Corbyn is wrong to put his faith in Hamas

I lived in Israel for six months in 1985 when I filled the gap between the departure of the former Financial Times correspondent and the late arrival of his replacement. I enjoyed the experience. I had a good time and made several friends with whom, alas, I have lost touch in the intervening third of a century. Nearly all of my time was spent among younger Israelis, all of them Jewish, all Army reservists, most of whom more or less backed the then prime minister Shimon Peres.

In Tel-Aviv on Friday nights, after the Shofar was blown, it was party-time in the Ponderosa bar, where we remained locked in by our host (an Army major) until the end of Shabbath the following day. But it wasn’t all fun and games. In Jersualem, on my third day in the country, I was pelted with stones in Mea Shearim, a long-established Ultra-Orthodox district, for the crime (of which I was then ignorant) of wearing shorts.

During my six months, I visited the West Bank a number of times, talking mainly to Palestinians, but also to Jewish settlers, including the Zionist extremist Meir Kehane, who was later assassinated. It was fascinating stuff and I wished at the time that I could have stayed on.

As it happens, there was no major outbreak of violence for me to cover. The biggest incident I can recall was the bombing of Tripoli, in Libya, by the Israeli Air Force. But if there had been a war, if Israel had been invaded by, say, Egypt and Syria, with backing from other Arab states, I would have wanted Israel to prevail. As Moshe Dyan said, Israel has to win every time, the Arabs only need to win once. 

But that was then and this is now. Years later, I take a less benign view of Israel. I am appalled by its treatment of Gaza in particular, and also by its relentless settlement policy, which is gradually inching the Palestinian people out of their own country. The passage last month in the Knesset of the coalition government’s legislation defining the state of Israel and the demotion of the status of its Arab population strikes me as deeply regrettable.

I would still back Israel in the event of a full-scale Arab-Israeli war. It is unthinkable that the Jewish people should have to fear a second Holocaust. But I would very much prefer it if such a conflict were rendered unnecessary as the result of an accommodation between Jews and Arabs that allowed the creation of a single state, to be known as Israel-Palestine, in which everybody, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, enjoyed equal rights, guaranteed by the United Nations, the U.S. and the EU. Under my solution, Jews of the diaspora would continue to have a right of return, as would dislocated Palestinians – but not Arabs from elsewhere in the region. Preservation of the Jewish and Palestinian character of the state would be a first priority. Beyond that, the new country could be friends with all of its neighbours and the wider world. It would flourish as never before. 

Needless to say, I know that this won’t happen. Do you think I’m nuts?

One other thing, which I mention in passing in full awareness that it is a cliché: I really do have Jewish friends. I also have two brothers-in-law who are Jewish and a nephew-in-law and two nieces-in-law who are Jewish. And I once had a Jewish girlfriend called Lisa, who came to visit me in London from Tel-Aviv. It would never occur to me to either like or dislike Jews on the basis of their faith or culture.

But the deliberate conflation of anti-semitism with principled opposition to the aggressive zionism of the current government of Israel is threatening to muzzle free speech in the UK more effectively than anything dreamt of in the student unions of our sillier universities.

Jeremy Corbyn is wrong to put his faith in Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation that would slaughter Jews with all the demented enthusiasm of the Nazis. But he is not wrong to stand up against the extremist policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. He is not Alf Garnet. He just needs to learn some sense and to say what I think he means, not whatever pops into his daft old head every time something unpleasant takes place in Israel or Gaza. The same applies to the Labour Party as a whole. Both need to learn to think before they speak and to root out any in their midst who are, actually, anti-semites. They were right to boot out Ken Livingstone, and should get rid of anyone else who thinks that backing Hamas is the best way forward for the Middle East.

There. I’ve said it. Now its time to sit back and wait for the condemnation coming my way from the Board of Deputies, or whoever else thinks it speaks for all British Jews.