These are the things I’ve learnt you can’t ask about Israel

In recent years, I have been asked to comment on the Middle East “impasse”, though I am no foreign policy expert. I am merely one of many humanists who mourn this tragic history and rail against the failure of the international community to exert the great influence it has to bring peace and justice to innocent civilians in this area of the world.

Many Jewish supporters of peace have argued that it is precisely because of our own long history of oppression and discrimination that we must stand with the Palestinian people and support their right to self-determination. I have come to the point where I think differently. It is not because of my own history that I have declared myself to be an ally of the struggle of Palestinian people, it is because as human beings injustice and inequality demand that we all care.

Yes, my own family history has shaped my political views. If my mother and grandparents fleeing Berlin in 1938 had not been accepted here, they would have joined the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust. So, yes, I care deeply that asylum seekers should be met by our welcome embrace.

My father’s father was less fortunate. He was deported to Beaune-la-Rolande in the first round-up of immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and then sent to Birkenau, where he was murdered. My father, at the age of 14, joined the Jewish section of the communist resistance in Paris. This group of partisans, ordinary young men and women with nothing but courage and commitment, determined it was vital to urge French Jews not to report to their local police station, to encourage them to go into hiding, and to provide rations and places to sleep for young children abruptly orphaned.

My father, with his mother’s blessing, took a stand. In such moments, we all have choices, which is not to condemn those who focused on survival, sought ways to escape to Palestine, or took comfort in God’s protection. But it is to acknowledge that there was heroism in daily life, despite the great risks. My father’s exhortation “not to look away” was the lesson of his entire life after all that he’d witnessed and lost during World War II and then from the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War and all the horrors since. And so, all these years later, the question remains: Who will bear witness if we don’t?

The lessons of my parents’ early years inevitably shaped my understanding of the world. To continue in a personal mode: my teenage years were spent in a socialist Zionist youth movement. I suspect my parents, who weren’t Zionists, simply appreciated two hours of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon without children. The movement’s intention was that at the end of school, we would spend a year on a kibbutz. My parents, entirely focused on education, weren’t having a year of picking oranges or plucking turkeys. So, it was agreed that I would spend Christmas in Israel and return to Australia for university. I arrived at the end of 1972. I imagined that I was landing in a socialist utopia. Instead, the reality of the Zionist project made itself explicit at the airport: European Jews stamped my passport, Middle Eastern Jews manned the luggage carousels while Palestinians swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. So much for the socialist dream.

t was the beginning of my own education regarding the entrenched racism underpinning the establishment of the State of Israel. As Saree Makdisi has pointed out in his recent book, Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial, Israel has long been hailed as the only democracy in the Middle East, which belies the fundamental contradiction: a Jewish state is by definition exclusionary and therefore anti-democratic for everyone who is not Jewish.

My education would continue as a postgraduate student of Edward Said’s in the late 1970s when he was being vilified as the “professor of terror”. In one conversation, he talked about the plight of the Palestinians as the victims of history’s victims. I felt uncomfortable when he talked about “Jews” rather than Israelis or Zionists. I suggested that his terminology left no space for progressive Jews like me who were not Zionists. We moved on to other subjects, but I realised afterwards that my naive plea for nuance was irrelevant to his struggle. It wasn’t Edward Said’s task to acknowledge this small group of dissenting Jews.

Why should Palestinians (or anyone) respect a distinction between Jewishness and Zionism when the Israeli state is founded on – and its continued existence justified by – precisely this conflation? When the Star of David is emblazoned on the uniforms of the IDF soldiers who humiliate, torture and murder Palestinians? When, as an Australian Jew, I can settle on a kibbutz in southern Israel that was once home to the family of a Palestinian – now confined in Gaza mere kilometres away, who have to break through a barbed wire fence to “return” – simply because I am a Jew, and he is a Palestinian?

My education continued when Mohammed el-Kurd, the much-vilified young poet and activist, wrote an essay on the connection between Jews and Israel. He argued: “Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives – by force – in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by ‘divine decree’. Many others reside – by force – in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorising or apologising for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarise. I’m tired of the impulse to pre-emptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty and particularly tired of the assumption that I’m inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretence that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I’m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.”

My education has continued, as it should. There have been deeply unpleasant encounters with family, friends and frenemies. I am not sharing these stories to elicit sympathy but rather to reveal how deeply fractured and fraught the issue of Israel and the war on Gaza has become. I have been repeatedly berated for mentioning the Holocaust and failing to refer to October 7 in an interview with Laura Tingle on the ABC’s 7.30.

I have discovered that it is impossible to ask, however hesitantly, whether anyone feels that the images from Gaza on our TV screens are reminiscent of the brutal and now iconic images from last century, of the photos of the Jews rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto. That is to break a taboo. To compare the conduct of the IDF in prosecuting the occupation to the Nazi regime’s segregation, dispossession and persecution of the Jews in World War II is forbidden.

