Seeking Peace for Palestinians
Accusations of Anti-Semitism are Confessions
Attending church services before Christmas this year, I experienced my usual cognitive dissonance as I sang, “Oh, little town of Bethlehem.” I lived in Bethlehem in 2005, just after the Second Intifada. The town was less like a place where Heaven had descended to Earth and made flesh by a young Palestinian woman than a place where hell had risen from the bowels of the earth. The Church of the Nativity had holes in its walls where Israel’s snipers had recently killed 7 Palestinian men and injured around 40 others seeking refuge in the church and its compound. The brutal reality of violence in this sacred space was not spoken by the guides who take tourists and pilgrims around the alleged birthplace of Christ.
I pondered at this year’s Christmas service how the baby boy of two thousand years ago, born under Roman Occupation, could be the baby boy of today’s Palestine, birthed by a young mother in the rubble of Gaza under Israeli Occupation. The vicar at my church prayed for peace in “the Middle East” and for politicians to be supported in resolving the conflict. Netanyahu and Biden swam into my mind. I wondered, disloyally, how much praying it would need to dissuade Biden from his ideological subservience to Netanyahu and AIPAC and to stop Netanyahu, a Zionist ideologue, from raining bombs down on Palestinian heads, killing thousands of babies, children, and women.
On Boxing Day, I sat late with my daughter in front of the log fire while the rest of the household slept. We found ourselves quietly mulling over “life.” She had read somewhere that “accusations are confessions.” It struck her that this statement neatly encapsulates something true about the psyche and human relationships. I agreed. Two examples sprang to mind where I had been accused of “hate” and where it was clear the accusers were the ones morally compromised.
The first example bears on the second. My academic research on paediatric “gender medicine” led me to the conclusion, unpopular in 2016, that it was unevidenced, underpinned by gender identity ideology, and physically and psychologically dangerous for children and young people, leaving the underlying causes for their identification as “trans” remained unaddressed. Transactivists and their allies accused me of transphobia
Perhaps Susie Green, the transactivist and erstwhile CEO of the UK charity Mermaids, is a classic example of someone whose “accusations are confessions.” Having taken her son to Thailand to have his genitals removed at age sixteen, she spent the following decade steering an organization that successfully persuaded parents and teachers that “gender re-assignment surgery” is “liberation” for gender-non-conforming children. When young people began to “de-transition,” Green’s fidelity to her faith remained steadfast. Some young people “detransition,” according to Green, not because there is anything inherently wrong with “gender medicine” but because “they suffer from internalized transphobia.”
I am now rarely accused of transphobia, and I have ended up grateful for the lessons I learned during that period. I remain robust when I speak out against injustice, including when it puts me outside the herd or groupthink and renders me an object for attack. I thus arrived prepared, although shocked by a second charge of “hate,” which followed hot on the heels of “transphobia.”
With thousands of others in the UK, I express solidarity with Palestinians, including joining the pro-Palestinian marches. Israel has occupied Palestine since 1947 and is currently carrying out genocide. For these activities, I am now accused of being an anti-Semite. My transition from an academic, right-wing bigot to a naïve, historically illiterate, “woke” left-wing Jew-hater and Islamist lover has been seamless and swift.
The accusation of anti-Semitism is most vociferously addressed to people like me from the unlikely source of free speech organizations in the UK. The Academy of Ideas follows the principles of the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill who was the first to propose that individual liberty is achieved only when ideas, proposals, and hypotheses are tested through debate and free speech. The Academy organizes public debates—often on controversial topics—“to challenge contemporary knee-jerk orthodoxies.” It provided a platform for academics and professionals who challenged the orthodoxy of “gender medicine” when we were silenced elsewhere and accused of transphobia.
