Having attended nearly every national demonstration and countless local actions for Palestinian freedom, one remarkable aspect has been the diversity of people, spanning ages, backgrounds and faiths — challenging the mainstream media’s narrow depiction. Yet, one thing has stood out the most: the presence of older Jewish activists, many of whom have been dedicated to the struggle for decades.
It makes sense; many grew up alongside the birth of Israel, witnessing first-hand Zionist-driven expansion and subjugation of the Palestinian people, leading them to go against the grain and oppose Zionist ideologies.
Here I talk to a few who share profound personal stories and historical insight. As we live through yet another catastrophic turning point in the region’s history, amplifying their voices has never been more vital.
Stephen Kapos
Hungarian-British Stephen Kapos, 87, is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors. He is patron of Stop the War and a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jewish Voice for Labour.
I first became aware of Palestinians when I visited my aunts in Haifa in the 1960s. Their extreme Zionist views and Israel’s militarised atmosphere horrified me. I remember watching a Palestinian demonstration on the news, with helicopters over their heads, shooting. My aunt said, “What’s your problem? They’re Arabs!” She had adopted Israel’s anti-Arab attitudes and saw them as the enemy, not as equal human beings; it was quite tragic.
My parents, in contrast, had no interest in Israel. After the Second World War, they remained in Hungary, joined the Communist Party and lived professional lives influenced by left-wing, anti-racist views. Contact with family in Israel was rare (and considered risky in Stalinist Hungary), and they thought them strange.
Born in Budapest in July 1937, I was separated from my parents and hidden as a child under the Swiss Red Cross and Hungarian Protestant church, which saved over 2,000 Jewish children. My mother was in a girl’s place and my father, a doctor, was part of the Kasztner train project but never reached Switzerland – Hitler discovered the plan. He was held in Belsen as a hostage, not an inmate, and was allowed to act as a doctor. He saw people beaten to death and frozen bodies stacked like logs. Like the Palestinians today, I experienced fear and destruction all around.
Humiliation and dehumanisation were core aspects of the Holocaust. Wearing the yellow star, displaying one on our house and seeing the fear and depression among adults has made me sensitive to any apartheid-like practices – they’re vicious and destructive. I can’t stand seeing it inflicted on others — Palestinians or anyone else.
After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, I had enough of activism. I established my architectural practice in 1968 in the UK and returned to political activism in 1997, joining the Labour Party. I then joined the Palestine solidarity movement in 2015, supporting Boycott Divest Sanction campaigns and opposing the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Despite support from many international lawyers and academics, the better Jerusalem Declaration was ignored, while the IHRA definition became an international weapon to shield Israel from criticism.
Having experienced the Holocaust, I’m sensitive to anti-Semitism and in a way, a sort of litmus test for it. The Labour Party weaponised it during the Corbyn years for factional fights, ignored the existence of left-wing Jewish people and the large number of Jews protesting in solidarity with Palestinians.
The atrocities in Gaza are a moral dividing line. If you can’t see that it’s wrong, there’s something wrong with you, not us. This injustice hurts me deeply, as it does many people. Three generations of my family join me on demos, proving that Jews who oppose Israel’s actions exist and separating Israel from Judaism.
Learning the truth of what happened to the Palestinians makes it unforgivable to maintain the views of Zionists. I’m afraid my own family in Israel fell into that trap. It’s propaganda and self-deception that keeps people believing.
To younger activists, I say: don’t be impatient, change takes time. To my Jewish community, I say: wake up! I hear many complicated and sophisticated arguments. No argument justifies the killings we’re witnessing. The argument stops there.
Diana Neslen
Diana Neslen, 85, is a South African-born Jew, raised in the Orthodox tradition. After retirement she became active in the Palestine solidarity movement. Now widowed, she lives in East London and is an active member of Jewish Voice for Labour and Palestine Solidarity Campaign. She is also a committed and practising Jew.
I was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1939 and grew up in a strongly religious Jewish family. My older sister had special needs, making me aware of inequalities early on, as did growing up in apartheid. Despite knowing South African leaders had supported the Nazis, I still benefited from being white, and that troubled me. The Holocaust also shaped me – knowing my people were deemed unworthy had a profound impact. I spent my childhood trying to understand how people could act in violent, genocidal ways.
