The Israeli right, as represented in the coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, has led a campaign of vilification against the liberal left that threatens the country’s claim to be a rare beacon of democracy in the region. The Israeli academic Naomi Chazan, a former deputy speaker of the Knesset, wrote in December 2015: ‘For far too long, the orchestrated assault on inclusive concepts of Israeli society has been ignored and its consequences sadly neglected. The latest attempts at discrediting democratic voices across the political spectrum have made it abundantly evident that dark winds symptomatic of proto-fascism are sweeping the country.’90
With the rise of jihadi extremism in the region, public attitudes in Israel have hardened markedly. According to an opinion poll published in March 2016,91 nearly half of Jewish Israelis believe that the country’s Arab population should be transferred or expelled, and 79 per cent believe that Jewish Israelis should be given preferential treatment over non-Jews. So much for the pledge in Israel’s declaration of independence to ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…’
Israelis see themselves as a people under constant threat of annihilation, surrounded by enemies who, if they could, would murder them all. Every time an Israeli is stabbed or shot by a Palestinian, that conviction is reinforced. If outsiders fail to share their perception, the only reason must be that the outsiders are anti-Semites. The writer Linda Grant, whose Israel-based novel When I Lived in Modern Times won the 2000 Orange Prize for fiction, put it well: ‘Like fairground distorting mirrors, the world looks at the Israelis and sees a giant, a monster, but the Israeli looks and sees a tiny, cowering figure, the puny kid walking to school, tormented by bullies.’92
For most Israelis, nothing is more important than to make sure that Jews will never again be weak. As my fictional Israeli wrote in 2009, it is better to be hated and strong than hated and weak. When Golda Meir became the first Israeli Prime Minister to be received at the Vatican, she told Pope Paul VI: ‘Your Holiness, do you know what my earliest memory is? A pogrom in Kiev. When we were merciful and when we had no homeland and when we were weak, we were led to the gas chambers.’93
If it were possible to put an entire nation on a psychiatrist’s couch, it would be tempting to analyse the Israeli psyche as a classic case of an abuse victim turning into an abuser. Every single Israeli Jew, whether from a European or an Arab background, has a family story that is scarred by memories of fear and exile. It should come as no surprise that the last words every Israeli whispers before going to sleep at night are ‘Never again.’ In 1948, in 1967, and again in 1973, Israel’s neighbours joined together to try to destroy the country by military force; on each occasion, against the odds, Israel beat them back. As the saying goes, just because you are paranoid, it does not mean that they are not out to get you.
Throughout the thirty-plus years that I have been reporting from, and about, Israel and Palestine, I have generally tried to avoid answering the question posed by interlocutors on both sides: ‘So how do you think the conflict should be resolved?’ To even suggest a possible solution is the surest recipe I know for becoming instantly dragged into a quagmire from which there is no escape. But perhaps now is the time to be just a little bit braver, so what follows is an attempt to set out, if possible without offending anyone, a few observations born of my experience in the region. I shall aim to be, in the words of the founder of my old newspaper, The Observer, ‘unbiased by prejudice, uninfluenced by party’.
My starting point – and even as I prepare to write the words, I know how much trouble they will cause – is that the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 may well have been, in retrospect, a mistake. This does not mean that I think Israel should be wiped off the face of the map, or that the Jews who live there should be expelled. Israel exists, it has eight and a half million citizens, of whom roughly three-quarters are Jews, and they have as much right to live in peace and security as anyone else.
But do I accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state? I accept its right to exist, just as I accept the right of any other legitimately established state to exist (for example, I accept Kosovo, which has been recognised as a sovereign state by more than a hundred members of the United Nations, but not Abkhazia or South Ossetia, which have not). But as a non-believer, I have some difficulty in accepting the concept of a state that has a specific religious faith enshrined in its identity. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I should add that I have as much difficulty accepting the idea of the Islamic republics of Iran, Pakistan or Afghanistan as I have accepting the Jewish state of Israel.)
As I cannot accept religious scripture as a basis for international law, I base my acceptance of Israel’s right to exist on a resolution of the United Nations general assembly passed in November 1947 with the support of the two undisputed post-war great powers: the United States and the Soviet Union.† I can well understand the superpowers’ reasoning – especially President Truman’s wish to ‘rescue’ those victims of the Nazis who had managed to survive the Holocaust. But I also suspect that at least some of the political leaders who proclaimed themselves to be enthusiastic pro-Zionists did so because it offered them an opportunity to direct some of the quarter of a million Jews displaced by the Second World War away from their own shores. Support for Zionism could easily become a handy disguise for anti-Semitism, just as, confusingly, what these days is called anti-Zionism can sometimes be used in exactly the same way. (Not all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, even if some anti-Semites choose to disguise themselves as anti-Zionists.)
