I’ve said previously that I wouldn’t write about the situation in Israel/Palestine for Splice Today again, but circumstances have made me reassess that position. I can no longer stay silent when there’s an actual genocide taking place, when an entire population are being systematically starved to death and bombarded in their tents, while the world’s governments look on with apparent indifference and the rest of us are excluded from the decision-making process and made to witness what’s happening in helpless anger and frustration.
The situation in Gaza makes it clear that the world we live in isn’t what it pretends to be. Britain claims to be a democracy, but if democratic principles really applied—if my government was genuinely subject to the will of the people—then it wouldn’t now be supporting genocide, it wouldn’t be supplying arms to Israel and a flotilla of vessels would be sailing to Gaza to relieve the suffering of that trapped, terrified and starving population.
The reason that I stopped writing about the subject was I felt out of my depth. I’m still out of my depth. I’m not a historian. I’m picking up information from the internet, like everybody else. I do, however, have a personal stake in the matter which I’d like to clarify. I was 14 in 1967, the year of the Six Day War. English was my favorite subject. We were reading Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The subject of anti-Semitism came up: naturally enough, as the villain of the story is Shylock, a Jew.
Our teacher, Mr. Frost, said he understood why Palestinians would be upset at the loss of their homeland. He asked what our response would be here in the UK if another people had annexed Wales? He also talked of the Holocaust and of the Jewish people’s need for a safe haven. He weighed one position against the other and gave no definitive answers. I remember him as a good, fair, diligent and an inspiring teacher.
I’m not sure now if he was referring to Israeli claims to the whole territory of Israel going back to 1948, or to the recent occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, still fresh in everyone’s mind. I also can’t remember how the discussion in the classroom went. I was usually vociferous in debates, and would certainly have played an active part.
Later that day I repeated some of the discussion in front of my dad. Dads and sons are often rivals. So I recounted the discussion in the classroom and the next thing I knew I was in a blazing row with him; a violent row, in which I ended up with a black eye and a split lip. I have to admit my part in all of this. I was an annoying little know-it-all. I was 14 and full of my own opinions, which, on reflection, I realize to have been other people’s opinions dressed up as my own. Nevertheless it was odd and disturbing to find myself at the receiving end of such a violent onslaught.
I already knew that my usually passive father had some turbulent hidden emotions. He’d grow angry, very red-in-the-face, when challenged about any of his fixed ideas. But the quality of the anger on this day was of a different order. It was like I’d touched something raw and hidden in his psyche: like I’d accidentally ripped off a scab which unleashed some secret pain.
Mr. Frost was my favorite teacher and I was trying to repeat his position. My dad called him all sorts of names that I barely recognized. He called him a communist and an anti-Semite. He threw a variety of supposed facts at me which I was unable to deny. When I tried to explain that Mr. Frost had given us both sides of the story, he became even more enraged. I think it might’ve been at this point that he lashed out and hit me across the face.
That was the day I learned that my father had Jewish blood. My mum explained it to me afterwards. He wasn’t actually Jewish. His dad, Sam Stone, was Jewish, but Jewishness runs through the female line. But he was brought up between the faiths. In his early childhood he’d attended synagogue on a Saturday, and church on a Sunday. It was a secret which, at my mum’s request, he’d kept hidden from us all those years.
My mum didn’t like religion and didn’t like politics, and talk of either was banned from the house: despite the fact that religion and politics were fundamental to an understanding of my dad. Thus he suppressed something that was meaningful to him, which then re-emerged in this unexpected and violent way when he felt he was challenged by his mouthy son.
You might say that my relationship with Israel is tied up with that of my father. I found out later that he’d also been circumcised. I don’t think you can get more Freudian than that. Towards the end of his life we made an effort to heal these wounds. After my mum died he was lonely and lost and my sister and I spent a lot of time looking after him. He’d softened in those last years and it often seemed that our roles were reversed. I felt very tender and loving towards him.
One day I took him to a local synagogue, where we attended a service. That was a revelation to me. I saw the Torah scrolls paraded around the room as objects of veneration and watched the rabbi’s close examination of the text using a pointer, and thought that Judaism is essentially the worship of the written word. I watched the ritual in wide-eyed fascination, absorbed in the scene.
My dad, however, was discomfited. He said he was embarrassed that he remembered so little of the words. He’d stopped going to synagogue after he was evacuated during the war. He was born in 1930. He stayed with a Methodist family in Wales. They were probably very strict. After that he only ever went to church. When he joined the Navy, at 19, he declared his religion as “Church of England.”
We had lunch together in a nearby restaurant after. He chose pork ribs in an almost ludicrous refutation of his Jewish roots. Nevertheless, when he was buried I made sure a rabbi was there. He recited the Kaddish in English and Hebrew and said a Jewish prayer. And in that moment, perhaps, I began my own healing.
You can read my eulogy for my dad here.
So you might say that my sense of Jewish identity is something that I absorbed from my father through conflict, and that I’ve spent my life trying to come to terms with it. I feel proud of my Jewish connections. Nevertheless, I always look to the other side in the debate about Zionism. I’m not alone. Many of the most vociferous critics of the State of Israel are Jews. Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Medea Benjamin, Ilan Pappé, Gabor Maté, Miko Peled, Andrew Feinstein, Avi Shlaim, Michael Rosen, plus a host of other Jewish historians, authors, activists, and academics have taken an anti-Zionist stance, and while I can’t claim the wisdom or learning of any of these people, it’s to them that I turn when trying to come to terms with my own feelings about the horrors we’re witnessing in our time.
I’m not sure what my dad or my grandpa would say about what’s happening in Gaza now. I think they’d be ashamed of what Israel’s doing. As for me, all I can say is that what we’re seeing with our own eyes, live-streamed on our electronic devices, are some of the most heinous acts of cruelty and barbarity against a civilian population since the Holocaust.
I’ll write about this again.