Gaza: is the tide turning in Israel?
No-one who has looked at the images of extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust Memorial of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem will underestimate the impact of the appalling 7 October 2023 Hamas attack and hostage-taking on Israel and on Jews worldwide. No-one watching the daily TV coverage of the civilian dead and dying amongst the rubble of Gaza, and listening to radio reports of attacks on Palestinian communities on the West Bank, will underestimate the impact on public opinion here and elsewhere.
The ability of Israel to define the purpose of this violence – and the wider conflict with Palestinian nationalism — has reached its limits. It has created the current spiritual crisis in Judaism. Partly in response to public opinion, the tone and tide of Western governments’ reactions is changing. Why now?
For a long time Western democracies voiced concern rather than condemnation of Israel’s conduct. Hamas, the sorcerer’s apprentice that had received funding from Israel to split the Palestinians, had perpetrated a face-to-face version of 9/11. The ravages of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, Europe’s millennia of antisemitism, all weighed heavily on the scales of foreign policy. The weapons kept coming from the USA.
After months of bombing and blockade, Israel continued to promote a story that this was a war for its survival — rather than a war for the survival for Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, propped up by religious extremists determined to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinians. Haaretz, Israel’s oldest and most influential newspaper, was writing on 18 April that there was “no longer a war, but an unrestrained assault on civilians”.
The key to continuing unrestrained the invasion and destruction of Gaza, while containing the volume of protest both inside and outside Israel, was to “kettle” reporting and comment on public outrage in a wider story of antisemitism. The aim was to present as a further expression of antisemitism all protests at the massive civilian casualties, blockade of Gaza, deprivation of all but the most rudimentary health care, near starvation and resultant malnutrition of a generation of Palestinians. But like most falsehoods it contained an element of truth. Islamic solidarity worldwide with the Palestinians can slip easily into antisemitism, and in the heated language of Left-wing protests sometimes Jews are conflated with the Israeli government. Some hate crimes have been prosecuted in Britain.
As protestors increasingly emerged from Jewish communities around the world and inside Israel – albeit at first a small minority — dismissal of protest at the conduct of the war as merely antisemitism became implausible, even if frequently repeated by Israeli government sources. Moreover, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) bombing and shelling put the lives of hostages in danger. On 13 May a number of British rabbis called for an end to the blockade. “What is happening in Gaza is completely against core democratic values and what I would call Jewish values that we are all made equal in the sight of God”, in the words of their spokesperson Rabbi Janet Laura Klausner. Trump’s Riviera of the Middle East, an AI-generated social media video, brought out some 350 US Jewish leaders in denunciation.
Dissent with the conduct of the war has been growing in Israel. Last month, 40 NGOs issued an urgent appeal to stop the war. A Catholic news service, International Catholic News, carried this significant story about civil society resistance to the war in Israel. I have not found it reported elsewhere in the UK.
The organisations included — to give some sense of their range — Rabbis for Human Rights, which has increasingly been supporting Palestinians on the West Bank against settler attacks, a co-operative village founded by Jews and Arabs, Neve Shalom Wahat Al Salaam, the Jaffa based Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and the veteran Israeli soldiers’ organisation, Breaking the Silence. “All residents of the [Gaza] Strip are at risk of famine”, the appeal read, “while the healthcare system is collapsing due to severe shortages of medicine, medical equipment, and fuel. Israel is deliberately inflicting conditions that make life impossible in Gaza, with the declared goal of carrying out ethnic cleansing…. Israel’s commission of war crimes, which could also amount to crimes against humanity, must not be met with continued silence and inaction by the international community.”
In the past Israeli Government sources have spoken with candour. The Israeli director Dror Moreh’s documentary The Gatekeepers, 2012, contains strikingly candid interviews with six former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. Avraham Shalom (1981-1986) warned of the dangers of occupation. “We are making the lives of millions of people unbearable … the future is bleak … we’ve become cruel … cruel to ourselves, but especially the occupied”. The former Prime Minister (2006-2009) Ehud Olmert recently asked whether war crimes were occurring and spoke of “actions which can’t be interpreted in any other way”. A Refuser Solidarity Network is growing in numbers amongst IDF reservists and conscripts.
So when did the tide begin to turn? The date 24 April 2025 stands out: Holocaust Memorial Day, the annual official occasion at Yad Vashem, the grieving heart of Israel holding the victims’ names. According to the Guardian, waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers at the entrance to Yad Vashem were a handful of people in their 80s holding a banner that read: “If we lose our compassion for the Other, we have lost our humanity”, in English and Hebrew. They were Holocaust survivors. The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January was widely featured in the UK. This protest was not.
Veronika Cohen, one of the three survivors holding the banner, was born in the Budapest ghetto. “People here see Palestinians as the Other and that’s why they have created a barrier,” she said. “They have managed not to feel their pain and I find that incomprehensible. To me, when I read the stories of their suffering in Gaza, it blends completely into how I feel about the Holocaust.” This, the past’s call to the present for compassion, resonating in the soul of Israel at this memorial to the victims of genocide, at this symbolic place of tragic memory, and on this day, sends a unique and unequivocal message. In a square in Jerusalem thousands had gathered holding pictures of Palestinian children killed during the Gaza war, whilst some 50 lined a road in Tel Aviv dressed in black holding empty pots symbolising the hunger of the Gazan civilians.
No-one should imagine Veronika Cohen as typical of Holocaust survivors, nor the Refuser Solidarity Network of the military, nor the many now protesting representative of the majority of the population. This poignant protest will not end the killing, but it challenges the claim Netanyahu and the Israeli State make to represent Jewish values.
World opinion about Israel is changing. Future generations may see the protests of April 24th 2025 in Israel, under-reported at the time, as a turning point. But, please God, these protests may signal the beginning of the end to the intolerable suffering in Gaza.
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