That advert in the Jewish Chronicle

The Jewish Chronicle has a front page article on the full page Times advert condemning Israel's actions in Gaza signed by 300 Jews.

MORE THAN 300 Jews publicly con­demned Israeli actions in Gaza in a £10,000 full-page advertisement in Thursday’s edition of The Times.

Headlined “What is Israel doing? A call by Jews in Britain,” the text de­nounced “the collective punishment of the people of Gaza” and the use of Is­rael’s “enormously superior military might to terrorise an entire people.”

Signed by academics and figures from the arts, including playwright Harold Pinter, director Mike Leigh and actress Miriam Margolyes, the petition alleges that kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit “has become a pawn in the Israeli government’s ongoing bat­tle to topple the democratically elect­ed government of the Palestinians.”

Calling for the immediate release of Hamas MPs arrested by Israel, the advertisement urged readers to protest to their MPs and to the Israeli embassy. Ms Margolyes told the JC she had signed the statement “because I want Israel to survive, and it won’t survive if it is destroying Palestine. The prob­lem is that Jewish people feel any crit­icism of Israel is antisemitic, so it’s very difficult to get across that we are proud ofbeingjewish but ashamed of the actions of the Israeli government.”
Marxist historian Professor Eric Hobsbawn felt it “very important for a number of Jews who agree with the sentiments of the statement to stand up and be counted. The predominant view associated with the Jewish com­munity in this country and elsewhere isto almost automatically support the present government of Israel.”

Writer Lynne Reid Banks — who is not Jewish but married to an Israeli and who lived on kibbutz for 10 years — hoped Palestinians would hear about the advert as “it might change their views that everyone in the world, and especially Jews, are against them.” Describing herself “more pro-Pales­tinian than pro-Israeli,” she argued that kidnapping an IDF soldier was a legitimate tactic. “I regard Corporal Shalit as a prisoner of war because he was captured by guerrillas, rather than terrorists, acting against a military and not a civilian target.”

Pyschotherapist Susie Orbach said her concern “is for the safety of the State of Israel and I’m worried that the ac­tions of the Israeli government is threat­ening the security of its people.”

Author Moris Fahri said: “When you hit the infrastructure, you endan­ger the lives of quite innocent people.”

Now the statement itself is quite remarkable. I discussed it with a few anti-zionists and we all felt that it could and should be harder hitting but we were in a hurry to sign it off and get it into print. It's only now I've read this JC report that I realise how difficult it must have been for its author to come up with something acceptable to anti-zionists and to people like, say, Miriam Margolyes who "told the JC she had signed the statement “because I want Israel to survive, and it won’t survive if it is destroying Palestine. The prob­lem is that Jewish people feel any crit­icism of Israel is antisemitic, so it’s very difficult to get across that we are proud of being jewish but ashamed of the actions of the Israeli government.” Now my view is that it's only by destroying Palestine that Israel came to exist in the first place. Also, look again at what Susie Orbach says. Her concern “is for the safety of the State of Israel and I’m worried that the ac­tions of the Israeli government is threat­ening the security of its people.” Suppose someone could demonstrate that by killing lots of Palestinians and seeing that many will die prematurely for months to come because of the damage to infrastructure Israel would then be more secure, would Susie Orbach then support Israel's crimes against humanity? I assume not. I assume that she expressed herself badly or that the JC reported badly. That's been known. But clearly there are signers who signed because of their concern for Israel whilst others signed because they are opposed to Israel.

To me this all says two things. The first is that the author of the statement did an amazing job. The second is that, with Israel's propensity for major atrocities with tacit approval and even overt backing from the powerful countries and blocks, the question of how many states there should be in what is now Israel and the occupied territories has become a secondary consideration and that, if the unity displayed by the signatories to the advert could be maintained, we might be able to simply campaign on the issues, the wall, the aggression, and so on.