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I am a Jew and I insist it is not anti-semitic to criticise Israel for its Gaza crimes

In demanding equality and freedom for all the residents of historic Palestine, it is the opponents of Israel, not its supporters, who carry the torch of history's anti-racist struggles.

This article was first published in July 2014.



The equivalent would be for Vladimir Putin to accuse those angered by his crackdown on LGBTQ rights of being driven by nothing but anti-Russian racism. Claims like this are significant because they shift the terms of debate – rather than asking whether Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is justified, Israel's supporters wish to place that question beyond the scope of legitimate discussion. In order to defend human rights effectively, it is therefore important that we are all able to respond to these claims, which take two main forms:

"Lots of countries are awful. You single out Israel's violence because you hate Jews"

This often repeated claim is doubly flawed. First, it is simply untrue that the majority of those appalled by Israel's attack on Gaza are zombie-like automatons with no involvement in politics but who dramatically arise from their life of slumber every time Israel kills children. Most are involved in a range of political campaigns; at a recent Stop the War volunteers' meeting about Gaza campaigners handed out flyers advertising everything from anti-fracking protests to a socialist film co-operative.

Secondly, Israel is sufficiently unique to justify a particular focus on its crimes. There is no other country today premised on ethno-religious discrimination. In the West Bank every aspect of life, from how much water people can drink, to how freely they can move and which courts judge them if they are accused of a crime, is differentially regulated for Jewish settlers and for illegally occupied Palestinians. In Gaza, Palestinians are besieged so that Israelis may live in safety. A large chunk of Gaza's population is made up of internal refugees and their descendants, forced to flee their homes in 1948 to make way for the creation of the Jewish state. Israel privileges one ethnic group while impoverishing and imprisoning another.


Corruption, inequality and tyranny are all as appalling as they are widespread, but people find states constructed on the basis of racism particularly disturbing.

If France invaded Spain and proceeded to construct a network of settlements with special privileges for French settlers while blockading those Spaniards who fought that status quo and restricting their access to food and building materials, it is not hard to imagine that the occupied and marginalised people of Spain would receive at least as much sympathy and support as is currently shown to the Palestinians.



Britain all but gave Israel its birth certificate and continues to fund its military machine. Our obligation as citizens to oppose the use of our taxes to kill Palestinians combines with Israel's uniqueness as a racially defined occupying power to explain the anger its violence generates.

"You say you're an anti-Zionist? Why should Jews be the only people denied their right to self-determination?"

Even if they acknowledge that opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its de facto occupation of Gaza need not be motivated by anti-Semitism, supporters of Israel often insist that taking offense at the crimes of 1948, rather than those of 1967, implies a hatred of Jews.

In fact, the above question suffers from historical amnesia. As recently as the early 1990s, activists were opposing the principle of self-determination for another ethnic group – white South Africans. It is noteworthy that FW De Klerk's defence of the principle of Apartheid has involved a comparison to Israel; Afrikaners wanted only the national self-determination sought by Israeli Jews, he says. The cases are analogous because both peoples sought national rights based on dispossessing another population.

Jewish self-determination in Palestine is therefore not comparable to, say, the right of people who live north of the English Channel to self-determination in a country called Britain. Rather, the hypothetically similar case would be if one section of the British population asserted a divine right to control part or all of the country, with a flag, an anthem and a constitution declaring the state to be the property of that group. It should come as no surprise that Israel cannot countenance permitting the children of 1948, Palestinian refugees, to return to their homes since that would endanger the Jewish majority crucial to securing Israel's future as a Jewish state. Jewish self-determination is bound up with the denial of Palestinian rights.





Barnaby Raine interviewed on Sky TV, 26 July 2014

Source: Stop the War Coalition

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