Howard Epstein – LETTER FROM ISRAEL – TRAUMA IN THE AFTERMATH
As life in Israel settles back towards what was normal over fifteen months ago, with restaurants bustling, people in the streets without masks and no risk of an air raid siren piercing one’s very being, trauma strikes from an unexpected source. The Sunday Times was emblazoned with photographs of vast crowds – of tens of thousands – protesting on British streets at the allegedly Nazi, Apartheid and otherwise evil State of Israel. There are problems here in Israel but they seem rather less immediate than those of Anglo-Jewry, beset as it is by anti-Jewish racism from both right and left. The usual suspects made their inevitable presence felt. Corbyn and McDonnell manned the barricades to advance the case for BDS. (A lucky escape there, thank you, Boris.) Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a Palestinian project designed to destroy Israel economically, has its supporters in the UK. Thousands of them, apparently, yet despite BDS and its 16 years of campaigning, the growth of the Israeli economy continues on its unrelenting way. Elbit, based in Haifa, with no less than nine locations in England and Wales, is a case in point: it is building a submarine school for the Royal Navy!
There have been complaints that Israel waged asymmetric warfare against Gaza by using the might of its air force to destroy the military infrastructure of Hamas. There is more asymmetry than that, given the hatred poured out by many in a population whose defence is being enhanced by Israeli technology.
In a worrying development this evening, one read of Maureen Lipman leaving the actors’ union, Equity, and of Jewish actors suffering discrimination. Where are the spokespeople of the establishment who do not hate Israel? Do they not know where events such as these lead?
There is a more difficult question that that to be answered. It has long been said that the difference between the 1930s and now is that now we have Israel. The Jewish State has diplomatic relations with every country in Europe, the UK and the USA. How should it act to seek to reduce anti-Jewish racism in those places? Is Israel to be only the refuge of last resort, the bolt-hole to which the Diaspora will flee if persecution becomes institutionalised or otherwise intolerable? Or can Israel use its influence in the corridors of diplomacy to work towards a better understanding of Israel’s case, so as to reduce inter-communal tensions afflicting Jewish communities from the West Coast of America, via Britain, to Europe? No one knows the answer as the question is a novel one – but it is likely to become ever more urgent as the Palestinian narrative receives a warmer reception than that of Israel. Of course, they have an advantage. They do not struggle under the everlasting burden of being Jewish.
You might reasonably have thought that the premature and violent deaths of some six million Jews in the Shoah would have given the survivors and their off-spring, six million years of freedom from anti-Jewish racism, might you not? And yet, only three quarters of one century later we see, as I say, tens of thousands in the streets of the cities of Great Britain and elsewhere protesting that Israelis are no better than the Nazis. Oh really? Israel has its Einzatzgruppen forcing Arabs into sealed vans into which the carbon monoxide exhaust gases from the engines are directed? Israel has cattle trucks transporting millions of Arabs to specially-constructed gas chambers, sited next to ovens built to turn their poisoned and mangled bodies into ash? Does Israel have a policy of genocide of Palestinians? Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the director of UNWRA said today (to the fury of Hamas) that Israel’s aerial strikes were “precise”. Colonel Richard Kemp says that there has never been so moral an army as the IDF, and yet the narrative, the received wisdom about the Jews is reminiscent of Der Stürmer.
There is a difference now, however. Jews no longer go silently to their deaths but have the temerity to fight back when their residential areas are assailed by thousands of missiles (in the end four thousand) fired from the residential areas of the human shields that are the people of Gaza, held hostage by the Hamas terror organisation. What chutzpah those Jews have! Do they not know their role, and their role is to go silently to their slaughter? Well, here we fell it is better for us to prevail and be criticised that to become the underdog again. But the effect of our prevailing has a spillover effect in the Galud, and we are concerned for you, and your children, and theirs.
When Chaim Weizmann left Russia for school in Germany in 1892, he was traumatised to find his school chums denied their Jewishness. “We’re not Jews, they protested. We are Germans of the Mosaic persuasion. And all this intellectual anti-Semitism? Oh, that will blow over.” It did. Mingled with the ashes from the chimneys of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
© Howard Epstein May 2021
