Israel didn’t mean much to me in my north-west London childhood.
My parents donated to the (then) ‘Joint Palestine Appeal’ and we had a JNF Blue Collecting Box. They had bought some land in Jerusalem before the war because I remember them talking, in the late 1950s, about selling it. “Just a small orchard in Bayit v’Gan,” they said. If only they hadn’t sold that ‘small orchard’!
My father was German, my mother Polish and though not directly refugees from Nazi Germany, they lost all their families in the Shoah. Now – though not then – I can see how big the influence of the Shoah was on me, in particular on my subsequent relationship with Israel. I might have felt that influence, but didn’t have the insight, and certainly not the vocabulary, to articulate it.
In retrospect, putting together these and other fragments of memory adds up to something more consequent about the place of Israel in the family home.
My conscious journey with Israel began in the early 1960s. I had signed up for a walking holiday with Habonim, and thought I should meet some of my fellow walkers beforehand. There I encountered Zionist ideology for the first time and we had intense debates about making aliyah. But there came a point where it felt dishonest to remain in a movement whose raison d’être was aliyah, if I was not, ideologically or temperamentally, prepared to make that commitment.
I was also involved with the youth club at West London Synagogue, becoming chair of the group the year Hugo Gryn started there as rabbi. He became very much a mentor, which led me to get more involved with Jewish learning.
‘Israel’ was present but not with the centrality it now occupies in Jewish life
I began to appreciate more fully what devastation the Shoah had wreaked and how Jewish life on the Continent was trying to reestablish itself. These and other influences led me to apply to Leo Baeck College.
In my first year (1967), rhetoric from Arab broadcasts promising ‘seas of fire and rivers of blood’ seemed very real, as if another Shoah was in the offing and war seemed inevitable.
I phoned the Jewish Agency in London and volunteered to go to Israel. Two weeks later, war began.
By then, I was involved with fellow students at Leo Baeck coordinating young peoples’ support for Israel. I eventually went the day after the war ended. It was my first time there and, while I didn’t kiss the tarmac on arrival, I fell in love with Israel instantly.
I was a civilian worker on a small army base. Volunteers were given army uniform and the commander took us all over Israel and the captured areas.
I returned to London full of euphoria – Israel had survived a potential Shoah and the world loved us. But I did not forget the almost palpable enmity, especially as I was in uniform and especially on the West Bank.
That November, Leo Baeck College students organised the first Jewish-Christian-Muslim conference in Berlin. Among the delegates was a young Egyptian whose brother had been killed in the Six Day War and he spoke about how it had devastated his mother. That previous euphoria took on a darker shape and was one of those critical moments where my thinking about Israel became more nuanced.
In 1968, Golda Meir was in London and met with young Jewish leaders including some of us from Leo Baeck College. Somebody asked about the Palestinians. “There is no such thing as the ‘Palestinians!’” she exclaimed. How, I wondered, might Israel arrive at a peaceful settlement with her neighbours if they were seen with such disdain?
Many Israelis and many of Israel’s friends worldwide urged her to take advantage of victory and make peace with the Arabs. Sadly, other voices prevailed there which only saw the short-term gains of victory while much of the Arab world was opposed to any peace.
I was rabbi in Paris during the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Israel’s existence seemed to hang on an even thinner thread than in 1967. The necessity of finding other ways of living in peace became even more pressing.
A two-state solution seemed the only way forward. However benevolent Israeli propaganda proclaimed it to be, it was an ‘occupying power,’ with all that implied. I could no longer argue that occupying a people for what is now nigh on half a century is consistent with the values and teachings of Judaism. I became involved with Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) when it set up a branch.
Anwar Sadat’s 1979 visit to Jerusalem and the subsequent peace treaty with Egypt seemed to augur a brighter future.
Anybody who criticised the Israeli government was branded as disloyal, colluding with antisemites or, worse, wishing that Israel ceased to exist. The 1982 Lebanon War polarised attitudes even further. Various monitoring groups developed at this time: Rabbis for Human Rights; B’Tzelem, the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents’ Forum and so on. They all argued that loving Israel and being supportive of all that its government did were not one and the same thing.
The values of some parts of the Settler movement became increasingly unpalatable religiously as well as politically, reflecting an expansionist way of thinking, often linked with Messianic ideology. Their ideas and actions have become increasingly outrageous.
I watched with tears in my eyes as Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands at the White House in 1993. The Oslo Accords seemed to fulfil Abba Eban’s memorable phrase, “people do make peace when they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
Things just fell apart thereafter. Intifadas. The Hebron Mosque massacre (1994) and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (1995), perpetrated by religious right-wingers, spoke of attitudes and positions becoming ever more extreme. Whatever hopes for a positive outcome of the Israel-Arab conflict seemed to have slipped through our fingers like sand.
Many of my friends in Israel were on the streets demanding change in the government – until 7 October 2023. Israelis are in despair.
While I think it nonsense to describe what has happened in Gaza since as ‘genocide,’ even the Israeli military does not now contest that some 70,000 have been killed, which is appalling. Hamas is evil and must be neutralised. But invoking “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” is not acceptable. Reducing Gaza to look like Berlin in 1945 cannot simply be compared to “breaking a few eggs.”
How to conclude writing about this long journey, this love affair with Israel, at such a time when it has sadly acquired pariah status in so many quarters.
I continue to be one of the prophet Zechariah’s assirei ha’tikvah, “a prisoner of hope”; I continue to grasp that rabbinic phrase gam zeh ya’avor “this too will pass”; I continue to believe in the affirmation of life and the decency of human beings – those Jewish values that have accompanied me on my journey.
• This article is a shortened version of Rabbi Colin Eimer’s introduction to MPJ’s first book, Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel.