This war is not in black and white

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 28 July 2006

This is one of those times when I feel badly out of step, estranged, one way or another, from most of my fellow Jews. Crises in the Middle East, I have discovered, have a way of doing that.

So I look to my left and see Jews for Justice for Palestinians, a group who are appalled and distressed, as I am, by the scenes of violence coming from Lebanon. So appalled, in fact, that they took to the streets last Saturday alongside, among others, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Muslim Association of Britain.

JfJfP might have their hearts in the right place, but they get it wrong, time after time. Earlier this month, they spent £10,000 on a full-page advertisement in the Times, denouncing the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. As I wrote in the Guardian the following week, I shared the sentiment - but wondered why, since it was the Israeli government that JfJfP wanted to persuade, they had not spend their money on an ad in, say, Ma’ariv or Yediot Achronot. Wouldn’t that have been a more direct act of advocacy?

By taking an ad in the Times, the group, and its 300 signatories, allowed the sceptics to believe that their chief concern was to advertise their own moral purity to their fellow British citizens.

The latest mis-step by JfJfP was almost comic in its ineptitude. The group wanted to leave flowers at the Israeli and Lebanese embassies, as well as at the Palestinian mission in London, in memory of all those killed in the current hostilities. In a statement dripping with acid sarcasm, the Israeli embassy explained that it didn’t want any bouquets from JfJfP - not least because “giving flowers at a time of mourning is not a Jewish custom, a fact that this group would have been aware of if they were in any way representative of the Jewish community.”

Like last year’s flap over an “alternative carol service,” organised and publicised by a JfJfP luminary, this move exposed the group’s chief weakness - its distance from the heartbeat of Jewish life in this country. A fact which would not matter at all, were it not for the fact that its Jewishness is the sole source of JfJfP’s credibility.

So I do not stand with them. But then I watch the TV footage of the Israel solidarity demo at JFS last weekend, featuring teenage girls in youth-movement shirts, smiling and singing, and I wince at that, too. Because I know how bad that looked when the previous item on the BBC bulletin showed Lebanese children maimed and killed by the latest Israeli air strike. It looked as if British Jews are untroubled, if not gleeful, while Beirut burns.

Of course, people will shout that it was typical BBC bias to select those shots. But such a scene should not even have been possible given the current climate; the mood at the rally should have been too sombre for anyone to feel like singing and dancing. It wasn’t, and that fits with the wider mood I detect in many quarters of our community just now: a kind of unapologetic bullishness, an insistence that Israel is in the right and can do what the hell it likes.

As it happens, I agree that Israel had every right to hit back at Hizbollah. A sovereign nation cannot tolerate a militia across the border regularly taking pot-shots at its civilians, especially when that militia is the proxy army of a state committed to the nation’s destruction. So military action was justified.

But on this scale?

Whacking not just Hizbollah targets, but the painstakingly reconstructed Beirut airport? Power plants, hospitals and, this week, an ambulance convoy?

Sure, Hizbollah use civilians as human shields, embedding themselves in residential neighbourhoods. But that cannot justify the tearing apart of Lebanon’s civil infrastructure. The Foreign Office minister Kim Howells was right when he surveyed the devastation of Beirut and said of the Israelis: “If they are chasing Hizbollah, then go for Hizbollah. You don’t go for the entire Lebanese nation.”

I watch the pictures from Tyre or Sidon and I fear the grievous damage this is doing to Israel’s standing worldwide, accelerating the country’s downward slide to pariah status. I fear the new generation of Hizbollah fighters this onslaught is recruiting. And I fear that none of it is working: Hizbollah can still rain fire on northern Israel, even after all this pounding. Because there can be no military solution to a problem like this; only a negotiated peace can end the nightmare for good.

So I know I am out of step with the current communal mood. But I am out of step with the outsiders, too. I am somewhere in between, on a sliver of ground that always seems to be shrinking.

Posted on July 28, 2006 06:15 PM

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