Last Thursday was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, so I dragged my kids to synagogue, thereby obeying the most important of the Ten Commandments: thou shalt force one’s children to endure the same religious rituals that thine parents once forced upon thee. And my children were equally observant of the commandment that follows: thou shalt spend the entire service asking thy mother if it’s almost over yet and did she bring any snacks?
I will not lie: there have been times when schlepping the kids to synagogue has felt like little more than a wearisome box-ticking exercise. But this was different. By chance, Rosh Hashanah fell just a few days before the first anniversary of October 7, and I know I’m not the only western Jew who, over the past year, has felt forced to recalibrate many things I thought I understood, about myself and others.
The day before Rosh Hashanah, I watched the documentary One Day in October, which will be on Channel 4 on Wednesday at 9pm. It tells the story — through Hamas’s GoPro footage, recorded phone calls between frantic Israelis and interviews with the survivors — of the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, a socialist, secular kibbutz founded in the 1940s by Holocaust survivors and Iraqi refugees. Be’eri is only three miles from Gaza, and on October 7 more than 100 people there were slaughtered in their homes by Hamas terrorists.
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“We don’t have a worry in the world — I mean, we didn’t use to have any worries,” says Tom Hand, whose eight-year-old daughter Emily was kidnapped and eventually returned by Hamas (she is also interviewed). “Apart from the missiles coming over us regularly.”
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I’m making it sound grim, and of course it is pretty grim. But I hope people watch it, because it’s excellent and it lightly touches on some details that too many have forgotten over the past year: the unprovoked savagery of Hamas’s attack on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7, and how Israel has always been shadowed by missiles, because it is surrounded by countries that explicitly state they want to destroy it. Some commentators have written sneeringly about this “existential threat to Israel”, and how it can’t compare to the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza. But this “existential threat” is not imaginary; it is real. And without understanding one, how can you talk about the other?
So that’s Israel, a country I’ve always felt free to criticise, just as I will criticise Britain and America, my two home countries. But over the past 12 months people have said things to me about Israel that felt as if they were squeezing my sciatic nerve. Not because I disagreed with them but because what they were saying was so — here comes the technical term — ignorant. And the worst part is, they took pride in the ignorance, because things like “context” and “history” are seen now by too many as mealy-mouthed justifications for the killing of Palestinian and Lebanese citizens. They are not. But they are real.
In the US the big book out now is The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most revered American writers working today, whose articles about racism in the US have won pretty much every prize possible. In the new book he claims that Israel is analogous to the antebellum American South and Palestinians are analogous to the American slaves, and any claim that it’s more complicated than that is “horseshit”. When asked last week why he left out any references to Palestinian terrorism, Coates replied, “The reporters who believe more sympathetically in Israel’s right to exist don’t have any trouble in getting their voice out.” But if partial history is wrong in one direction, it is wrong in the other. Or, apparently, not: “I’m the child of Jim Crow. I have a moral compass about this, and perhaps it’s because of my ancestry,” he said. So whereas his ancestry gives him a moral compass, journalists who believe in Israel’s right to exist (to quote Liz Lemon from 30 Rock, “Jack, just say Jewish — this is taking for ever”) are full of horseshit.
Historical ignorance is not moral clarity. It’s narcissism, laziness and stupidity. And, as the war continues, the ignorance mushrooms, perhaps to simplify a conflict that is so complex. An English friend told me the other week that October 7 was “inevitable”, by which they meant “understandable”. Another described Israel as a “colonial settler country”, as though Holocaust survivors who couldn’t return to their native countries — including my Polish ancestors — were white supremacists. Others blame Israel entirely for what’s happened to Gaza, to which I say: google Yasser Arafat. How is it so hard for some people to understand that Binyamin Netanyahu is appalling and Hamas and Hezbollah are murderous terrorists who have sacrificed their own people’s lives because they hate Israel, Jews and the West? Are they stupid, or just stupid about Jews?
When you’re surrounded by so much stupidity, it is hard to resist the pull of extremism, ideology and simplifications. But, like Coates, I too have a moral compass; unlike his, mine tells me that Israel is complicated, and so, sometimes, is being Jewish. There have been times this year when I’ve definitely felt more Jewish than anything else. But when I was in the synagogue, three layers of security outside, praying for a better year for all inside, I made my new year’s resolutions: to not listen to fools who try to rewrite history and to never forget how lucky I am to live here and to live now. And to celebrate that, my kids and I went out to buy some snacks.
