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| The flag of Israel, recognised by the UN in 1948 |
It is almost like admitting to being a paedophile these days – saying you are a supporter of Israel when there has been virtually universal international condemnation of their actions in Gaza, where women, children and journalists have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force. In the name of wiping out Hamas which they (rightly) see as their mortal enemy, Israel seems to be conducting a policy of ethnic cleansing in the areas they have conquered.
I should say first of all that there are two types of Zionist – those that think Israel is like any other country and can attract criticism and condemnation if it does things that are wrong. Then there are those that think everything Israel does should be defended and justified. There are similarly two types of people who believe in a Palestinian state – those who think it can coexist with Israel and those who think Israel should be abolished in order to create it.
In both cases, I am a believer in the first definition of a Zionist and a supporter of a state for the Palestinians. This means I support a ‘two state solution’ (a phrase you do not hear often these days) in which Israel lives side by side with its Palestinian neighbours. If might be too much to hope that the two countries would do so in peace, but it is essential to the future of the Middle East that they each recognise the others right to exist.
Many Israelis are suspicious of the Palestinian desire for a separate state because they say that this will only allow them to move their rockets closer to the Israeli border. They prefer to see the Palestinians as contained in an area where they cannot threaten Israel. In that way, Israel can continue to exist in security if not in peace. Safety and security come above everything else – the rights of the oppressed and the need to make peace permanent.
For what it is worth, I think that what the Palestinians lack is a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela, someone who says to his people: “We may not like these people but we have to live with them, so we had better learn to do so.” Everything that comes out of Palestinian leaders seems to say: “Burn, destroy and abolish Israel, so we can create a Palestinian nation in its place.” Is it any wonder that the Israelis have stopped listening?
If anyone should know about ethnic cleansing and the destruction of a people, it is the Jews. They suffered – as they often remind us – at the hands of the Nazis and were systematically and comprehensively destroyed in the Holocaust, surely the worst example of mass killing devised by man. “And now they are doing the same to us,” said a Palestinian guide to the Holocaust Museum, according to my partner, who has a lot of sympathy for their cause.
Even if they succeeded in destroying Israel, what would happen to the roughly six million Jewish people who live there today? This is a hugely significant number, of course, and I dare say that even those who are most vociferously anti-Zionist are not suggesting the reintroduction of Zyklon B to solve the problem. I make no apology for using it, however, as the matter of what to do about Israel’s Jews is not going to go away.
They are hardly going to end up in Florida, are they? Even if the USA supports Israel’s war against the Palestinians, the country would be unlikely to welcome in its people. They have an increasingly closed-border attitude and a hostile view of incomers, both legal and illegal, despite the fact that they rely on them for a badly paid and non-unionised workforce who will work at jobs that ‘real’ Americans are increasingly reluctant to do.
We are rapidly approaching the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 after the horrors of the Holocaust became clear. I am old enough to remember how (almost) everybody supported Israel in the six-day war in which it was fighting for survival and defeated the Arab - and undemocratic - enemies that surrounded it. As Howard Jacobsen has said, they should have lost that war to retain public support.
But this is a very western approach to the problem. Israel wanted – indeed needed – to defeat its enemies to survive. They knew that defeat would result in destruction and wanted to continue to exist rather than be loved. Everybody hates us: we don’t care, as Millwall’s sing with a bit of sarcastic pride. A country’s first duty is to protect its people and the failure to acknowledge this is what is holding the Arabs back.
For various reasons – many originating in Jewish contempt of Arabs, it has to be said – Israel has never been accepted as legitimate by the Arabs. When we saw the film about the Palestinians, there was little doubt about the wish to destroy the Jewish state by the Arab rock-throwers, who were aiming their stones at Israeli soldiers with the aim of driving them out so that a Palestinian state could be established - without any Jewish presence.
We seem to be no nearer a solution to the problems of the middle-East. Jews keep voting for Netanyahu, who has never accepted the idea of a Palestinian state; Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed so that this Palestinian state can be set up without Jews; believers in a two-state solution like me are dismissed as hopelessly naïve and unrealistic. Well, let idealism and naivety triumph over defeatism and a repeat of the holocaust.
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