I wrote my last piece on Israel/Palestine in August 2014. One year after that, I began attending Mass every day, two years later I was received into the Church, and as far as Israel, Palestine and I were concerned, that was that. I’d had it with the solidarity movement, with its tired lefties, acquiescent Christians and gatekeeping Jews. I told myself, God will deal with it, it’s time to move on. Except that a few weeks ago, I sent that 2014 piece to Culture Wars magazine, and received back an appreciation of the piece, but also a request that I expand it to include the latest round of violence.

I wasn’t very enthusiastic. Not enough drama, I thought. After all, this latest round lasted only about eight days, as opposed to the seven weeks in 2014, so the casualties were less dramatic – 212 Palestinian fatalities as opposed to over 2,000 in 2014. Also, the dynamic was different. This time, the Israelis decided to forego a ground incursion (the only way to root out hidden, and mobile missile batteries), with its concomitant IDF casualty price tag, so we were denied a repeat of the 2006, 8 and 14 spectacles of the Israelis getting their “asses kicked.” Never mind, we could still enjoy their humiliation at the rockets raining down on TelAviv and Haifa. Never mind how explosively ineffective the rockets are, the fact they get there is victory enough.

On the political front, there were important if less dramatic developments. Human Rights Watch, the world’s premier human rights organization and Betselem, the Israeli equivalent, both published reports, which between them, went way further than ever before, naming and calling out Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, and even going as far as to question the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself. And Biden – no friend of Binyamin Netanyahu, since he marched into Congress to rub Obama/ Biden’s nose in it – was less than totally supportive. Nor was there enthusiasm amongst Jews. In both the U.S. and in Europe, attendance at pro-Israel rallies was markedly down. Norman Finkelstein got very excited about all this. He’s been writing about the growing Jewish disaffection with Israel for years. But I’m not so sure. The Jewish romance with Israel may be over, but what about the Jewish romance with Jews?

But something wasn’t right. Everyone I agreed with – traditionalists, pro-lifers, Christians – they were all supporting the Israelis, while everyone I disagreed with – progressives, pro-choicers and atheists – they all supported the Palestinians. I also noticed both sides of the argument were led by Jews, Zionists and Marxists, divided by that one hundred-andfifty-year-old family squabble as to who is going to lead the Jewish people in bringing a light unto the nations.

If in your despair you’re wondering how the solidarity movement comes to be dominated by Jews and you’re picturing grey-bearded rabbis huddled in tiny rooms in Zurich plotting world Jewish domination, forget it. That’s not how it’s done (though these days, it can come worrisomely close). Jews come to the movement because they think they care, they believe such good works are essentially… well, Jewish. And they rise in the movement because, if not smarter, they’re certainly more focused, organized and energetic, and also because of their sheer chutzpah in believing that they can get it done. What they’re not fully conscious of, any more than a bee is conscious of stinging or a dog of barking, is that they will, in the end always act in what they believe are Jewish interests, in the case of the Jewish Marxists, of building a heaven on earth and never mind the cost, and of the Jewish Zionists, of building a Jewish powerbase in Palestine, and also never mind the cost.

Then I looked round and noticed I wasn’t where I ought to be. You know how YouTube works: the more you look at something, the more you get of it, so in my efforts to find out about this latest episode in Gaza, I’d inadvertently stumbled into a new and hitherto alien self-affirming bubble, one peopled by young leftists, progressives – and again, most noticeably by Jews.But these weren’t the Jews I’d known. Certainly not the ones I grew up with. We were undersized, a bit odd looking, certainly clever, but not very good at football. In later life we got a bit flash. Always sexually precocious with our “evenings in” snogging sessions, later we’d meet en masse at GoldersGreen Station to crash a couple of parties before heading up west to the clubs.

Nor were they like the young Jews I ran into after the twenty years I spent away from Jewish life with my Catholic wife and secular children. It was 1993, suddenly everybody was reconciling. You couldn’t spit without hitting a Jew looking for a Palestinian to reconcile with. It was my first event, a fundraiser for “British Friends of Neve Shalom,” or to give it its full name Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam. It’s Hebrew and Arabic for “Oasis of Peace,” and it’s a village between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where Israeli Jews and Palestinians live together, and in so doing hope to provide a model for others to do the same. That the Palestinians with whom these young idealists wish to live, are a minority in their own land, were forcibly expelled from their homes, lived for five years under military rule, and now suffer all kinds of discrimination, both official and unofficial, including not being allowed to live on ninety percent of their own land, all this registers with these young Jewish idealists not one bit. These Jews were also North London youngsters, but they looked different – all glossy hair and shining teeth. I couldn’t place them. Like they’d evolved, been genetically modified, they were kind of international, continental, but not quite. Then I got it. They were Israeli. Of course, they weren’t really Israeli, though I’m sure lots had two passports, and all had grown up in the post-sixties Israeli-ization of Jewish life. But they looked Israeli, and they sounded Israeli, like you’d see any Saturday night on Dizengoff.

Then there were the older Zionist-lite Jews I ran into when I began my activism. At first, they welcomed me, with my vision of some remnant Jewish goodness, some dimmed, but still flickering flame of Jewish virtue, rooted in the specialness of Jewish suffering. These Jews welcomed me – that is, until I began to question that suffering….

[…] This is just an excerpt from the July/August 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!