In October 2023, the Academy declared itself a staunch supporter of Israel. It launched the Friends of Israel Declaration at its annual conference, The Battle of Ideas. Many gender-critical feminists immediately rushed to pledge Israel their unequivocal support. The Academy’s premise that the free exchange of ideas in the public square prevents those in power from controlling the narrative and that accusations of “hate” are intended to shut down debate, were not only abandoned by the Academy in its support for Israel but became its modus operandi. It describes the marches as anti-Semitic hate marches and initially called for them to be banned until it became publicly embarrassing to opine about free speech whilst calling for its clampdown.
Spiked is a free speech political magazine whose declared aim is “to change the world for humanism, democracy, and freedom.” It also frames the marches as “anti-Israel” and fuelled “by Jew hatred.” Those who march in solidarity with Palestinians are “racist scumbags” and have no moral grounds to do so but are mere “virtue signallers.” Despite the many Jews who also march, Spiked incites readers to believe that our capital city has become a no-go area for Jews because of “hate,” a term they have roundly decried when used by transactivists. “‘Hate marches’ is almost too polite a phrase to describe the sewer that has consumed London.”
Melanie Phillips, a Times journalist and a Zionist Jew, can be seen as someone whose “accusations are confessions.” She discusses with the chief political editor of Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, the kinds of people who criticize Israel as anti-Zionist “intersectional” folk, who use language such as the term “oppressor/ oppressed.” Phillips declares that the oppression of the Palestinians is a made-up story—“a polite fiction”—designed “to conceal that people want to hate Jews.” She then weaponizes the same language by reversing it. Jews are eternally oppressed and victimized. Those who see the Palestinians as oppressed by Israel not only participate in the historical tradition of Jew hatred and oppression, but they also wield “a dagger to the heart of Judaism.”
Phillips, writing for the Jewish Chronicle, assumes the infallibility of her victimhood standpoint. With the fundamentalist fervour of someone who self-righteously condemns a whole people, she tells us the only proper response to Palestinian claims of oppression is “to call out these Palestinian lies.” We should regard Palestinians as sharing “a collective psychopathology.” In a similar strategy to Susie Green, who castigated detransitioners as transphobes, she labels Jews who “support the Palestinian Arab cause” as anti-Semites. They suffer from “a misplaced sense of fairness, a craving for fashionable approval, or extreme ignorance about Jewish and Middle Eastern history.” With one fell swoop, she dismisses the views of Jews who disagree with her as of no value: The esteemed historical scholarship, for example, of Ilan Pappe, who describes Israel as an apartheid state; Jews whose moral repugnance of the war is grounded in their Judaism; The testimonies of Jews like Stephen Kapos, an old man who has lived Jewish and Middle Eastern history and who declares that the war on Gaza is “not in his name.”
Freud’s psychoanalytic hypothesis surely holds that unless made conscious, the unconscious drives our conduct, often with grim, destructive consequences. Professor Jacquline Rose is a Jewish academic whose work is underpinned by psychoanalysis. She argues that whilst Zionism was fuelled by the legitimate desire of persecuted people for a homeland, it disavows the consequences of the founding of Israel: Jews, a persecuted people, in turn, persecuted the indigenous Arab population whose land they invaded and homes they stole by brute force and murder. They sent the Palestinians fleeing to the West Bank and Gaza, where they have remained as refugees to this day, sustained in their material existence by UNRWA.
Rose plumbs some of the psychological components that make up the imaginative world of Zionist identity politics—for example, the disavowal of Israel’s violent history and the view that the Israeli state has license to act as it pleases because Jews are permanent victims, never perpetrators. She also explores the psychological dynamics that command the passionate and seemingly intractable allegiance to Israel of many non-Jews. This brings to mind the organization Our Fight, whose aim is to support Zionist Jews in their conviction the marches are racist and marked by the same Jew hatred that led to the Jewish Holocaust. It also helps explain why many UK feminists, whilst railing against the covering of women’s heads as a tool of patriarchal oppression in Iran, steadfastly support the war on Gaza even though countless thousands of women are losing their actual heads.
