Tag: nakba

The Greens, Zionism, the Tories – and Brazil

I wake this morning to hear that the Tories in their blissful ignorance plan to abolish the Environment Agency and Natural England. We assume it’s because they’re deemed to have green credentials. According to a writer in the Spectator it’s down to his local river not getting cleared of weeds as it used to be. Wading birds and frogs take priority. The main problem, as the rest of us see it, is underfunding. Thinking of my own backyard, Natural England administer, on a day-to-day basis, our local common, which we own: what would happen without them, we wonder?

It is always so much wiser to help find solutions rather than create or exacerbate problems.  This would apply to another news story, the Green Party conference passing a motion asserting that Zionism is racism. For sheer stupidity that takes some beating. There is a vast 120 and more year issue here: where might there be a homeland for a Jewish population, and how could that be squared with settling a territory where people were already living?

Tenant farmers back in the 1930s were displaced by Arab landowners selling territory to incoming Jews. The ultimate outcome was the displacement of vast populations, the nakba, in 1948. Also, over time, the development of a prosperous and proud and high-achieving Jewish state. The 1990s saw a chance for coming together, but moderates were pushed aside. The politics of Hamas and Likud left little room for compromise. But – none of this makes Zionism of itself racist. The attacks on Palestinian settlements and villagers by Jewish settlers with the connivance (and indeed active support by some members of) the Israeli government are another matter.

I have long supported the Palestinians. But if I was Jewish I would, I’m sure, be a supporter, right or wrong, of Israel. And, speaking as an Anglo-Saxon, originally out of Manchester, the courage and the sheer genius of the Jewish people have had a huge impact on my life.

The Economist describe the Greens’ decision to support the motion as ‘shameful’. ‘The party thereby deserves to fade back into irrelevance.’ I have to agree. I’d also add that having heard the Green mayor of Hackney outline her policies, all of them well-meaning, with no mention at all of promoting local business, I was left wondering how the community could generate the jobs and income that a prosperous local economy requires.

We need the Greens to pick up and run with their old agenda. We need them. The likely election of another Bolsonaro in Brazil could have terrible consequences for the Amazon, with loggers and farmers spreading deeper into the forest. Reading that wonderful travel writer Norman Lewis recently I was made aware of how, over many decades, bible-toting American evangelists brought notions of sin and salvation to Amazonian tribes, displacing and resettling, allowing the forest to be felled and given over to agriculture feeding American and European markets. Protestant evangelists have also brought American-style mega-churches and an effective funding model to Brazilian cities. The bonds of the old Catholic communities have been fractured. The evangelical right is little focused on environment and heavily focused on money and the immediacy of salvation.

If you detect cynicism on my part, you would be right. In my book, care and compassion, in their widest sense, come before sin and salvation. Without the former the latter are worthless. In the words of a 17th century Quaker, ‘sin … means losing he way of the heart’. 

We have of course the same evangelical and funding model in this country, and they surface in such people as Paul Marshall, proprietor of GB News and the Spectator, and the recently disgraced (attempting to bypass electoral law by enlisting American funding) head of policy at Reform, James Orr. This brings us, almost but not quite, full circle back to the Tories and their conference, trying to make a mark by trashing old institutions. There are many older, more centrist Tories who are horrified by what’s happening. Maybe the current crew will implode over the next few years and wiser folk regain their party. But as things stand I don’t hold out much hope.

Israel and Gaza – keeping the faith

So much is written about Gaza. I feel outrage, and disbelief. About Hamas and the brutality, and the futility, of its actions. And about Israel’s response, which has directed our focus back in Israel itself. What does it stand for?

Zionist ideas going back to Theodor Herzl are interwoven with a sense not just of a physical return to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) but of a spiritual and territorial revival of the old biblical, pre-diaspora Israel. This isn’t the modern Israel we in Europe supported. But it is the Israel of Netanyahu, Ben-Givr and Smotrich. It is also it seems the Israel of Trump’s born-again-Christian ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. He recently visited a Christian church in the West Bank which had been attacked by Jewish settlers. He protested. But attacks on Palestinian Arabs are condoned. It is as if it’s they who are the occupiers of Jewish land, of the territories Huckabee and the Israeli government describe as, using their biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

I have always been pro-Jewish. I cannot emphasise that more strongly. My academic heroes and indeed teachers were Jewish. I never made distinctions between Jew and Gentile. The Old Testament, ‘Old’ as Christians see it, has been and is a primer for life, with God and without, as well being both magical story and superlative historical document. For my father freemasonry brought Christian and Jew together in Manchester in the 1930s and later decades. I remember reading, as maybe a ten-year-old child, a story about 1948 and Israel’s fight for and achievement of independence. Only later did I learn about the nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948) and take on board the other side of the story. Later, in my twenties, Martin Buber became one of my heroes, for his books ‘I and Thou’, life lessons that have stayed with me, and the wonderful ‘Tales of the Hasidism’, and for his advocacy back in the 1930s of a bi-national, Israel and Palestine, solution.

Yesterday I watched footage, on Channel Four, from the West Bank, of settlers fencing off land owned by a Palestinian Arab farmer and, when he tried to stop them, a settler shooting him in the leg. The farmer’s son recorded the incident on his mobile phone.  Settlers are allowed to carry guns. The farmer had a leg amputated. He’s now back defending his land.

Two days ago I learnt of the death of an Al Jazeera journalist and his team in Gaza. The Israelis did not mind taking out five others if they got their man, Anas Al-Sharif. They claim to have documents linking him to Hamas and missile campaigns against Israel. But they won’t answers questions. They can’t produce the documents. Journalists are excluded from Gaza. We are left to conclude that Israel’s claims are specious. And they don’t care. They are, it seems, past caring, locked in their own doom-loop. Al-Sharif reported from  his tent, his home having been bombed, on the day-to-day reality of Israel’s bombardment. We need to hear what he had to say.

In this week of anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we’re reminded of the terrible realities of destruction from the air. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been measured, deliberate, and slow, and no less terrible for that. And yet we feel some residual moral obligation to support Israel. And that compromises our position when we oppose the brutalities of Vladimir Putin, also the SAF (government) and RSF (rebel) forces in Sudan, and the army junta in Myanmar. There is a deep cynicism in the way Netanyahu’s government turns that obligation to their advantage.

Israel in the years up to the Likud victory 1977 still had its pioneering spirit. That I could connect to. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars it was fighting for its survival. That was enough to overcome any ambivalence I felt. This was what I’d characterise as the old Israel. I could connect to its passion, and to its genius. Friends who worked on kibbutzim came back with good stories.

Yes, we could be accused of romanticising Israel. We weren’t to know how terrible the consequences of the continued occupation of Jordanian and Egyptian lands after 1967 might be. That opened floodgates for which there is no sign of any closure. But the old Israel I know is still there, it was in its own way an inspiration to us back then, and we lose too much if we lose it, vexed and violent though its origins were.

As for the ‘new Israel’ of Netanyahu, Ben Givr and Smotrich, of Judea and Samaria as they would rename Palestinian territory, they have nothing to offer the world. Only their hatreds.  And they have turned the current conflict into, as now it seems a majority of Israelis see it, a battle for their nation’s very survival.

The forces of hatred are not yet spent. We as outsiders might long for a pragmatic solution but by its nature pragmatism cannot be imposed. Like Keir Starmer I want to see Palestine independence recognised but wonder also what good it might do and how might Hamas be excluded. Would it be no more than a token gesture? With Trump dictating our response we are little more than straws waving in the wind.  

But we must keep the faith. In a very literal sense – Christian and Jewish. We need both.