Where is the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel?

I confess: I don’t know the answer to this question. And my uncertainty has only deepened since the appalling events of October 7, 2023.

I first went to Israel, as the number two in the British embassy in Tel Aviv, in 1990, shortly before the First Gulf War. I was thrilled at the prospect of this posting. I had taken my A-levels in 1967, against the background of the Six Day War, when I cheered on the heroics of the Israeli military against the encircling threat of the Nasser-inspired Arab world. David versus Goliath…

The early ’90s were an exciting and inspiring time to be in Israel: through the Iraqi Scud missile attacks and on to the Madrid conference; getting to know those who would be involved in the Oslo process; watching Rabin beat Peres in the Labor leadership contest, and then carry the country in the 1992 elections. It was a moment of hope, of an effort to design the contours of a solution to the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and therefore for the realization of the Zionist dream of a “Jewish state” unburdened by the weight of its occupation of the “OPTs” (“Occupied Palestinian Territories”) after the wake-up call of the First Intifada.

During my London briefing in advance of my 1990 posting, I became aware that the Foreign Office’s Middle Eastern center of gravity was elsewhere, and that there was something in the perceptions of a deeply-embedded Camel Corps in King Charles Street. Part of the problem, it seemed to me, was that there was a real sense in the FCO (Foreign Commonwealth Office, the UK’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) of an “Arabist” community made up of those who had been selected at the start of their careers to learn Arabic, with no Israeli/Hebrew-speaking alternative. Nobody seemed as outraged as I felt, for instance, by the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism and racism, though the UK voted against it at the time.

All of which meant that, from time to time, I was aware that the ideas and policy suggestions we were sending from Tel Aviv were falling on deaf ears, and that there was a distinct lack of interest in the UK playing any sort of lead role in trying to secure a long-term place for Israel in the region, via resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. There was, of course, energy and economic interests apart, also an element of realpolitik in this hands-off approach, in the recognition of the fact that the UK no longer had the weight to make a real difference in the region, and that this was now primarily an American game. But at least the central and crucial nature of the UK relationship with the US meant that my country was fully supportive of US efforts in the region.

When I returned to Israel as the UK ambassador in 2006, the picture had changed. Israel’s high-tech success story had boosted interest in the research and commercial relationship, while events such as 9/11 and the disastrous 2003 Iraq expedition had more than raised the possibility that the core problem in the region might not be the Palestinian issue, however important it might be for Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, the different and deeply-historical fault-lines between regional powers and within Islam, and the governance and economic failures of Middle Eastern countries that would eventually explode in the 2011 Arab Spring. Moreover, the old generation of Arabists in the FCO had retired, many of them in a state of depression because their wise advice against the 2003 Iraq expedition had been ignored.

There was a perception too that the Palestinians had to take at least some of the fault for the failure to achieve a two-state solution and that Yasser Arafat had not proved to be the Palestinian Mandela, even if Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli Right had done their best to undermine the Oslo Accords, and the Israeli attribution of blame for the failure of the 2000 Camp David negotiations (“Barak offered everything; Arafat said no”) was simplistic. Israel had, after all, withdrawn from Gaza, even if many suspected that part of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s agenda was to relieve the pressure for any similar move in relation to the West Bank, let alone East Jerusalem.

The UNGA “Zionism is Racism” resolution had long been consigned to history and Ehud Olmert was working towards his 2008 offer to the Palestinians which, in my opinion, remains perhaps the major missed opportunity in the long history of Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, including its recognition that the East Jerusalem issue could not be ducked.

When I spoke to new members of staff arriving to take up positions in the embassy, I told them that they had a moral, as well as a political, duty to try to understand both sides, and both the Israeli and the Palestinian “narratives,” but the trouble was that the strain of doing so risked tearing them apart.

Much has happened since I left Israel in 2010, further complicating — and indeed souring — the picture. The task of achieving a two-state solution ever more difficult, given: in particular, Netanyahu’s long-dominance of Israeli politics, the slow drift to the right in Israeli politics and public opinion, the shortcomings of President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, the failure of the Fatah and Hamas to resolve their differences and put together a unified Palestinian leadership, and the growing settler presence and population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with all the infrastructure of separation that required. I for one had long ago reached the conclusion that a two-state solution was no longer achievable, even if it were the “right” solution, in terms of responding to two valid national movements, and even if there were no viable alternatives, apart from continued conflict.

