Loving Israel

I have never believed that loving Israel requires me to look away from what Israel does. Quite the opposite.

If Zionism means anything serious to me, it means taking responsibility for Jewish power as well as defending the Jewish need for it. That is why the violence being carried out by extremist settlers in the West Bank is not somebody else’s argument. It is mine.

In Qusra, Palestinian families have been surrounded in their homes. Illegal outposts have been established around Palestinian houses. Water and electricity have been cut. The IDF itself has described the activity as illegal, reprehensible and unacceptable. Across the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians have been displaced in recent years in circumstances linked to settler violence.

There is no version of Zionism I recognise in this. My Zionism begins with Jewish self-determination and includes Palestinian self-determination. I believe two peoples belong to that land and that neither should have to surrender its national future for the other to have one. I do not see Palestinian freedom as something to be grudgingly allowed once Israel feels sufficiently secure. It is a right in itself.

That conviction is political, but it is also Jewish. Zionism gave Jews something our history had so often denied us: power. The great moral question was always what would happen next. What would Jewish values look like when they were no longer the ethics of a minority but had to survive contact with sovereignty, soldiers, borders and control over other people’s lives?

That matters because the moral language of Judaism becomes rather empty if it only works when we are the people being wronged. Tzedek tzedek tirdof,  justice, justice shall you pursue, is not especially demanding if justice means justice for Jews. B’tzelem Elohim, the insistence that human beings are made in the image of God, cannot conveniently end when the human being in front of us is Palestinian. And the command, repeated again and again in Torah, to remember the stranger cannot simply be a way of memorialising our own suffering.

We remember what vulnerability feels like because memory is supposed to change how we behave when somebody else is vulnerable. Jewish values are not slogans or  proof texts that can be dropped into a speech once the politics has already been decided. Rather they are supposed to make life more difficult, they are supposed to stop us becoming completely comfortable with our own power.

Jewish sovereignty was never meant to free us from Jewish ethics, it was meant to test whether we really believed them.

That is why what is happening in the West Bank is not some peripheral embarrassment for supporters of Israel, best dealt with quietly because the wider political situation is difficult. It goes to the character of the state.

When people can intimidate Palestinian families, seize land or make normal life impossible because they believe they are unlikely to face serious consequences, the damage does not stop with those families. Instead something happens to the rule of law. Extremists discover that they can keep pushing and violence becomes easier to excuse because the people committing it claim to be acting for the nation.

And …. eventually we start changing the language we use to describe it.

That is  where moral failure begins. We find softer words for behaviour because the person doing it is one of ours.

I do not think sanctions against those responsible for settler violence are anti-Israel. The British Government and its partners have sanctioned individuals and organisations accused of financing, enabling and carrying out violence in the West Bank. If the Israeli state will not properly hold people accountable for terrorising Palestinians, it should surprise nobody when its allies begin to act.

There is a strange idea abroad that friendship with Israel means lowering the standards by which we judge what happens there. I think that is the opposite of friendship.Nor should we as Jewish leaders need permission from outsiders to say what we can see. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel and hardly someone known for hostility towards the settlement movement, has used the language of terrorism about Israeli extremists. We should be capable of at least the same clarity.If Jews terrorise civilians, being Jewish does not change the nature of the act.

This would already be enough to demand better leadership. But then Benjamin Netanyahu chose this week to talk about the “Islamic Republic of Britain”.

The phrase was not simply insulting to the British Government and the British people, it traded on something much uglier: the idea that the presence and political visibility of Muslims is evidence that Britain is being lost.

I am a British Jew. I know that antisemitism here is serious. I have spent a considerable part of my public life arguing that it has been minimised, misunderstood and too often tolerated and that Islamist extremism is also real and must be confronted. None of that requires me to treat British Muslims as a civilisational threat. Benjamin Netanyahu certainly does not get to do it on my behalf.

British Jews are not a licence to denigrate British Muslims. Our fears are not political currency with which someone else gets to purchase a culture war.

This matters and it matters beyond the offence of one phrase. Jews and Muslims in Britain are living through an extraordinarily difficult period. The Middle East is constantly present in our relationships here. Antisemitism has risen. Anti-Muslim hatred has risen. Families are frightened. People who have worked together for years have found conversations suddenly harder. There are those on all sides who would be delighted if we simply gave up on one another.

That is the context into which Netanyahu’s words land.

Muslims here hear an Israeli Prime Minister suggest that Islam itself is swallowing Britain. Jews then find ourselves associated with that idea, as though he has somehow spoken in our interests. Let us be really clear he does not speak for us.

Jewish safety is not purchased through Muslim insecurity. We know better than anyone that minorities are safest in societies where belonging is not a scarce commodity - where being visibly Muslim does not make somebody less British, where being Jewish does not make somebody responsible for the Israeli government and where citizenship is not something political leaders can quietly grade according to religion.

And let us be really clear, this is not a soft argument about interfaith friendship. It is a hard argument about social cohesion and security.

Extremists understand very well what happens when societies lose that cohesion. They want groups to know one another only through their worst fears;  Netanyahu may  want Jews to think of Muslims primarily through Islamist terror and Muslims to think of Jews primarily through the actions of Israel and he may want every atrocity overseas to become evidence that coexistence here was always an illusion, but he will not force that on me.

The more frightened we become of one another, the more powerful the extremists become.

Jewish leadership has a responsibility to name this. We rightly ask other communities to deal with hatred that comes from within them. We ask Muslim leaders to challenge antisemitism among Muslims. We ask Christians to confront Christian antisemitism. We expect political parties to act when racism appears among their members. We cannot demand that courage from everybody else and suddenly discover nuance when the extremism is Jewish.

If we expect others to confront their own, we have to confront ours.

That means saying that racism against Palestinians is racism. It means acknowledging Jewish extremism instead of assuming that identifying it somehow strengthens Israel’s enemies. It means being able to condemn violence committed by settlers without first producing a paragraph explaining all the reasons Israel is under threat.

And it means rejecting anti-Muslim rhetoric even when it comes from an Israeli Prime Minister. Otherwise we are not defending a principle. We are asking for an exemption.

We should be uncompromising about antisemitism without allowing hostility towards Muslims to masquerade as solidarity with us. We should defend Israel’s existence and security without becoming spokespeople for its government. And when Jews act violently towards Palestinians, we should not wait for someone else to find the words.

The exercise of power tells us something about who we are. Jewish values have to mean something precisely at the moment when applying them is uncomfortable, if they only bind us when they cost us nothing, they are not values at all.