A long post, I’m afraid; and on a sensitive and even dangerous topic.

I seem to remember warning in an earlier post that the ‘Israel lobby’s’ scurrilous hounding of Jeremy Corbyn as a supposed ‘anti-semite’, might rebound on them, and actually encourage anti-semitism – or at least hostility to the government of Israel, which of course is not the same thing – in the Labour Party and more generally. Following on from that, Netanyahu’s brutal war on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank could have had the same effect: eroding support for Jews, and in particular getting people who hadn’t previously given much thought to the Zionist project (that is, the establishment and defence of a ‘national home’ for the Jews) to examine its political, historical and moral credentials.

Which are, we must surely acknowledge, extraordinarily flimsy. Apart from the ‘God’s covenant’ argument, which no-one who isn’t a Jew or an American Evangelical is at all obliged to trust, and which in any case may be based on a misreading of the scriptures (see https://bernardjporter.com/2024/08/24/gods-covenant/), the best reason for allowing the Jews to have a ‘national home’ is to protect them from the persecution that has dogged them as a diaspora for centuries, culminating of course in the Russian anti-Semitic pogroms of the late 19^th century, and the Hell on Earth of the ‘Holocaust’.

But there are problems here too. Not all Jews – possibly only a minority of them – have historically wanted a ‘state’ of their own, separate from the rest of humanity. Many Rabbis hold that the idea is heretical. The very notion of a racially or even religiously-defined state doesn’t sit very well with modern enlightened thought. It was almost universally abhorred in the case of apartheid South Africa, with which modern Israel is sometimes compared. It involves a toxic amalgam of ‘racism’ with ‘nationalism’, neither of which is seen as a particularly ‘progressive’ ideology today, and both of which – together with religion, another ingredient in the Israeli mix – could be seen as responsible for many of the problems of the world just now.

The alternative to this – a multicultural and tolerant society, including Jews and giving full scope to their talents, as was the situation in Britain for most of her modern history – seems far preferable. To be fair to the currently much reviled British Empire: this was its ideal in its dying – ‘Commonwealth’ – days. Which is why the Brits of that time couldn’t understand why the Muslims of British India should want a nation of their own, or why Jews and Arabs couldn’t get along better with each other in their Palestine mandate. It’s also why the notorious ‘Balfour Declaration’ – which incidentally only favoured a Jewish ‘national home’ (whatever that meant) on the ‘clear’ understanding that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ – did not seem so problematical in 1917 as it turned out to be.

Diaspora Jews have played a brilliant part in many areas of European and American life over the past few centuries, especially in politics, the arts, philosophy and science. This was despite their having no state of their own; or perhaps – could it be? – because of it. To attach them to and identify them with a single geographically defined nation, with all the luggage that brings with it, might well undermine this contribution, and would certainly – as we are witnessing today in present-day Israeli domestic politics, and in Gaza and the West Bank – corrupt it.

This in fact must lie at the root of the problem. Jews, having achieved the nationhood that some of them had long hankered for, are now themselves behaving like a nation, and indeed like some of the worst nations in recent history; attracting comparisons – valid or not – even with the régime that was their principal oppressor in the 1930s and ’40s. They are even aggressively colonising, stealing and illicitly settling other people’s lands, just like European empires did in the bad old days.

This is what mainly disturbs philo-semites (like me), who used to hope and believe that the Jews could be better than this. As a community, they behaved more morally and effectively when they were a diaspora: ‘a people without a land’, as they used to call themselves. They could, and often did, live in peace and friendship with both Christian and Moslem neighbours, contributing greatly to their cultures. Their conduct today has nothing to do with their being different, or ‘Jewish’ (well, perhaps just a little, with that ‘Covenant’ nonsense); but far more to do with their becoming the same as us.

And as ‘the same as us’, surely they must merit the same scrutiny and criticism as other nations, when they offend ‘civilised’ standards of national behaviour, as Israel is doing in Gaza right now. Indeed, if it weren’t the Jews who were involved, with their terrible history of persecution, Israel’s behaviour today would automatically disqualify her from any international sympathy or support at all. This is what the Tsars and the Nazis did to them: shielded them from criticism that would clearly be more widely applied if it weren’t for the Jews’ sufferings in the past.

Of course it might be better for the world – and for the Jews themselves – if the state of Israel had never been created. But that is no longer an option; apart from in the dreams of their vicious Islamicist (and undoubtedly anti-semitic) neighbours. What practical measures can now be taken in order to give Jews the security they deserve after more than a century of persecution is not for me to opine. I personally would prefer a single secular state embracing both peoples, like most European nations are, and as India in 1947 was supposed to be. But that seems unlikely. We are where we are.

So any settlement will probably need to be the much canvassed ‘two-state’ one: two nations living side by side, boundaries negotiated fairly between the parties, one nation Jewish- and the other Moslem-dominated, but neither of them theocratic or racially exclusive, and each of them liberal and tolerant of both (and other) faiths. Right now that seems a big ask. In particular the Jewish side is too wedded to being a separate and historical ‘nation’, in a region and a world where all the spaces for nations are taken up.

But at least modern Israelis could be more aware of the underlying problem, as many Jews of course are; which is not ‘anti-semitism’, but is the nationalism that has made things so much more difficult for them, and is alienating so many people – me, for example – who hugely admire and would like to be friends with Israelis, so long as they are not too Zionist; and with more liberal Jews.