Gideon Levy is one of a few brave Israeli journalists who dare to speak out publicly against his government, in particular about the murder of Gazan children. He recently went to a restaurant in Israel with his son when a group baying for violence encircled their table, screaming: "If only you would choke on the food and die," "Why are you (the restaurant owners) giving him food here," and "If there weren't cameras here, I would break your face." Father and son quietly left to the sound of curses. Men shouted at Levy that he was a Nazi, and to his son: "Fuck the mother of anyone who eats with the Nazi."
Levy points out that Nazism has now received a new definition in parts of Israel: At the time that the starvation, siege, shortages, destruction, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the Gaza Strip are described around the world as having Nazi characteristics, the exact opposite is defined by supporters of Israel’s war on Gaza. A Nazi is now someone who cares about the children of Gaza.
The post-Second World War commitment to “never again” is honoured today by Jews and non-Jews alike who have protested Israel’s war on Gaza. We have refused to dehumanize Palestinians and accept their deaths as the regrettable but inevitable consequence of the “horrors of war,” the trite, debased phrase repeated by free speech proponents, always followed by the claim that “Israel, is not to blame for the horrors, but Hamas.”
The Anglican Church has remained almost silent on the horrors carried out by Israel. In contrast, the Pope has provided strong moral direction, calling for people who support freedom of speech and freedom of belief to advocate for the protection of Christians in Palestine and to call for an end to the obliteration of holy sites and the unbearable killing of Palestinians.
A cease-fire and hostage deal are finally in sight but fragile. There are numerous ways they could go wrong. Israel has played a duplicitous game in the history of peace negotiations with Palestinians. The pattern is that it signs a deal that will be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants—in this case, the release of the hostages—but then habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace. The far-right religious fundamentalists in the Knesset led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are threatening to quit the governing coalition unless Netanyahu ends the deal at the implementation of its second phase.
There is no agreement on who will govern Gaza. There is no mention of the status of UNWRA, the agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, and there is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza. And, of course, there is still no route to a sovereign Palestinian state, an independence that Zionists have successfully resisted since 1948. Finally, there is no discussion of the generation of traumatized Palestinian children who may take revenge as adults, not because Palestinians are uncivilized brutes or because they are Muslim. They will rage, as would your children and mine, because their mothers, fathers, and siblings have been maimed and killed in front of their eyes. We couldn’t have created a more perfect recruitment ground for freedom fighters if we had tried!
As Jews for Peace have consistently argued, it is only by bringing about true peace for Palestine that this generation will have a hope of healing. Frank Furedi, the academic most lauded by the Academy and a self-declared proud Zionist, insists that Jews who belong to groups such as “Jews for Peace” are not only anti-Semitic but “zealots” engaged in “a ceaseless propaganda war against Israel.” They belong to a “Woke-Islamist Alliance.” “If they get away with their ‘morally depraved project,’ then a new dark age is imminent.” Furedi reveals himself to be confessing that it is he who is the zealot advocating moral depravity, standing in sympathy with the far-right, religious fundamentalist members of the Knesset—the two messianic extremists—who would continue the lawless bombardment and killing of the Palestinians.
The war on Gaza is not about Enlightenment values, as Furedi so trenchantly claims, but its complete converse. It has slaughtered thousands of innocent people, the majority of whom are children and women. It has demolished the medical, educational, and cultural infrastructure that sustains civilized life, reducing Palestinian existence to mere biological life under canvas, human animals without rights—what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” It has been difficult to imagine a darker world and the profanity of hell in the Holy Land.
Jews for Peace “hold tightly to the hope of a halt to the Israeli military’s bombardments, an end to the starvation of Palestinians by the Israeli government, a beginning of rebuilding in Gaza, and the return of hostages held in Israel and in Gaza to their families.” Their hopes for the future are that after “millions of people around the world have come together to demand an end to the genocide and Palestinian freedom” we continue to stand together to ensure “this agreement becomes a step on the path toward Palestinian liberation — the only way to achieve a just peace for all.” On this note, I will join my Jewish colleagues tomorrow and march for peace, not for hate, through the streets of London!