I became deeply committed to my Jewish identity and later to Zionism. I joined a Zionist youth movement, which was then socialist, liberal and idealistic. Israel was presented as a land of pioneers for a new, just society. In 1958-59, in my university break, I travelled to Israel and was disturbed by the contempt toward Arabs and racism within Jewish communities. I remember a cousin, whom I admired and who had fought in the Suez Crisis, telling me they killed their prisoners. I also heard how a Mizrahi Jew was rejected from a kibbutz for being “too brown”. These experiences unsettled me. I began reading Israel’s history, learning for the first time about the Nakba and Palestinian displacement.
Conflicted, I moved to London to study social work and married a Canadian Jew. He was raised in the Bundist tradition and as a Yiddishist, was trying to revive the wonderful Ashkenazi Jewish culture, dismissed by the Israeli state. In the 1940s and 50s, Israel promoted the “new Jew” — blonde, blue-eyed and carrying a gun. Despite fearing for Israel’s survival in the 1967 Six-Day War, after seeing images of new Palestinian refugees and destroying Arab homes in Jerusalem, I realised Israel was a militarized power, not a fragile state. That was when I broke with Zionism completely.
My activism began with the anti-apartheid movement. Speaking out against Zionism was incredibly isolating; conversations were met with hysteria or silence. Resistance to the truth was — and still is — immense.
Years later, I was accused of anti-Semitism — not by Jews, but by gentiles in the Labour Party. The term is weaponised to silence defenders Palestinian rights. Every time Israel faces scrutiny, it pulls the anti-Semitism card.
Anti-semitism exists — I see some grim things online — but not all Jews support Israel’s actions. Many of us reject them. Unfortunately, too many Jews in positions of power defend it.
When a state becomes more important than human beings, it becomes idolatrous — blasphemous, even. Zionism has replaced faith with nationalism, turning Israel into a false god. This is not Judaism; it is a corruption of Jewish values. After 1967, Israel aggressively pushed the narrative that it was the only safe haven for Jews. The propaganda worked, seeping into politics, media and education.
My life has been bookended by two genocides. I know the damage it does to the soul of a people and am horrified by how Western governments defend the indefensible. The conflation of Zionism with Judaism is one of modern history’s greatest tragedies.
What gives me hope? A new generation that refuses to accept Israel’s propaganda. Young people are asking questions, seeking real history and challenging mainstream narratives. Social media is powerful but books provide depth. Keep reading. Keep questioning. Keep talking about Palestine. Don’t normalise oppression.
Zionism, I’ve often said, is like a virus that has infected the Jewish people, spreading unchecked. It is deeply painful to know that my people, once victims of genocide, are now the perpetrators. But I take solace in the knowledge that righteous Jews refuse to be complicit. That is where I stand, and where I will always stand.
Haim Bresheeth
Haim Bresheeth, 79, is an ex-Israeli anti-Zionist working and living in Britain for over 50 years. As a media historian, he now specialises in Palestinian history, its settler-colonial occupation and how the Israeli military shapes the state’s identity, ideology and systems of power. He is the founder of Jewish Network for Palestine.
My parents were Polish Jews, both taken to Auschwitz. Against all odds, they survived, found each other in Torino, and I was born in a displaced person’s camp in Rome in 1946. They weren’t Zionists and never wanted to go to Israel, but they couldn’t return to Poland, and no other country would take them. In June 1948, just after Israel’s creation, we arrived in Haifa.
After six years under Nazi rule, my father refused to join the Israeli army. He may have been the first refuser and was briefly jailed. Eventually, he served as an unarmed medic.
We settled in Jaffa’s Jabalia neighbourhood, alongside other Holocaust survivors and Palestinians who had survived the Nakba. Until school, I didn’t know there was anything wrong with being Palestinian — they were my friends. But school taught us otherwise. We were also told not to speak Yiddish, just as Mizrahi Jews were told not to speak Arabic.
At the time, only about 1% of Jews outside of Israel were Zionists. Israelis didn’t want to hear Holocaust survivors’ stories — considering us weak, “lambs to the slaughter.” This feeling of separation made me want to integrate, to belong.
I eventually joined the army, but my allegiance was conflicted, and I never fitted in. Luckily I never harmed or killed anyone. Later, I left Israel for London, studied for a PhD, and joined Khamsin, a journal of Matzpen. Through discussions and protests, like the one on Land Day outside the Albert Hall, I finally understood settler colonialism and became an anti-Zionist.