It seems, though, that I am not the only person who sees parallels. Masha Gessen, at the recent Festival of Dangerous Ideas, made the same point. Gessen rejected the notion that Gaza was an open-air prison and very precisely outlined the topographical parameters of a ghetto, be it in Warsaw or Gaza. The Kremlin critic, journalist and author had earlier been vilified and initially denied an important prize for making exactly this point. It seems that the Holocaust is an inviolable, sacred moment in history, forever beyond comparison. Which, for me, means that we can never learn the vital lessons we should draw from that catastrophe.

I have been told I am desecrating the memory of family who’d been murdered in World War II. As if many Jewish people of my generation in Australia have anyone much left by way of extended family. I have been asked how I felt on October 7 as if my empathy or indifference towards those Israelis murdered on that day was a sign of my loyalty, or lack of it, to Israel and, beyond that, testimony to my Jewishness. If it needs to be said, I watched in horror the coverage of that day and the days after. I had been sickened by the footage and frustrated by the mostly ill-informed and ahistorical reportage that followed.

I have been called a “kapo” (or collaborator), a “token Jew”, and received lurid messages: my parents would turn in their graves; I am a “denier of Judaism; the shame you wear is a suitable crucifix”; “shame on you and all you stand for”, and “there are those in the community who wish to do you harm”. I have been berated in Adelaide’s Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens by “disgusted” citizens. I have been glared at buying fruit. I have listened as a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant told me, “They” – the Palestinians – “are not like us”.

In this small corner of the world, there are 120,000 Jews. I have learnt that it is not acceptable to ask what is our relationship to the modern state of Israel. What is our response to the occupation of Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians?

And my response is to ask why empathy, an acknowledgement of our shared humanity, is such a risk?

A bright young lawyer tells me she’s been excluded from her family’s WhatsApp group for speaking out about the occupation. A 30-something academic has been attending pro-Palestine marches. For her entire life she has gone to Friday night family dinners, but she is refusing to do so now because discussing the war has become impossible. Her mother fears the family will split apart over the issue.

These are First World problems. Our individual or personal experiences are just that. It would be obscene to equate the pain engendered by the rifts tearing apart Jewish families in the diaspora to the suffering of Palestinian families literally torn apart by Israeli bulldozers and bombs. But it would be equally naive to imagine the two are not related. So the question remains – what is there about that place that engenders such passion and heat when we are so far removed from the region? What is this emotional attachment most Jews declare they feel for Israel? Why is Israel’s existence, the idea of it as a safe haven, so entrenched in their hearts and minds? How does a kind of collective amnesia take hold of people who know in their bones about persecution? Because it must be some kind of tacit shared forgetting that enables Israel’s zealous advocates in the diaspora to turn away from the reality of the occupation.

To state the obvious, centuries of persecution have left their mark. The Holocaust confirmed a collective psychic terror: the deeply ingrained fear that we can never be safe. However, the establishment of a Jewish state didn’t arise as a response to the Holocaust; it was a nationalist project of the 19th century, and its advocates set aside the fact that a Jewish state would entail the denial of an indigenous population. Think of the logic of “terra nullius” transported to the Middle East. The Holocaust has been written into history as a post facto rationale for the establishment of the State of Israel. Rewriting that history is now prosecuted relentlessly to assert that the cure for antisemitism lies in the State of Israel.

But 75 years later, a succession of wars, countless dead, displaced and deracinated people, the ever-increasing oppression of Palestinians’ lives, years of a reactionary government, and the moral, civil and political cost of denying the rights of another people have added up to what precisely?

It is incumbent upon us collectively to summon up the lessons of history as we contemplate the reality that successive wars in the Middle East have only produced a terrible loss of innocent lives, be they young people at a rave in Israel or 16,000 children now dead in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials. Shouldn’t our profound pity for the children stay our hands, stop us reaching for weapons of destruction? We don’t have to retrieve the scales of justice to measure man’s inhumanity to man, and we should not indulge in the obscenity of comparisons to declare these victims are more important than those victims.

The tragic lesson Israel failed to learn yet again on October 7 is that peace cannot be premised on the subjugation of a people. Violence invariably returns. Indeed, every attempt to cover it up – be it with the increasingly fascistic policies of the Israeli government, the ever-increasing restrictive conditions of the occupation, or the hysteria of the Zionist lobby in the diaspora in response to the mildest expression of solidarity with Palestinians – only reveals the terrible and inevitable persistence of violence.

The lesson of October 7 is that you cannot normalise and live peacefully in the context of a profound, ongoing injustice. Peace and justice will only come to the region when Palestinians are recognised as a people with the right to self-determination, sovereignty and their own state.

Louise Adler is a former Australian publisher and former board member of numerous arts organisations.

This is an edited version of a speech she is giving in Brisbane to mark the UN Day of Peace.

Republished from Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September, 2024