[I’ve been nervous of publishing this, in view of the way that any criticism of Israel can be labelled ‘anti-semitic’ by dedicated supporters of the modern Israeli government. (See – again – Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism, 2023.) I don’t regard myself as anti-semitic by any stretch of that word; and seriously hope that what I write here won’t be taken in that way.]

‘Israel stands on stolen territory’. Well, yes; but to start with we should acknowledge that many if not most nations of the world are the results of theft: built, that is, on land taken from others. I imagine that the Celts or Britons who originally lived in the part of England I come from were pretty cross with my Saxon antecedents when they pushed them westwards to allow them (the East Saxons) to settle in Chelmsford. (Or where Chelmsford is now.) A more recent example of course is the entire American continent, both north and south, whose present populations are by and large not the ones that lived and ruled there 500 years ago. Humanity’s history has been one of successive waves of territorial expansion and robbery. So, historically, Israel’s situation today is not unique.

In fact it fits this pattern pretty well. The land on which the modern state of Israel stands was stolen from its previous inhabitants and rulers – mainly Arabs and Ottomans at the time it was taken over – by a people whose ‘title’ to it rested on disputed interpretations of an ancient religious text, implying that God, no less, had ‘promised’ it to the Jews several thousand years previously. There were other and I think better reasons for their occupation, which I’ll come on to later; but these can’t alter the fact that it involved blatant land robbery: a form of ‘colonialism’ familiar from what we are taught to despise in the European history of a century or two ago. For a historian of that period and of that episode, the parallels are striking: the seizure by force of an already occupied land; the ‘settlement’ movement going on now in the West Bank, involving the bulldozing of Arab villages to make room for Jewish incomers; the religio-racism that lies at the foundation of Israel’s very existence; and the virtual ‘apartheid’ found in many areas of Israeli social life that this gives rise to. These are all genuine throw-backs to, or continuations of, the original and much despised ‘European age of imperialism’; with its colonialist character given extra credence by Israel’s supposed origin in the infamous ‘Balfour Declaration’, which was issued by a British imperialist for imperial motives of his own.

So, the creation of Israel started off as a crime; but then what state hasn’t, if we look far enough back in time? More serious is the fact that it has become obvious subsequently that it was also a huge diplomatic mistake, bearing in mind the troubles it has given rise to, right up to the present day. Some of these have been the results of a misreading of Balfour’s original ‘Declaration’, which promised the Jews only ‘a national home’ – whatever that meant – ‘in Palestine’; and – crucially – ‘its being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Israel of course has gone some way beyond that; which is one of the reasons (not the only one – clearly Hamas bears a great portion of the blame) why she and the Palestinians are in conflict with each other today.  

But history – even historical crimes – should not determine the present in every situation. Otherwise we should need to give America back to the Amerindians, Northern Ireland back to the original Irish, and Chelmsford back to the Welsh. History, whether modern or very ancient, as in this case, can be a useful tool for understanding the present; but it can’t be allowed to confine our present-day options in any way. The most it should do is to make the ‘winners’ of past events – modern Americans, Ulstermen, Chelmsfordians; in this instance Israeli Jews – aware of the ways in which they have ‘won’ their new countries, and of the resentments that may still linger from those times.

The other – and to my mind better – factors said to justify the Jews’ takeover of this territory are, of course, the appalling atrocities committed against their people over the centuries, culminating in the Russian persecutions of the 19th century and then the Nazi Holocaust; against any repetition of which it is perfectly understandable that modern Jews feel that a nation-state of their own will safeguard them. Of course the Palestinian Arabs had nothing to do with any of this, which is what makes it doubly unjust that they should be saddled with the West’s tardy act of contrition for allowing it. But the Jews’ appalling suffering in comparatively recent times must explain and even justify the sympathy that many of us have for them, and consequently for the solution that was found for them in 1948.

That this solution has turned out so problematically should not justify our turning back on it completely, as Hamas for example proposes. But it surely ought to encourage Israeli governments to tread more softly than they have over the past few years in response; keeping in the front of their minds the original offence – so far as the Palestinians are concerned – from which all this horror sprang. Clearly bombing the living daylights out of the Gaza enclave is not doing this. And it is also turning many of Israel’s and Judaism’s former friends and admirers into what are now being slandered as ‘anti-Semites’, when they clearly aren’t.

In fact it surely can’t be, when those critics include many Jews themselves, both in Israel and in the diaspora. Here is one example: prominent members of the highly influential British Board of (Jewish) Deputies, coming out against Netanyhu’s and the IDF’s actions yesterday. ‘Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we, members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, fear for the future of the Israel we love and have such close ties to’.  (See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77ndzkz778o.) That is powerful.