Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in today's Sunday Times:

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the schools near me put Ukrainian flags in their windows. When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis two years earlier, Black Lives Matter posters appeared overnight all over my north London neighbourhood. Because that’s the kind of caring, sharing milieu in which I live, full of politically aware good liberals.

So do you know how many Israeli flags I’ve seen in the week since Hamas kidnapped, raped and slaughtered over a thousand Jews in Israel, from geriatric Holocaust survivors to tiny babies? That’s right: nada, zip, none.

In my area of North London, pro-Palestinian and "Boycott Israel" stickers are appearing on the streets. 

On the contrary, several north London Jewish schools have closed out of concern for the children’s safety. My children’s Hebrew school is, for the moment, still open, but it has been sending regular updates about security measures it is taking — on top of the ones it normally takes. “Well, now we know who would have helped us, and who would have pushed us on to the trains,” a friend texted me.

I generally recoil from Second World War comparisons, but I couldn’t deny this one. After all, Hamas’s founding charter calls for a Jewish genocide and accuses Jews of being behind the French Revolution, the freemasons and the UN. It is indistinguishable from Nazi ideology. And when Hamas terrorists committed pogroms last week of the kind we thought died out with our ancestors in eastern Europe a century ago, so many good caring, sharing people decided that the right response was to say Israel had brought this on itself. This is not “Jews don’t count”, to use David Baddiel’s memorable book title. This is flat-out “Jews deserve it”….

But it turns out many who march for a free Palestine believe, as Hamas believes, that Israel shouldn’t exist at all. They see Israelis as “colonisers and settlers”. But do you know why they had to settle there? Because they had nowhere to go after the Holocaust achieved what centuries of persecution had failed to do and wiped out most of Europe’s Jews. Many, like my Polish family, couldn’t go back to their home country because there were still — even after the fall of Nazism — Jew-hatred and pogroms there. So they went to Israel. This is the context: the Jews are there because they needed somewhere safe to live, and now their grandchildren are being killed for it. It’s striking how many of the same people who talk about the Tories’ cruelty to refugees speak so scornfully of Israelis as “settlers”….

On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish: the men wore kippahs and tallits, and everybody knew the words to Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was. Young Muslims, older white people, everyone marching together in defence of — what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves. Now we know.

She's right, of course, but her way of defending Israel as a necessary safe haven for European Jews after the Holocaust does play to the line that Israel is some kind of imposition of the West into the Middle East. But some half of Israel's Jews are Mizrahi, descendants of Jews expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries, who've never set foot in Europe and whose ancestors never set foot in Europe. That's the other half of the equation, always conveniently forgotten by Palestinian activists.

For instance, the population of Baghdad was somewhere around a quarter Jewish 100 years ago, and the Jewish presence was a great deal more long-lived than the relatively recent Arab presence in Palestine (the Islamic Arab expansion in the 8th Century). After the Farhud pogrom in 1941, following the overthrow of the pro-Nazi government, that Jewish presence in Iraq dwindled to nothing – gone to Israel, the US, the UK. Not held in refugee camps for decades in a UN-financed limbo. 

As I noted a few weeks back:

UNRWA supports Palestinian refugees, some 75 years after Israel's foundation – the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict. It was originally established to provide relief to all refugees resulting from the 1948 war, but the Israeli government took over responsibility for the Jewish refugees in 1952. No Arab country has stepped forward to take responsibility for the Arab refugees however, despite all the talk of Arab Nationalism and Arab unity. Keeping them as refugees – and the responsibility of UNRWA – is too convenient, and reinforces the point that the state of Israel, for them, can never be acknowledged. The refugees will stay refugees – now more than 5.6 million registered with UNRWA – until Israel is destroyed. That's the thinking.

That's what this is all about. Israel can never be accepted. But recently Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE realised that, actually, they had no problem with Israel and were getting a little sick and tired of Palestinian moaning and rejectionism. There were positive signs of a breakthrough. For Iran, and its proxy Hamas, that had to be stopped….