Daily Mail, March 6 2002

On and on it goes, in a rapidly escalating spiral of horror. Israel has become a bloodbath. Palestinian suicide bombings and frenzied gun attacks are followed by Israeli military reprisals against the terrorists, providing the excuse for yet more Palestinian attacks.

The Israeli public is turning against its prime minister Ariel Sharon for not halting the violence. His failure is palpable. Now he is stepping up military action in a desperate attempt to teach the Palestinians that violence will not succeed, a strategy that Israeli doves say will make matters worse.

But what if Sharon is not in fact the problem? What if the reason the Israeli cabinet seems paralysed by the violence is that there is nothing it can do to stop it?

As a British Jew, watching from the safety of distance, I have never felt as gripped by such terrible foreboding as I do now. For Israel seems to be check-mated. It has three options: retreat unilaterally from the semi-occupied territories; re-occupy them and crush the population; or stumble along, reacting to escalating terror with futile military sorties.

This is Hobson’s choice. None of these will deliver peace and security.

For the Jewish community in Britain, watching aghast as these appalling scenes succeed each other, a truly nightmarish vision is threatening to unfold. The terrible thought that Israel may not survive is now forming itself – maybe not through military defeat, although that is more possible than one may think, but through the effects of attrition, despair and, worst of all, a kind of sickness of the soul.

And beyond even that, another dreadful anxiety is seeping into the minds of British Jews. The Jewish state, which was supposed by its founders to purge once and for all the poison of anti-semitism, has not done so. On the contrary, Israel is being used as the catalyst for a resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling which erupted as soon as the twin towers were hit.

Under the guise of criticism of Israel, Jews are being accused of running American politics, bank-rolling Tony Blair or being disloyal to Britain. They are told they should be ashamed to be Jews, that they all stick together, that they have a murderous history and that they are the real cause of world terror.

Before September 11, British Jews thought they were safe, settled and secure here. Now they’re not so sure.

I do not consider myself a Zionist. I have no personal wish to live in Israel, nor do I believe it is the historic mission of all Jews to live there. I am a diaspora Jew. My country is Britain.

I support Israel as a refuge in the Jews’ historic homeland, the reason a specifically Jewish state was established by the United Nations after every country had made clear that it wasn’t prepared to take in the survivors of the Holocaust.

And in a corner of my mind Israel exists as a last refuge in the unimaginable circumstance that this country would turn against the Jews. This may seem preposterous. After all, Jews are fully integrated as British citizens.

Jewish history teaches that such confidence is an illusion. England was the first to drive out its Jews in the 13th century; Spain drove them out after a golden period; and Germany, where they were most assimilated of all, tried to wipe them off the face of the earth.

After the French shouted ‘death to the Jews’ in the 19th century Dreyfus affair, Theodore Herzl and other founders of Zionism thought that if the Jews had a state of their own, this would bring such ancient hatred to an end.

They were wrong. Not only has Israel not eradicated the hatred of Jews, but it has itself become its target.

Of course, Israel can and should be criticised. Personally, I think the settlements are wrong and should be dismantled; and undoubtedly, human rights abuses are occurring for which there is no excuse.

But what is so distressing is that Israel is represented as launching unprovoked attacks on a population that means it no harm and which is then driven to react. In fact, it’s the other way round. Whatever criticisms one may have of Israel’s reactions, they are just that -- reactions to violence, terror and outright rejection of its right to exist.

This pattern of Arab atrocity and Jewish reprisal dates from before the foundation of the state of Israel and characterises everything that has happened since. The Arabs of Palestine were offered a state of their own when Israel was set up. They refused because they did not want the Jews there at all, and went to war to try to drive them out.

The impression is given that Israel subsequently occupied Palestinian territories out of aggressive expansionism. But this is not true. The West Bank belonged to Jordan; the Golan Heights to Syria. They were captured after Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, and were held for strategic reasons.

The situation was vastly complicated by the settlers, many of whom undoubtedly had expansionist aims, as did the Likud politicians who encouraged them. They were very wrong. But to see the settlements as the cause of Palestinian hostility is to ignore Arab rejectionism over one hundred years of history.

Indeed, if real peace was on offer Israel would have left these territories. The offer made by Ehud Barak and subsequently improved upon by President Clinton proposed to give back more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and all the Gaza Strip. Yasser Arafat’s response was to demand 100 per cent, and the refugees’ right of return to Israel which would have destroyed it as a Jewish state. When that was refused, he launched the intifada.

Since it started, the Israelis have suffered more than 11,000 acts of terror – some 30 per day on average, against a country the size of Wales and with a population smaller than London’s. Most of this has not been reported here.

