, Mick.

Those family connections have left me with a direct stake in Israel and its fate: I have relatives there still, people for whom the prospects for Middle East peace or war are not a debating topic, but a matter of life and death.

Still, it goes deeper than that. Simply put, I am a Jew and Israel is a Jewish country. The novelist Howard Jacobson is right when he says that, for Jews, Israel is a version of ourselves: when it flourishes, we feel proud; when it is attacked, we feel attacked.

For some, that translates into a kind of blind faith. They become cheerleaders for Israel, ready to defend its every move. They will not hear of criticism. If it comes from the outside, they suspect the motive is anti-semitism. If it comes from within, it is self-hatred. The mindset is simple: my Israel, right or wrong.

My connection with the country has taken me in a different direction. I feel profoundly bound up with the place — my forebears toiled to build it — and I want it to survive and thrive. But, for me, that demands more than flag-waving. Sometimes it means speaking out.

So I repeatedly condemn the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, now in its 38th year — an occupation as old as I am – and rage against what I see as the morally corrosive rule of one people, the Palestinians, by another, the Israelis. I have done it not as an enemy of Israel, but as an ally.

My instinct is that of the candid friend, giving advice — even unwelcome advice — not because you don’t care for your friend, but because you do. Sometimes I see Israel — bent on policies that I fear can only eat away at the country — as a driver speeding towards a cliff. Most of the driver’s friends and family are whooping and cheering, urging him to press right on. But I am desperate for him to stop, to make him see sense – not for my sake, but for his.

Some of Israel’s permanent cheerleaders ask what right I, as a non-Israeli, have to say anything at all. That right belongs, they say, to Israelis alone. And yet these same people also insist that Israel is more than the country of the Israeli nation - it is the Jewish state, a spiritual and cultural home (if not a literal one) for the entire Jewish people. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then surely the whole Jewish people have a right to be heard. We have a stake, so we deserve a say.

Not that such a stance is always comfortable. To be a Jewish critic of Israel is to risk making some painful enemies — and some unwanted friends.

I have been denounced from several London pulpits by rabbis who have branded me a traitor and worse. I have been deluged with hate-mail wishing on me and my family a fate too awful to set down. I have been likened to those Jews who led their fellow Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers. It breaks my heart that these people see me as their adversary.

At the same time I have found myself lumped in with those anti-Zionist critics of Israel whose motives are the polar opposite of mine. They do not want the best for the country, but oppose its very existence — deciding that the Jews, perhaps uniquely in the world, do not deserve a home of their own. I do not want these people as my allies.

So while I might be enraged by some new Israeli folly, that does not put me on the same side as, say, the Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has justified suicide bombings against Israeli civilians (by arguing that there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian) and lauded female bombers, insisting their actions are “one of the most praised acts of worship.”

Indeed it pains me that the mayor of the city where I was born and live — and whose candidacy I supported early and loudly — could have embraced such a man so warmly. (It pains me too that Ken Livingstone could have apparently compared tension between himself and a newspaper group with the Nazi treatment of the Jews, a crass act of trivialisation which demeans him.)

It is, then, an awkward chunk of terrain I have staked out for myself. It would be far easier to walk away, no longer to write about Israel and take up a specialist interest in — I don’t know — the Maldives instead. But I cannot do it.

After several years working on this book I now think I know why. I am just too connected to this strange, remarkable project — the attempt at a Jewish renaissance in Palestine after 2000 years of exile — to abandon it. It gave my mother her place of birth and inspired countless others in the generations before me. It is woven around the roots and branches of my family tree.

And that’s just what a Jew’s relationship to Israel is like: a family. We may scream and shout at each other, hurling the worst abuse, but we cannot ever really break apart. This is the family we were born into. It is who we are.

Posted on February 21, 2005 06:58 PM

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