It may surprise you to know that most Jews believe in Free Palestine, if by that you mean the existence of a free, independent Palestinian state that doesn’t erase a free, independent Jewish state. Hopefully it’s not a surprise to you that there never has been such a state, that in 1948, Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and other armies marched through international neutral territory and the land set aside by the UN for Palestine on the way to attack the fledgling State of Israel.
Almost a year since the Hamas attack, I am still often caught out by wrong assumptions and basic gaps of knowledge by people involved in public arguments about the situation in the Levant. Yes, there are rights and wrongs on both sides and no, the sides are not even in 2024. There is room for extreme disagreement – but you have to know what lies behind those claims and those asymmetries. If you don’t, you align yourself with extremists who choose to ignore history, nuance, and motive. Most disappointing are the errors of oversimplification by people whose education should allow them to understand complexity in a situation, including students threatening death to Jews in New York.
While Israelis have generally supported a war against a terrorist army of 40,000 militants sworn to destroy their country and world Jewry, it may surprise you, and certainly those who protest at Jewish institutions, to know that the situation is nuanced. Most Jews — even most Jews in Israel, who held a national strike against him after Hamas murdered six hostages — believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu has to leave his position, not least because he repeatedly failed to agree a ceasefire and hostage release.
Americans and British readers who mostly know Ashkenazi Jews, may be surprised to know that the Jewish population of Israel comprises a majority of Jews of Color and that they, along with the Jews who fled persecution in the USSR, are the population who have repeatedly voted for Netanyahu. Many of these Jews of Color are Jews whose families fled from the vast Arab-controlled area where Britain and France set up colonial nation states. Hundreds of thousand of Jews escaped violence and persecution in Muslim countries such as Egypt, Iraq, and (though it’s not Arab) Iran.
It’s worth pointing out, too, that as well as the mass expulsion of the Jews from Arab lands, the Christian populations of those countries have also plummeted. With a plethora of countries to invite them in, the dramatic Christian emigrations are less visible as immigrations. Even in Turkey which is in some ways more tolerant than it was, and constituted as a secular state, Jews and Christians have been effectively expelled. This is worth pointing out because these Muslim states in the region are the visible alternative to the status quo.
When the voters and leaders of Israel’s liberal democracy look out into the region, they see repressive regimes and autocracies caught in a regional power struggle between the theocratic petrostate of Iran that has funded the terrorists on its border for a generation and the feudal petrostate of Saudi Arabia that has funded rabidly antisemitic Islamic fundamentalism around the world for a generation.
Jordan and Egypt want as little to do with the hot potato of Palestine as possible and, though many many Palestinians want to set up a tolerant, democratic state, there have been no elections in Gaza or the West Bank since 2007. Hamas’ brutal coup in Gaza came after they won the last elections there and, given the relative freedom of an autonomous enclave, murdered the political opposition, made women second class citizens, hanged LGBTQ folks, and spent countless billions of aid dollars on arms and tunnels.
So, yes, the government of the state of Israel is also culpable. Its leader is hanging onto power so he isn’t sent to prison, the Minister of Police is a racist fascist, and the army is being dehumanized by fighting a war in Gaza against terrorists who are happy to lie and sacrifice Palestinian civilians for propaganda. But most Jews have no say in that. And, still, Israel remains a democratic state that will survive a bad election. As a country it will accept a peaceful neighbour as it arrives and it will, as will most Jews in the world, and Israelis of all stripes, believe in Free Palestine.