One of my earliest memories, around age five, shaped everything; my writing, filmmaking and activism that I would do later. My mother told me our flat wasn’t ours – it had belonged to a Palestinian family forced to leave – and one day, they would return. That idea stayed with me.
In 1956, during the war against Egypt, my father and uncle were drafted. I spent months waiting for them, and one day from the balcony, I saw two women with three children approaching. I ran to my mother, saying, “They are here. They have come.”
My mother understood immediately, brought them in and by chance, they spoke Italian. The children and I played, while my mother showed them everything they had left behind — bedding, glassware, even photo albums — all carefully preserved. The women broke down, crying. My mother reassured them, but the older woman said through her tears, “We will not come back. They will not allow us to come back.” That moment history stopped being abstract and became something I had lived. I’ll never forget it.
I once believed the Holocaust happened because no one knew about it. I thought if people had been aware, they would have acted. For years, I held the same belief about Palestine. But after Gaza, I realised how wrong I was. This is the most documented genocide in history, yet it continues. The irony is that Palestinians are painted as aggressors, and Israelis as victims.
Unlike the Nazis, who hid their crimes, Israel commits them with pride. As a Jew, it is unbearable to witness. If someone cannot understand that, I cannot reason with them.
I don’t believe change will come from within Israel. Apartheid didn’t end in South Africa because white people willingly gave up power — the decision was made for them. The same must happen with Zionism. Palestine must be decolonised.
Some defend Zionism as a Jewish safety measure. But genocide is not a Jewish value. For 2,000 years, Judaism was a peaceful religion. Zionists have abandoned Judaism for nationalism, replacing God with the army, morality with militarism.
As for my arrest, it’s insignificant compared to what happens in Gaza. But it highlights Britain’s complicity. The UK is arresting people like me for upholding international law while arming Israel. The Genocide Convention states that failing to act against genocide makes one complicit. I refuse to be complicit. I refuse to remain silent.
The North London Peaceniks
The North London Peaceniks (@nlpeaceniks) is a small group of older Jewish women, aged between 75 and 86 years old, who curate creative events to highlight the abhorrent treatment of Palestinians. Some are children of parents persecuted by the Nazi regime.
We came together in March 2024 driven by anger and distress over Gaza, to organise a fundraiser. To our surprise, we filled a 90-seater local arts cinema in north London for a film and poetry night, raising over £3,500 for Medical Aid for Palestine.
As a group of four women with different strengths, we tell stories visually and creatively. Our first curated event, inspired by a P21 Gallery show on Gazan civilian detainees, featured a silent performance on the South Bank. Wearing t-shirts describing people’s inhumane treatment, we enacted torturous stress positions. As older Jewish women, it made an impact.
Two of us, raised in North London, have long been involved in Palestine solidarity movements. The other two, from Zimbabwe and South Africa, recognise distressing parallels with apartheid. Gaza galvanised us. We’ve all been on a journey – some of us more than others – to truly understand the history.
Protesting as people of Jewish heritage carries a different weight. It feels vital, like a deep – almost personal – responsibility. There’s an incredible warmth at demos, especially from young Muslim demonstrators who read our self-made placards and thank us for being there.
The most shocking aspect of the last 18 months has been the lack of empathy within our own communities, costing us a few friends and family. As in South African apartheid, those facing brutal discrimination are not seen as human. This is especially painful for one of us, whose husband’s son, a committed Zionist and Israeli reservist, has been deployed since October 7. This has strained relationships yet we remain committed to exposing the inhumanity of this situation.
The Israeli propaganda machine has been terrifyingly effective, fuelling perpetual fear and paranoia. No matter how rational the argument or shocking the images and statistics, many just cannot hear us. The silence of rabbis has also been a great moral failure.
We’re now planning our next fundraiser, for medical and psychological care for Gazans and hope to create more imaginative events to raise awareness of Jewish voices, and inspire others to do the same.
[Cover photo: Silent performance piece on the abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees by members of The North London Peaceniks on 26 September 2024 (c) @nlpeaceniks]
Yanar Alkayat is a health and fitness content editor for magazines such as Women’s Health, Runner’s World, and Men’s Health. She is also a registered Yoga Therapist
Follow her on Instagram: @yanarfitness
