One of the profoundest sorrows of my life as an observer of politics is the way Jews, once the most visible and extreme victims of Fascism, have now taken on many of the attributes and actions of Fascism themselves. I say ‘Jews’, and emphatically not ‘the Jews’, because Netanyahu and his clique are clearly not representative of Jewry generally; with most Jews being – I like to think – as unsupportive of Israel’s hideous crimes in Gaza, and of the religio-racist ideology that appears to be one of the factors lying behind them, as are most of the goyim. You’ll find opposition to Israel’s present policies in Gaza, and even to the idea of a single-religion-dominated State of Israel itself, widespread in the Jewish diaspora, even among the Rabbinate; scotching the accusation that it must be an ‘anti-Semitic’ trope.

That of course is the charge, together with the terrible memory of the Nazi holocaust, which has protected Israel from some of the criticism that it might otherwise justly have attracted to itself, and is normal when deployed against other similarly aggressive and colonialist powers. The charge of anti-Semitism, ‘weaponised’ in this way, has a lot to answer for; quite apart from crippling the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s, and so prolonging the political mayhem that the Conservatives inflicted on us afterwards – until Labour found a new more Israel-friendly leader for itself. I personally shall never forgive the ‘Israel lobby’, as it’s called, for this. It has done much to erode much of the pro-Jewish feeling I instinctively used to share with most other progressive Britons, before then.

What I fervently wish is that Judaism could revert back to the purely personal belief-system that most religions are, enriching the cultures of all the societies that harbour it: this of course depends on those societies tolerating it; or, if it still feels it requires a state apparatus to protect it from future holocausts, to have its Israel, but more liberally conceived, side-by-side with a viable and hopefully friendly Palestinian state, and – crucially – based on the frank admission that the acquisition of land from the their previous Arab occupiers in the 1940s and ’60s, was a crime. And, of course, there must be none of this nonsense about God ‘promising’ it to them. That only fools Jewish Zionists and American Evangelicals. Why should the Godless amongst us have any truck with it?

Many other nations are established on ‘stolen’ lands: the USA among them. Israel is not alone in this regard. What might make a difference is to acknowledge it, apologetically, as I think Americans do; and to proceed on from there. – But in the present situation this does, I admit, seem naïve.