AN ISRAELI CONSENSUS?

To be anti-Semitic is to be a Jew-hater, in common language, but most of the people of the Near and Middle East and Ethiopia are ethnically Semites too. They are all reputed to be descendants of Shem. I forget who he was exactly but there is a Yiddish word, “shemozzle” which translates as our “bacchanal”. So, I imagine Shem was a confusion man. In any event, I do not know how “anti-Semitic” came to mean anti-Jewish in particular. And now it has acquired a new meaning – anti-Israeli, especially when non-Jewish people criticise Israeli actions.

In 1998 Israel celebrated 50 years as a state and I went there to make a series of programmes for the BBC. It was quite an eye-opener. I was used in Britain to an over-aggressive reaction to any vague suggestion that Israel had erred. But in Israel, I found as many shades of political opinion as exists in any healthy democracy, and none of that sterile debate about who hates Jews that is always on the Jewish agenda outside of Israel. For Israelis it’s about security.

The Israelis joke that if there were 50 Jews in a room there would be 50 different opinions. They have a good line in humour and the butt of one of their current jokes is none other than their Minister of Defence, Amir Peretz, and you could argue the people themselves. Peretz personifies the extremes of Israeli opinion. At the moment he is masterminding, with the generals, the new Lebanon war. But, ironically, just in 1982, he was one of the vociferous members of Peace Now, the high-profile, anti-war campaigning group that demanded accommodation with the Palestinians and withdrawal from Lebanon. Two decades later, another Lebanon war, and Peace Now has gone on record as pro the engagement.

That first Lebanon war divided Israel, with the peaceniks opposing those who would wage war to the bitter end. One young, popular writer told me she would be happy if every Palestinian was wiped off the land but I also met human rights lawyers, businessmen and even an army chief who believed that war was damaging the Israeli psyche. One ex-labour minister went as far as to say that the abused had become the abuser, that the Jewish people were doing unto others what had been done unto them. No non-Jew could dare say such a thing publicly outside Israel.

Tzali Reshef, a Peace Now founder, in a manifesto on the organisation’s website last week said, “I’m not a pacifist. At certain times, in certain conditions, and without other options, in order to protect your life, your security, your future, your right to live in peace, there is no alternative but to fight. In Lebanon this situation came to be. But will the war, which as I said is justified, continue to be justified without thought to the amount of force used? Is the destruction of an entire neighbourhood in Beirut justified? When lacking clear military targets, is it justified to choose targets without distinction? The answer is no.”

So, even when there is consensus on the war there is none on how to conduct it. At the same time, according to Associated Press, three Jewish Moroccans have submitted a petition in the Rabat High Court against Moroccan-born Israeli Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, who still has Moroccan citizenship, accusing him of war crimes in Lebanon and calling him a “criminal terrorist Zionist”. That word Zionist is a key, I would guess, to some of the rancour.

One of the open secrets I learned about Israel is the inequality felt by the Sephardic Jews who’d lived mainly in Arab countries after their 15th C expulsion from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. Apparently, to increase the pressure of numbers for Jews to be given a “homeland” European Ashkenazi Jews, anxious to return to Zion, used the threat of the Holocaust to frighten Middle-Eastern Sephardic Jews to flee to the Promised Land.

Once there, the non-European Jews, say they found themselves second-class citizens, discriminated against because of their Arabised culture.

A Sephardic teacher showed me a Zionist history text where the Sephardi were described just as pejoratively as Europeans described the colonised Africans and Indians.

Apparently, Jews had lived easily with Arabs everywhere before the creation of Israel, especially in Morocco where they were critical to the economy.

The King publicly appealed to the Jews not to abandon their Moroccan home, guaranteeing their continued safety, but many left and the schism between those two Jewish tribes, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi, became apparent. Peretz is obviously seen as a traitor.

It is misguided for people on the outside to defend Israel in everything she does, pretending there is a united front. The Israelis themselves face their own divisions. One even ventured that if they didn’t have an Arab enemy they would be a lot worse off. Tell that to the refuseniks.