Instead, Sharon -- into whose arms Arafat’s rejection of peace pushed the despairing Israelis -- has been demonised. The impression is put about that Palestinian violence is the inevitable reaction to Israeli aggression. Would that this were so. For if the problem were indeed Sharon, there would be peace as soon as he went.

But it is not so. Whatever they say for western consumption, the Palestinians want Israel gone altogether. Arafat never rounded up Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Now he is involved directly in terror. The current outrages have been claimed by an organisation linked to Arafat’s own Fatah faction.

Through their newspaper, TV stations and sermons, the Palestinians laud the suicide bombers as national heroes and urge their children to volunteer for martyrdom against the Jews. They pump out Nazi-style libels and tell lies about Jewish history, claiming there was never a Jewish Temple on Temple Mount in an attempt to prove that the Jews have no historic connection with the land of Israel.

Their own words show they are far from merely reacting to Israeli aggression. Last month, the director-general of the Palestinian Information Ministry, Hassan Al-Kashef, said violence was to be preferred to negotiation since this would cause a crisis in Israeli society and end the occupation.

The head of the PLO political department, Farouq Al-Qaddumi, said in December: ‘If Sharon is defeated, the rapid countdown [to the end of Israel] will begin because that country was established through historical coercion’.

The purpose of terror is to provoke a reaction so apparently disproportionate that the propaganda war is won. This strategy has worked brilliantly. People in Europe believe Israel is the aggressor.

But far worse is the way the reaction to terror has corrupted its victims. There is undoubtedly brutality at the checkpoints, and collective punishment in the destruction of Palestinian houses. The former head of the Shin Bet security service has said soldiers are behaving illegally by shooting unarmed youths. The Speaker of the Knesset has said: ‘The occupation corrupts, or more accurately, the occupation has already corrupted’.

As the British Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, strikingly warned last week: ‘Israel’s enemies have tried to put her into a military crisis, political crisis, economic crisis; these all failed. Now they have tried to put her into a moral crisis, and they have succeeded’. This more than anything else is what may tear Israel apart.

Which is why it is imperative that Israel leaves the territories. But it is not being allowed to leave. It is being deliberately sucked in deeper and deeper by people for whom the normal rules of engagement do not apply.

I would love nothing better than to see a Palestinian state living peacefully side by side with Israel. Some in the Israeli peace movement claim there are highly placed Palestinian doves who agree.

Yet Benny Morris, a radical Israeli historian who went to prison for refusing to serve as a soldier in the West Bank, states bleakly that even the most doveish Palestinian leaders at best accept Israel as an obstacle they can’t get round rather than as the legitimate home of the Jewish people. When a conscientious objector like Morris can write: ‘They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible’, the prospects for peace look dark.

Indeed, Morris reaches a horrific conclusion. Through military might or the pressures of demography, he predicts, Israel will become either a Jewish state with very few Arabs, or an Arab state with very few Jews, or a nuclear wasteland and a home to neither people.

In Britain, some Jews are scarcely less apocalyptic. The eminent thinker George Steiner, an arch-critic of Israel, says nevertheless that the people behind the intifada will never compromise because ‘they want to push Israel out of the world’. And he fears that the Jewish diaspora would not survive such a catastrophe.

The Jewish people has astonishingly survived exile, persecution, inquisition, forced conversion, dispossession, starvation and genocide. It survived because throughout these catastrophes, its ethical core remained intact. But a moral crisis is the one thing that is lethal.

Many British Jews are being torn apart by Israel’s impasse. They are British citizens; but they are also a people with a common history, faith and ethical precepts – and a common vulnerability to murderous and irrational hatred.

Many view the evidence of Israel’s brutalised behaviour with unmitigated horror. But this is countered by the fear that Israel is engaged in a struggle for its very existence.

And this anguish is intensified by the horrified realisation that the gentle, fair-minded, hospitable British not only don’t seem to realise this but blame the Jews for the violence – an attitude redolent of the ancient anti-semitic charge that the Jews are the architects of their own misery.

According to George Steiner, wherever Jews live they remain vulnerable to a hatred that never dies. His advice to a Jewish audience last weekend was chilling: keep your bags packed and make sure your children learn foreign languages, to equip yourselves for permanent displacement.

There was a time when such a remark would have been dismissed as ludicrous hysteria. It is a measure of the current mood that when Steiner delivered this speech to a packed hall -- and despite a passionate counter-argument from Dr Sacks -- he struck a chill in many hearts.

The neurotic insecurity of the most persecuted people on earth is being fed by Arab terror, a moral crisis and the sound of doors being loudly slammed shut all over Britain. Israel’s predicament tells us joltingly that the tragedy of the Jewish people has not ended.

Posted by admin at March 6, 2002