These are the things I’ve learnt you can’t ask about Israel

These are the things I’ve learnt you can’t ask about Israel September 22, 2024 In recent years, I have been asked to comment on the Middle East “impasse”, though I am no foreign policy expert. I am merely one of many humanists who mourn this tragic history and rail against the failure of the international community to exert the great influence it has to bring peace and justice to innocent civilians in this area of the world. Many Jewish supporters of peace have argued that it is precisely because of our own long history of oppression and discrimination that we must stand with the Palestinian people and support their right to self-determination. I have come to the point where I think differently. It is not because of my own history that I have declared myself to be an ally of the struggle of Palestinian people, it is because as human beings injustice and inequality demand that we all care. Yes, my own family history has shaped my political views. If my mother and grandparents fleeing Berlin in 1938 had not been accepted here, they would have joined the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust. So, yes, I care deeply that asylum seekers should be met by our welcome embrace. My father’s father was less fortunate. He was deported to Beaune-la-Rolande in the first round-up of immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and then sent to Birkenau, where he was murdered. My father, at the age of 14, joined the Jewish section of the communist resistance in Paris. This group of partisans, ordinary young men and women with nothing but courage and commitment, determined it was vital to urge French Jews not to report to their local police station, to encourage them to go into hiding, and to provide rations and places to sleep for young children abruptly orphaned. My father, with his mother’s blessing, took a stand. In such moments, we all have choices, which is not to condemn those who focused on survival, sought ways to escape to Palestine, or took comfort in God’s protection. But it is to acknowledge that there was heroism in daily life, despite the great risks. My father’s exhortation “not to look away” was the lesson of his entire life after all that he’d witnessed and lost during World War II and then from the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War and all the horrors since. And so, all these years later, the question remains: Who will bear witness if we don’t? The lessons of my parents’ early years inevitably shaped my understanding of the world. To continue in a personal mode: my teenage years were spent in a socialist Zionist youth movement. I suspect my parents, who weren’t Zionists, simply appreciated two hours of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon without children. The movement’s intention was that at the end of school, we would spend a year on a kibbutz. My parents, entirely focused on education, weren’t having a year of picking...

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