On the regional and international front too, the picture had changed, with the failure of the Arab Spring, convincing many Israelis that democracy would never take root in their Arab neighbors, and the Trump-driven Abraham Accords, boosting the conviction of the Israeli Right that Israel could make its peace with at least some of those neighbors, including those with which it shared a strategic interest in containing and combatting Iran. These developments allowed a kind of progress that did not need to take any steps forward to address the Palestinian issue, let alone contemplate the establishment of a Palestinian state, as required by the 2003 Saudi-inspired Arab Peace Initiative (the other major missed opportunity, in my opinion, based on more recent reassurance from Saudi contacts that it was not meant to be 100% prescriptive, although Saudi marketing at the time of the API’s launch was lamentable).

The net result was, above all, that the Israeli/Palestinian issue had been put in the “too difficult” tray by a busy international community with plenty of other problems on its plate. It was also seen to be essentially manageable, despite occasional Gaza-related flare-ups and the regular drum-beat of stories about settler violence and human rights violations in the West Bank.

And then, October 7th.

The world leaped to Israel’s defense, in response to the brutal savagery of the Hamas attack and concern about the fate of the hostages, and all of us with friends in Israel understood with bleak clarity the extent of the trauma and the echoes of the Shoah. We also registered the further blow this would mean to any attempt to achieve a two-state solution, as even those on the left of the Israeli political spectrum asked themselves whether Israel could risk the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, if such a state would sooner or later vote for a Hamas-led government.

But UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was right when he said that the attack had not happened in a vacuum, however much his remark outraged the Israeli government. Despite the 2005 Israeli withdrawal, the ICRC and many others considered that the extent of continuing Israeli effective control over Gaza meant it should still be defined as “occupied,” and certainly those in contact with Palestinians living in Gaza were fully aware of the potential powder keg that was developing in such a small and tightly enclosed geographical space. There were also, of course, stories of Israel quietly turning a blind eye to Hamas rule there, and even to Qatari money going into the Strip, as part of an agenda of delegitimizing the Palestinian cause and fostering the gap between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-dominated PA in the West Bank, the latter being the priority for those on the Israeli right dreaming of extending Israeli sovereignty to the biblical kingdoms.

The question was also soon raised as to whether the Israeli military response to October 7th was “proportionate and discriminate,” fueled by statistics provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza, but also with daunting wider evidence of the extent of destruction and civilian displacement and suffering, and an assessment that Netanyahu wanted to prolong the fighting as long as possible in order to remain in power and duck criticism for the failures that had contributed to the scale of the disaster. Critics of Israel pointed too to the lack of any clear Israeli political objective, other, perhaps, than the hope that many if not most Gazans would end up shifting to Egypt (however much that would have been resisted by the Egyptian government).

Suspicions about the underlying Israeli agenda, and the disturbing evidence of increasing settler violence in the West Bank, also contributed to the Palestinians’ own deep trauma, and memories of the Nakba – the catastrophe – of 1948, and the start of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Friends of Israel accused those critics of double standards: what about the RAF bombing of Dresden in a similarly existential struggle? Or the extent of civilian casualties when the US and the UK blundered into Iraq? Or ditto in the war against ISIS? And – more widely – why were demonstrators so quickly on the streets in European and other capitals, protesting against Israel’s military campaign? Why were not similar protests happening every weekend about Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine? Or Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara? Or human rights in many parts of the Arab world? Or the scale of killing in the ongoing Sudanese civil war? And — hey — what about the Chinese occupation of Tibet and its oppression of the Uyghurs?

