Beware the friend who is only trying to help. Not, perhaps, as a rule for life but certainly when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the clashes that battle provokes around the world. So often those who think they’re doing their bit serve only to make an already impossible situation even worse.
The week began with an instructive example, when Gideon Falter, head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released a video clip of himself being steered away from one of London’s weekly Gaza demonstrations by a police officer on the grounds that: “You are quite openly Jewish, this is a pro-Palestinian march.” Falter argued that he had flushed out proof that the Metropolitan police regard the marches as an unsafe environment for visibly Jewish people, even though the Met allows them to go ahead week after week.
Was Britain’s Jewish community grateful for this contribution from Falter? Some were, but others were troubled by his insistence that he had merely been out and about on a Saturday, minding his own business, when he happened to stumble across the Gaza demo, rather than admitting that he had deliberately set out to make a (perhaps legitimate) point. That lack of honesty was damaging because it played directly into the hands of antisemites who say Jews cannot be trusted to tell the truth about antisemitism. Falter would say he was only trying to help, but there were plenty – including those who work full-time to protect Jewish life in Britain – for whom the whole episode was a headache they didn’t need.
All this was relatively small beer compared with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations now spreading across US campuses, where mass protests and permanent solidarity camps have been broken up by sometimes brutal police action. There, too, debate rages over whether these demos pose a threat to Jews, with organisers pointing – as they do in the UK – to the presence of a vocal Jewish contingent as evidence that they are completely safe. After all, how could a movement possibly be hostile to Jews if Jewish supporters are so warmly embraced?
It’s worth explaining why plenty of Jews are not reassured by that. For most of their history, Jews have been told that, so long as they change their ways or beliefs, they will be accepted. Nazism was the exception, holding that Jews were to be murdered no matter what they believed or did. But most persecutors of Jews held open the possibility of acceptance to those Jews who were ready to break from the rest. The Spanish Inquisition would spare you, so long as you converted sincerely to Christianity. This is not, I stress, to suggest the current Gaza demonstrations have any connection to that despicable history: it is solely to explain why most Jews draw scant comfort from seeing a movement being nice to those Jews who agree with it.
Meanwhile, the discomfort at much that is said and done at the growing US protests is real. At Columbia University in New York, demonstrators were filmed chanting: “We say justice, you say ‘How?’ / Burn Tel Aviv to the ground / Ya Hamas, we love you / We support your rockets too”. Another one runs: “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it.” In that same vein, some students are no longer content simply chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; they now hold up placards with an Arabic version. The trouble is, those words say: “From the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab” – meaning there will be no Jews from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, a goal that spells doom for the 7.2 million or so Jews who live there.
I have no doubt that those students occupying campus lawns across the US believe they are acting as good friends of the Palestinian people, that they are helping the cause of Palestinian freedom. But here’s why they risk doing the exact opposite.
First, they are alienating potential allies. There are plenty of Americans, including American Jews, who have been appalled by Israel’s conduct of its war against Hamas, by the sheer numbers killed and by the obstruction of vital humanitarian aid to Gaza. Some have broken the habit of a lifetime to speak out. Think of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the US Senate and decades-long advocate for Israel, who last month delivered a heartfelt denunciation of Benjamin Netanyahu and called for him to go. Schumer spoke for a huge constituency of US Jews, one that may well run into the millions – a group with the potential to be a new and crucial ally in the struggle for Palestinian independence.
But when those people see activists praising Hamas – the men who killed, tortured and raped so many on 7 October and still hold dozens hostage – or carrying the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that does the bidding of the theocrats in Tehran; or saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; or chanting in sinister unison for the expulsion of a “Zionist” who has been detected in the camp; or lamenting the Jewish role in American feminism, they want nothing to do with such a movement. Because they know that movement wants nothing to do with them. And that feeling is not reduced when they hear a big-name speaker suggest to a New York crowd that any Jew who believes, after two millennia of persecution, that Jews need a home of their own is a worshipper of “a false idol”, a “profane” god.
Though, to be clear, the most striking condemnation of this hardening of supposedly pro-Palestinian rhetoric has come not from Jews, but from Palestinians. The protesters have taken “an extremist, maximalist, inflammatory, unreasonable, and totally illogical approach which is harmful to the pro-Palestinian cause,” wrote Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza-born Palestinian analyst who has lost a staggering 31 members of his own family in recent months. Via social media, Alkhatib urges the demonstrators to stop “wasting time with slogan-driven and maximalist activism that does nothing”, and instead to “use your western privilege to actually help the Palestinian people and promote a pragmatic path forward by engaging Israeli and Jewish audiences”.
For him, it’s clear that that pragmatic path leads to two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side. As a demand, it does not deliver the same transgressive thrill as calling for an all-Arab, Jew-free Palestine. It doesn’t have a neat rhyme. But real friends of Palestinians and Israelis know that it is the only way the two peoples of that much-promised land can hope to have a future that involves life rather than yet more pain and death. Anything that makes that already impossible task harder is not an act of friendship – it is an act of unforgivable narcissism and self-indulgence.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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