3 min read
ByZoe Strimpel, Zoe Strimpel
Collateral social damage is the price of confronting those who turn out to support the destruction of the Jewish state
February 22, 2024 14:21Growing up, I was aware that Israel was a bone of contention between my parents and some of their friends — sometimes leading to quite big fallings-out. A handful of their British friends — my parents had left Blighty in 1984 with me as a toddler — had especially anti-Israel views. I remember those arguments as vicious, painful and destructive, but it was only later that I would understand why they were so. It was because they felt like existential insults and cruel mockery: “Those awful Jews! Always at it!”, all in the language of voguish progressivism.
For a few years at university, following my own political awakening after 9/11, I also fell out with people over Israel. As soon as I sniffed injustice, demonisation, the sheer moral stink of the urge to insult and vilify the uniquely moral, very special and entirely democratic Jewish country founded in the ashes of the gas chambers and thousands of years of pogroms, torture, ghettoisation and harassment, I saw red. I went from zero to a hundred fast, but what was even more galling was how my opposition, usually some home counties gentile called Brian or Lucy with absolutely zero skin in the game, aggressively stuck to their anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian position. They were as willing to fall out with me as I with them, despite there being no personal resonance in it for them. It was enraging.
But as I got older and my pro-Israel views settled into part of of my identity I also became safe in the knowledge that there was a large community of us and the fight was less urgent for me personally. I went to Israel and understood the complexity of views there and also Israel’s resilience. I simmered down.
Plus, I found that conflict stressed me out and I tried to avoid it wherever possible, which required sensing when ignorance might be bliss. I avoided environments in which Israel would be attacked, and as soon as the conversation turned towards “The Middle East” in social settings I would either try to change the subject or step out. In select cases, when I knew the anti-Israel feeling was part of a wider, if misguided, peacenikery, I’d even just let it go.
But since October 7, Jews the world over have had to urgently reconsider their limits. What is debate and what is egregious insult? What is acceptable disagreement, and what is rank antisemitism? Is it possible to remain friends with people whose take on the war in Gaza strikes one as objectionable, a recapitulation of the ancient blood libel? Is it even possible to be civil to such people?
What about those who think the gross events at Harvard since Hamas’s killing spree should not have resulted in president Claudine Gay’s resignation and that, on the contrary, she was poorly used by a cabal of whinging Jews? Who appear to think that the true victims in the West since October 7 are not the Jews who are experiencing thousand-fold increases in attacks and intimidation, but Muslims experiencing “Islamophobia”? Who, despite being non-Jews, have no problem lecturing and harranguing Jews about Israel’s alleged barbarism and bloodlust, its zest for “collective punishment”, even as the blood has barely dried in the kibbutzim of southern Israel and hundreds of thousands of Israelis remain evacuees in their own land?
It has been well beyond my ken to compartmentalise such views. They seep like a poison throughout the whole edifice, making it impossible to retain respect and goodwill. How can you feel respect and goodwill when someone – friend or not – appears to be calling for the murder of your people and demanding their helplessness, under cover of being a good person? This may seem an extreme leap, but I am far from the only Jew who makes it. And I am pretty sure we’re right to — even if those on the other side are convinced that that’s not what they’re doing.
I can understand that people, rooted in swamps and layers and decades of misinformation and distortions about Israel, disseminated into the ether everywhere from the BBC to schools, might get the wrong end of the stick. I also get that however clear the moral backbone is, there is a lot of room for divergence in how one thinks Israel should proceed, not least since it got the nasty far-righters Ben-Gvir and Smotrich into government. Netanyahu is a dubious figure and he needs to go. I’ve been to Israel twice since October 7, talked to a lot of hostage families, liberals, right wingers…not everyone agrees on everything to do with Israel’s war strategies. But every single person I met thinks that Israel ought to do whatever it takes – which for some people means the total destruction of Gaza; for others something else – to get the hostages back. These are all variants on a moral position and more importantly they are entitled to it.
So yes, the period since October 7 has seen some collateral social damage, but it’s also brought clarity — never have Jews had a more reliable detector of the moral acumen of those around them.