The Saturday Read Feature: Being Jewish now
Leading writers reflect in the face of war.
Good morning. We are sending you this week’s cover early. At a time of rising anti-Semitism and divisions on the left over Gaza, we have asked a number of Jewish writers to reflect on the conflict. We hope you enjoy the pieces, seven of which are listed below, and we will catch you for the main email on Saturday.
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This generation will never see Gazans and Israelis become fellow citizens, argues Fania Oz-Salzberger.
“I am a peacenik, not a pacifist”, my late father, the novelist Amos Oz, used to say. “Pacifists turn the other cheek, because they think that war is the worst thing in the world. I don’t turn the other cheek, because for me not war but aggression is the worst thing in the world. And aggression must sometimes be defeated by force”.
Left-wing Jews are torn between their values and the intensifying conflict, thinks Shlomo Sand.
As is well known, in the long history of the left there have always been many Jews. Although in both of the great revolutions, the English and the French, that opened the modern age there were no significant figures of Jewish background. The moment that the left started to form in 19th century Germany, people such as Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, and later on in eastern Europe Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many other Jewish revolutionaries, became an inseparable part of the formation and spread of socialism in the West.
The global left is the only force that has the power to stay Israel’s hand, writes Celeste Marcus.
A person lives in many realms. One’s sexual identity is not the same as one’s ideological identity, though they may inform one another. We are multiple, but not fully intersectional, beings. I am a young liberal Zionist in the diaspora and so have had occasion, over the past bloody months, to see just how complicated my multiple identity is. This was made manifest during a period in which I was both deeply rattled and also called upon to act, to take part in the inflamed public conversation, to demonstrate the humanity which is the single tool powerful enough to staunch the bloodletting which has plagued the Palestinian and Jewish peoples since the early 1900s.
Charging up and drilling down. Whilst today we’re mostly in oil & gas, we’re also working to roll out EV charging hubs and recently opened up the UK’s largest public hub in Birmingham. And, not or – that’s our approach. See how bp is backing Britain.
Howard Jacobson: The founding of Israel wasn’t a colonial act – a refugee isn’t a colonist.
Let’s not beat about the bush. I am afraid and furious. I did not expect to see a day when the slaughter of Jews would again be a matter for celebration. Do leftist intellectuals who have the hots for terrorists weep remorseful tears? No – I thought not.
Susan Neiman: The universalist tradition has been forgotten, the Enlightenment betrayed.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember,” said Benjamin Netanyahu on 28 October. There’s no point wasting words over the lifelong secular conman’s sudden interest in biblical texts, or even in asking whether it’s kosher to follow an injunction to wipe out enemy tribes if your main object is to prolong a war in order to stay out of jail.
Omer Bartov: Both Netanyahu’s cabinet and Hamas see this crisis as an opportunity.
My own views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were confirmed by both the horrific massacre of 7 October and its brutal aftermath in Gaza. Already on 4 August this year several colleagues of mine and I had issued an online letter headlined “The Elephant in the Room” in which we called attention to the fact that even the protestors against Benjamin Netanyahu’s so-called judicial reform were refusing to address the occupation, which is at the root of his efforts to undermine the Israeli Supreme Court — the last and already weakened bulwark against authoritarianism and illiberal democracy.
Sam Adler-Bell: Jews in the diaspora must resist the inhumanity being done by Israel in our name.
Since the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October, and the onset of Israel’s genocidal retaliation, I have thought often of my grandfather, who died in 2020. Jewish mourners tell each other, “May their memory be a blessing.” But I’m probably not alone in experiencing the memory of certain loved ones as a mixed blessing, an irksome comfort, like a pain between the shoulder blades, reminding you every morning – with a strangely bittersweet nostalgia – of all the blissful days you’ve endured it before. What I have been unable to stop thinking about, through these awful days, are the arguments I would be having with my grandfather if he were still alive.
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I was brought up in Ireland as a Catholic and developed a love of Israel during my youth, so much so that I offered to spend one of my summer breaks from university to work on a kibbutz. I was refused as they had too many more suitable candidates. I then had thirty years of “the troubles “ in Ireland where neighbours murdered each other until a settlement was reached. Throughout all that, the conflict in the Middle East between Jew and Muslim continued and still continues. Is there no one who can find a way through this hatred, this fight to the death? In Ireland a lot of the reasons for the agreement was the loss of religion caused by the abuses of minors by catholic clergy. No such hope in Zionism or Islamic fundamentalism. My only advice is the restoration of the West Bank to Jordan on its acceptance by the Jordanians of Jordan becoming the Second State of the two State solution as a home for Palestinians (it is already 70% Palestinian).
can't wait to read this!