The recent but already much-debated letter to the Financial Times signed by 38 deputies, was an agonised but actually relatively restrained expression of justified concern at both the resumption of the war in Gaza and the wider direction of moral-political travel in Israel. Its guiding spirit was, quite explicitly, a sincere love of Israel and a heartfelt desire for the safe return of the remaining hostages – with both allied to what ought to be a fairly elementary concern for innocent Palestinian life.
Radical, it was not, even compared with the history of mainstream diaspora criticism. Compare it, for example to the cable sent by Lord Mishcon to Menachem Begin in September 1982 – at a far earlier stage of a war causing far less suffering than the present one, and directed at an Israeli government which, whatever its offences, was not seeking to mutilate the nation’s hard-earned democratic culture.
And yet, based on the hysterical reaction of some, those who have not read the letter would be justified in imagining it to be a hateful screed from Palestine Action. All this was perfectly inevitable of course, and no sooner had it been published than the calumnies started flying: the signatories are traitors; self-haters; Hamas-enablers; trembling courters of non-Jewish approval, and other disgracefully unwarranted epithets. They are – and here’s the rub – ‘anti-Israel’ and ‘anti-Zionist’.
36 Board memners write letter to FT opposing war in Gaza
This kind of rigidly binary discourse has dominated discussion of Israel for decades – both within the Jewish community and without – but has naturally seen an intensification over the last eighteen months. Somewhere along the line, a false and extremely dangerous dichotomy was established by some, whereby to be “pro-Israel” was reserved exclusively for those who cheer and defend the state’s every action, no matter how immoral or self-destructive. To defend it fundamentally, and specifically when called for, but to oppose its worst behaviour and to seek to aid Israelis working to correct its course became, on the other hand, “anti-Israel”. And, when offered by Jews, treason.
Such charges are illogical, grossly unfair, and spectacularly un-pragmatic, assuming one’s missions are to secure a safe and flourishing Israel and to reduce the levels of anti-Israel sentiment in the UK and the broader west.
They are illogical in that they misrepresent genuine solidarity and love, equating them instead with obsequious devotion and a supine suppression of one’s own morality and reason. Under no reasonable definition should authentic solidarity mean eternal approval; nor does authentic love mean cheering on the beloved when they act in a way you believe to be injurious to others and possibly fatally damaging to themselves. Indeed, the signatories to the letter might justly ask their critics: what kind of love of Israel is it that applauds those who would destroy it internally and further damage its reputation internationally?
Jack Omer-Jackaman
These attempts to limit the bounds of acceptable Zionism to include only hasbarists echo the neo-McCarthyism of the Netanyahu government. See, for example, its recent stripping of the Israel Prize from Eva Illouz, who wrote as powerfully as anyone about October 7 and its western apologists. Illouz was deemed an unworthy recipient of the prize for the offence of believing in a norms-based international order.
They are grossly unfair in impugning the motives of loving critics of Israeli action and maligning or outright denying the authenticity of their Jewish identity. To dissent is to auto-excommunicate, apparently – a canard marinating in at least four kinds of irony. Irony one is that there exists a long and learned tradition which not only values Jewish disunity but considers dissent a quintessentially Jewish value. It was the late and very great Yehuda Bauer who argued, pithily, that “unity is a death sentence for Jewish civilisation”.
Irony two is that such demands for adherence to a party line are also fairly un-Zionist. Two of the pre-state movement’s more commendable qualities were pluralism and self-confidence. It was a disputatious cause, and all the better for it. Party line uniformity, on the other hand, speaks of a distinct lack of self-confidence.
Irony three is that many of the same people assaulting diaspora opponents of Netanyahu and/or the war are the very same people who will respond to any criticism of Israel by trumpeting the fact that it is a lone pluralist democracy in the region. Democracy, they might be reminded, actually means something beyond its value as a PR cudgel. It means that people can dissent and disagree while remaining under the same civic umbrella.
Irony four is that, with Israel itself divided on the resumption of the war, why on earth should the diaspora be expected to defer and march in lockstep with Israeli government policy? The letter explicitly expressed solidarity with a particular Israeli constituency: to call it anti-Israel is parody. If diaspora Jews are expected to maintain a close bond with Israel, then they are certainly entitled to choose with which Israel that is to be.
It’s worth noting here that 72% of Israelis supported extending the ceasefire into the third stage rather than resuming the war; while the same proportion believes the current government condemned by the deputies should resign. Supporting the continuation of the war and shilling for Netanyahu, then, could be reasonably argued to be ‘pro-Israel’ but anti-Israeli.
And they are unpragmatic in the sense that neither demonisation of Israel nor anti-Zionist antisemitism – both prolific – will be reduced by acting as though Israel, unique among all nations, exists in a state of preternatural innocence. The reflex to automatically defend Israeli conduct regardless of circumstance is no more intellectually credible than the anti-Zionists’ reflex to condemn it regardless of circumstance. Those lauded for their apparent stalwart defence, who can be relied upon to parrot Israeli government discourse to the media on every occasion, in reality do nothing more than play to the gallery. The unaligned Brit is intelligent enough to spot the difference between a defence based on compassionate reason and one based on an article of faith.
No: anti-Zionism will not be mitigated by hagiography, but by sober history. And simplistic distortions of the complex agonies of the Israeli-Palestinian reality will not be reduced by propaganda, but by honesty.
There is plenty of authentic anti-Israelism around, and the recourse to defaming those who quite clearly are not guilty of it betrays the cause. At times over the last 18 months, it has gone well beyond the realms of unseriousness and crossed into outright satire. In the wake of October 7, Joe Biden – probably the most committedly ‘kishkes’ Zionist ever to sit in the Oval Office – first delivered perhaps the most Zionist speech of modern times; and then supported a bloody war, at considerable political and reputational cost, and with the patience of Job. And yet towards the end of his tenure as president, he was widely and ridiculously accused of having turned on Israel for the sin of latterly objecting to the conduct of the war. If he was anti-Israel, what on earth did that make the rest of us, whose criticisms went far further than his?
Thousands of Israeli protesters wave flags during a rally against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bills in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Gili Yaari/Flash90)
Similarly, while there is certainly a reservoir of latent antisemitism and reflexive anti-Zionism in the west, the vast majority of western populations are not frothing Hamasnik antisemites. They have, however, been profoundly appalled and justly alienated by much of the war’s prosecution, and the horrific scale of Gazan suffering. Public opposition thus advances Zionism’s reputation rather than degrading it. Liberal Britons will see a letter like that and conclude that here are Zionists who share our concern for the people of Gaza; that there exists a vibrant Zionism in sharp contradistinction to that offered by Netanyahu and Ben Gvir.
Zeev Sternhell, a truly great Israeli, brooked no contradiction between his brilliantly relentless critiques of the occupation and the Israeli right and his ‘super-Zionism’ – quite the reverse, he claimed, with good reason. So too, the deputies’ letter, as well as being an admirable humanistic plea, ought properly to fall comfortably within the range of any sensible Zionist consensus being, as it is, in perfectly explicit solidarity with a growing number of Israelis.
If ‘pro-Israel’ is further reduced to unthinking devotion, don’t be surprised to find the ranks of the ‘anti’ growing. And it won’t have been of our choosing.
- Jack Omer-Jackaman is a historian of the Israel-Diaspora relationship and a writer and editor focussed on Israel-Palestine and antisemitism