The list of course goes on… and includes a question mark over the right of European countries in particular to wag fingers at Israel when it was the failings of our own societies and our historic (and — sadly — often current) inability to provide a safe home for Jews within them which prompted the Zionist conclusion that only a state of their own could guarantee the security of the Jewish people. Isn’t there also a civilizational divide between Israel as a Western-style democracy as compared not only to Hamas’s rule in Gaza, but to the more authoritarian models on display in other parts of the region? Though Israel’s critics will counter that Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories leave a major question mark over its right to full membership of the Western club.

Defending Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah is an easier beat, although the longer the fighting goes on, the more the issue of discrimination and proportionality will come to the fore. After all, Hezbollah is an unpleasant Shia Iranian-backed militia playing a destabilizing role in a long-suffering Lebanon, whose solidarity with the Palestinian cause looks more to be part of a problematic anti-Western Iranian regional agenda than genuine concern about the suffering of Sunni Palestinians; and whose attacks against Israel hardly seem calibrated to reflect the concerns of international law.

Friends and even members of my wider family have joined demonstrations protesting against the IDF campaign in Gaza. I did not, and would not, join them. I am too deeply aware of the coded messages in slogans such as “from the river to the sea,” even if, in its own way, this is also the agenda of the Israeli right. I am not always convinced that the BBC for one does not have something of a default anti-Israel setting. Somewhere in the mix too — speaking as a Christian — is my concern that antisemitism remains the poison it has been for so much of historical Christianity, and I study anxiously every pronouncement by a Church of England or a Catholic bishop for any sign that this evil lingers in their approach.

I leave it for others more expert than I to comment on antisemitism in the Muslim world, although it is certainly distressing to hear of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion being available at airport bookshops in some Arab capitals. Historically speaking, you can argue that there is some irony in the idea of common “Judeo-Christian values,” given that for long centuries, Jews were comparatively better off in Muslim countries than in Christian ones, particularly those of the latter which expelled their Jewish populations.

It also seems to be the case that the modern growth of antisemitism in the Muslim world was in part a response to Jewish nationalism and Zionist activity. At the same time, I was sometimes struck — during my time in the Gulf — by the admiration of some members of the Arab elite for Israeli achievements and technology, quite apart from their interest in Israel as a potential ally against Iran combined with unfond memories of Saddam-Hussein-supporting and begging-bowl carrying Arafat, and some distinctly ambiguous attitudes towards the Palestinians generally. But there was no mistaking the overwhelmingly negative popular view of Israel as some kind of colonial implant in “their” region, and the way the words “Israel” and “the Jews” were often used interchangeably and negatively.

Surely, however, it should be possible to criticize Israel when it oversteps any particular internationally-accepted mark, and to resist any suggestion that all criticism of Israel is somehow antisemitic? Don’t most Israelis argue after all that they are part of the Western community, which means they have to accept that they will be held accountable against the standards to which countries such as the UK, France and the US are at least theoretically committed? How could it be the case that only Israelis, and only Jews worldwide, have the right to raise a red flag when Israel offends against those standards, or to worry that the lack of a two-state solution traps Israel into an insidious and corrosive threat against the dream of a Jewish state, just as the lack of clear and achievable political objectives for the current Gaza campaign looks likely to land Israel with the full and unenviable re-occupation of Gaza?

But given the tangled historical background and the many cultural and religious fault-lines involved (going deeper in Europe than in the US, though the role and theology of Christian evangelicals in the latter is an important part of the overall mix), this issue is a minefield, and I would certainly feel easier if Western politicians, and the Western media, showed a greater understanding of the sensitivities and did as much to spotlight violence and suffering wherever they are happening, although part of the irony in the overall mix is that journalists will inevitably focus on situations in which they can operate even if on a limited basis, which means that operating out of Jerusalem will always be easier than operating out of Moscow or Beijing, or Tehran or Riyadh. I do not however have any great hope that it is possible to strike the right balance. The linkages between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and our own histories and societies are too intense, and too intricate.

So my expectation is not only that we are are living through another downward lurch in what – sadly – has become the long-running tragedy of Israeli/Palestinian relations, but that the West will remain incapable of striking the right balance in its response to the current situation, or the further deterioration which I fear lies ahead.

Meanwhile my own personal ongoing effort to understand the situation as a whole is still tearing me apart…