Much of the furore in 2016 over alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party stemmed from this blurring of the distinction between Jews and Zionists. Some people openly and deliberately use the word Zionist (or the abbreviation Zio) as an insult, hoping that by calling someone a Zionist instead of a Jew they can avoid being labelled anti-Semitic. It is an easy elision to make, given that for many Jews, being a Zionist is intrinsic to their sense of identity.
So if I accept Israel’s right to exist, why do I suggest that its establishment might have been a mistake? Because, just as the Jewish anti-Zionists of the early twentieth century had feared it would, I fear that it has turned out to be bad both for Jews and for the rest of the world. Unlike the historian who described the establishment of Israel as a Jewish triumph, an Arab tragedy and a British failure,94 I am tempted to argue that it was not, in fact, even a Jewish triumph.
Zionism sprang from a belief that Jews could never be safe until they had a homeland of their own. Given the experience of the Tsarist pogroms, the Dreyfus affair in France and then the Nazis’ attempt to physically eradicate all of Europe’s Jews, it was a perfectly reasonable belief. Many Israelis still believe that no Jew can feel really safe unless they live in Israel. They are, however, in a minority among the world’s Jews, since, nearly seventy years after the establishment of the Jewish state, more than half the world’s estimated fourteen million Jews still choose to live elsewhere, the vast majority of them in the United States. (There is an old joke that goes: ‘What is the definition of an American Zionist? An American Jew who gives money to a second American Jew so that another Jew can go to live in Israel.’)
It is at least questionable whether the descendants of the Jews who moved to Israel from Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War are really any safer than they would have been if their forefathers had stayed in Europe, as my paternal grandparents did. My personal experience has been that I feel immeasurably safer living in the UK than I ever did living in Israel. Nowhere except in Israel have I seen shoppers in supermarkets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders – shoppers, not security guards – and it was in Jerusalem, not London, that I discovered that the father of one of my son’s school friends routinely travelled to and from work with a revolver in his briefcase.
So what about the descendants of the half a million or more Jews from Arab countries who fled to Israel i
n the years following the establishment of the Jewish state? They make up more than half of Israel’s Jewish population, but it is perfectly possible to argue that if there had been no Israel, and no war of independence that pitted the nascent Jewish state against the entire Arab world, the Jews of countries like Morocco, Yemen, Iraq and Libya might well have been able to stay put. Not that a Middle East without Israel would necessarily have been a region of perpetual peace and prosperity, but it is unarguable that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 introduced a new, highly unstable fault-line into a region that had barely emerged from its Ottoman past and was already undergoing rapid, oil-fuelled economic and social change.
Take Shalom, an Israeli taxi driver I once met. His parents had been Iraqi Jews who fled to Israel in the 1950s, shortly before he was born. They named him Shalom (peace) as a symbol of their hopes for the future, but his son had been killed in Lebanon while serving with the Israeli army, and he was consumed with rage. Just one story of many.
Under Israeli law, any Jew anywhere in the world is automatically entitled to Israeli citizenship and to take up residence in Israel. (An exception is made for those with ‘a criminal past, likely to endanger public welfare’.) The law defines a Jew as ‘a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion’. The same citizenship rights are also automatically available to ‘a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion’.
So I could become an Israeli citizen tomorrow if I wished, thanks to my mother’s Nazi-era passport, as could my children. But my near namesake, the late Roman Catholic Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, who converted to Catholicism at the age of thirteen and whose Jewish mother was killed in Auschwitz, would have been turned away. So would my father, who became a member of another religion when he was confirmed in a Lutheran church. To the Nazis, his confirmation made not a jot of difference – to them, once a Jew, always a Jew – but Israeli law sees these things differently.
I first realised how problematic is the idea of Jews as a race apart when I visited the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv. In the main entrance hall was a giant multi-screen video display, showing images of dozens of Jews from all four corners of the globe: white Jews, black Jews, brown Jews, Jews with round eyes and big noses, Jews with slanted eyes and small noses, brown-eyed Jews and blue-eyed Jews, dark-haired Jews and fair-haired Jews. How, I wondered, could anyone argue that they all belonged to the same ‘race’?
In the early twentieth century, many eminent Jews angrily rejected the concept of Jews as a separate race and regarded Zionism as a dangerous ideology that would inevitably lead to trouble. They thought the British government was wrong to publish the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, supporting the Zionists’ aspiration for the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’.
Just three months before the declaration was published, the British Secretary of State for India, Sir Edwin Montagu, who was only the second unconverted Jew‡ ever to sit in a British Cabinet (his cousin Herbert Samuel was the first), wrote an anguished memorandum to his Cabinet colleagues:
Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman … It seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the ‘national home of the Jewish people’.95
Imagine the reaction if a leading politician were to say anything remotely similar today. But the irony is that it was Hitler’s discredited theories about race that led directly to the near universal acceptance of the notion that Jews are a race apart – an irony of which I am the living embodiment, as someone whose only officially accepted claim to be Jewish is a document that was issued to my mother by the Nazis.
Some Jews who accept that definitions based on race are deeply problematic nevertheless argue that they are a clearly definable people. They share a culture, a tradition and a language, even if they do not all share a religious faith – therefore, as a people, they have the right to a homeland, a state, in exactly the same way as, for example, the American people have the right to a homeland. I have some sympathy with this argument, although it immediately raises an issue of practicality. What do you do if the homeland that you claim is yours by right is also claimed by another people, who claim an equivalent right?
Palestinians may not be a race apart, any more than Jews are, but they can also claim to be a people, albeit a people with a tradition that is a good deal less rooted in history than that claimed by Jews. They share much of their culture, and of course their language, with the rest of the Arab world, but their history, especially since the arrival of the first modern Zionists in the late nineteenth century, is uniquely theirs.
Perhaps these arcane discussions about the precise nature and definition of Jewishness are beside the point. Most Jews who identify themselves as Jews firmly believe themselves to be a separate and identifiable racial group, as indeed does English law. According to guidance issued by the Crown Prosecution Service, a House of Lords ruling in 198396 that Sikhs should be regarded as a separate racial group and therefore covered by the anti-discrimination provisions of the Race Relations Act should also be regarded as a ‘persuasive authority for Jews being included in the definition of a racial group as well as a religious group’.97
And, in 2009, a Jewish school in north-west London was found to have broken the Race Relations Act by refusing admission to a boy whose mother’s conversion to Judaism was not recognised by the Office of the Chief Rabbi. In the words of the Court of Appeal, ‘the requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act’.98
Many of the early Zionists were young idealists who saw the building of an entirely new nation as a wonderful opportunity to put their idealism into practice. Many young Jews of my generation leapt at the chance to spend a few months on an Israeli kibbutz, in the days when they were still a vibrant example of communalism in action, in which no property was owned individually and everything was shared according to need. Perhaps if I had realised at the age of eighteen that I was Jewish, I also would have headed off to a kibbutz rather than to Uganda to teach music.
But one of the saddest conversations I ever had in Israel was with David Passow, a wonderful man who, with his wife Aviva, was a neighbour of ours in Jerusalem. (Their three adult children, Judah, Mimi and Sam, all became good friends of ours – Judah is an award-winning photographer with whom I often worked on stories for The Observer.) David had been a passionate Zionist all his adult life; he had served as a rabbi in the US navy and had played an active role after the end of the Second World War in encouraging European Jews to emigrate illegally into what was still British-ruled Palestine. But when I visited him in 2001 shortly after Ariel Sharon had become Prime Minister – a man regarded by many, both in Israel and in the Arab world, as a war criminal – he remarked: ‘If I had known that this is how we would end up, I would never have started.’ For him, the dream of a Jewish homeland, the ‘light unto the nations’ of the biblical prophecy, had turned into a nightmare.99
I stir up this hornet’s nest for a reason. It is not because I question Israel’s right to exist, nor because I question the deeply felt ties that bind millions of Jews to the Jewish state. My reason is this: all my experience of war s
uggests to me that a prerequisite for the resolution of any long-lasting conflict is that each party to the dispute must make a serious effort to understand how it feels to be on the other side. In South Africa, for example, a peaceful transition from a brutal system of apartheid that classed the black majority as second-class citizens was made possible only when white leaders came to accept that the system was so unjust that it was simply unsustainable. And an essential element in that transition was what became known as a truth and reconciliation process, during which those who had been responsible for some of the countless injustices of the apartheid era were given an opportunity to speak openly about what they had done and seek immunity from prosecution.
Likewise in Northern Ireland, where a successful peace process bringing together Protestants and Catholics was possible only when leaders of the two communities came together in a mutual recognition of past injustices. All conflicts create victims on both sides, but conflicts that cannot be ended by a decisive victory of one side over the other will end only when each side recognises that the other has suffered as well.
So it seems to me to be self-evident that any resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict must include a recognition by Israelis that the establishment of their state caused immense harm and trauma to the Palestinian people who were already living there and to their descendants. At the same time, Palestinian and other Arab leaders must acknowledge that their refusal over several decades to accept the reality of the Israeli state, and the continuing attacks by Palestinian groups such as Hamas against Israeli civilians, have also been a strategic error that has caused immense harm and suffering.
It is one of the many tragedies of the Israel–Palestine conflict – but by no means unique to it – that neither side is yet able to acknowledge that they are both victims. If more Israelis could bring themselves to accept that Palestinians have suffered immensely over the past seven decades, and if more Palestinians could accept that Israelis still live, with justification, in fear, then there would at least be a chance of making progress towards a lasting settlement of the conflict.
Is Anything Happening? Page 28