Never again is now: calling out extreme anti-Zionism

By David Warden

David is the humanist representative on the Bournemouth & Poole Holocaust Memorial Committee. In this article, writing in a personal capacity, he challenges the rationality and morality of anti-Zionism, especially when it is expressed intemperately.

These alarming images recently appeared in my Facebook feed

I’ve been alarmed of late by the increasing ferocity of anti-Zionist rhetoric coming from some humanists. Giovanni Gaetani, a human rights professional who held a variety of senior roles at Humanists International from 2019 until 2022, recently posted some extreme anti-Zionist memes including “Fuck Israel” and a swastika superimposed on the Israeli flag. In a Facebook post on 20 July, he declared “if you don’t take a side, you side with genocide”. And William van Zwanenberg, a humanist who has written for this magazine, reacting to the UK government’s banning of the group Palestine Action, posted this message on Facebook: “Fucking sub-human Zionist cunts (for that is what they are, and no, I will [sic] apologise for using such language to refer to this human excrement – not until these fuckers apologise for being born, polluting the gene pool and imposing their filth on the world) are behind this repulsive decision. Just know. If you support this decision, you’re the scum of the earth.” Whatever your views are about Israel, I find it hard to believe that humanists – of all people who should be setting an example – consider that such a level of discourse is remotely acceptable or moral, whether on social media or elsewhere.

A reviewer of this article said he was pretty sure that most humanists would find it unacceptable and that if such examples appeared on their humanist group Facebook site the administrators would respond robustly. I was relieved to hear that. Another reaction to an earlier draft of this article is that I seem to be conflating anti-Zionism with criticism and opposition to the conduct of the war in Gaza by the current Israeli government. Critics include former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and many Jews outside Israel. These critics cannot be labelled anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic. I accept these caveats. It is of course perfectly possible to criticise the conduct of the war in Gaza without being in any way anti-Semitic or taking the position that the State of Israel should cease to exist. But often the two go hand-in-hand. Prior assumptions and rhetoric about the conduct and nature of the war against Hamas often stem from ideological anti-Zionism, whereas the nuanced position often gets squeezed out of the debate.

The demonising and dehumanising rhetoric so often deployed against Zionists mimics the rhetoric which was used against Jews in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Most Jews, particularly in Israel, are by definition also Zionists, therefore dehumanising rhetoric used against Zionists indirectly affects most Jews. But is there a crucial difference between a “Jew” and a “Zionist” which gives a free pass to such rhetoric? One is born a Jew through the maternal line and being Jewish is an ethnicity as well as a religion. But is being a “Zionist” a matter of ideology and choice and therefore fair game when it comes to hateful rhetoric? We all know that some Jews are not Zionists so is it the Zionism rather than the Jewishness that’s the problem? That’s what the anti-Zionists claim, but let’s test this by taking a short excursion into the meaning of the word Zionism.

Theodor Herzl (public domain image)

The word “Zionism” was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, an Austrian Jewish intellectual and journalist. Birnbaum used the word to describe the emerging movement for Jewish national revival in Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire), drawing from the biblical term Zion (Hebrew: Tsiyyon) which originally referred to a specific hill in ancient Jerusalem. Over time, the name Zion expanded in meaning to refer to the Temple Mount, the city of Jerusalem, and the land of Israel as a whole. Psalm 137 laments: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion”. Zionism, therefore, is a metonym because it uses the name of a specific place (Zion) to refer to a larger movement, idea, and identity.

Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl is, however, more famously associated with Zionism and the founding of the World Zionist Organization in 1897. While working as a journalist in Vienna and Paris, he was deeply affected by rising antisemitism in Europe, especially the Dreyfus Affair in France, which convinced him that Jewish assimilation had failed. In response, he published The Jewish State (1896), arguing that Jews needed a sovereign nation of their own to ensure safety and dignity.

There’s nothing inherently wrong in people wanting to have a sovereign nation of their own to ensure safety and dignity – indeed this is how the world has been organised since the end of the end of the great empires. The Jews had been expelled from their national homeland by the Romans in the second century (for the offence of rebelling against Roman imperialism) and throughout the long centuries they prayed for a return to Zion. The Romans renamed the province “Palestine” as a part of an effort to break the link between Jews and Judea. Remarkably, diaspora Jews maintained their cultural identity rather than assimilating and disappearing as a distinct people. In many places they were treated as second-class citizens and often subjected to pogroms. As nationalism superseded imperialism in nineteenth century Europe, the position of Jews became more precarious as emerging states wished to achieve ethnic, cultural and religious homogeneity. This was the driving force behind Zionism. Jews had never been fully accepted but now there was a lethal new danger to contend with.

Alternatives to Palestine were proposed. In 1903, the British government proposed the Uganda scheme. A plateau in what is now Kenya, then part of the British East Africa Protectorate was offered to the Zionist movement as a refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Herzl presented this idea to the 6th Zionist Congress but it caused a major split, especially with Russian Zionists who saw only Palestine as the rightful destination for Jews, and the plan was formally rejected in 1905. Some early Jewish writers, including Herzl himself, considered Argentina as a possible location. Argentina had a large, sparsely populated territory, a welcoming immigration policy, and some existing Jewish agricultural settlements. At various times other locations were proposed including Alaska, Siberia, Crimea, Cyprus, Sinai, and parts of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Despite these alternatives, a majority in the Zionist movement — especially after Herzl’s death — came to agree that only Palestine (then under Ottoman, later British rule) had the necessary historical, spiritual, and symbolic significance to sustain a Jewish national revival.

Jewish migration to Palestine occurred in a number of waves from the 1880s onwards. These migrations or “aliyahs” are well-documented. Less well known, and less well-documented because much of it was irregular, is the fact that Jewish migration into Palestine also stimulated Arab economic migration into the region. So today, it’s well-nigh impossible to separate out the “indigenous Palestinians” in the sense of descendants of people who have lived there for millennia. Indeed, many of the “indigenous Palestinians” were Jewish as well as Arab, Muslim, Christian and Druze. Before the state of Israel came into being in 1948, the word “Palestinian” applied to everyone living in the region.

People often blame the British for creating the problem we now have in the Middle East but this is a distortion of history. Jewish migration to Palestine was being driven by the dynamic cultural forces already alluded to. At the end of First World War, the League of Nations created a system of “mandates” to administer former territories of the Ottoman Empire. In 1920, France was granted a League of Nations mandate over Syria and Lebanon and in 1920/22 Britain was granted mandates over Palestine, Transjordan (as part of the Palestine Mandate), and Iraq. Crucially, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine explicitly and deliberately incorporated the Balfour Declaration which gained legal force when it was embedded in the Mandate. It included provisions to facilitate Jewish immigration and close (i.e. clustered) settlement on the land, to recognise the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine, and to establish a Jewish national home. At the same time, the Mandate included a commitment to protect the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities, though it did not extend to guaranteeing their political rights.

Most peoples take their homelands for granted. The English have England, the French have France and so on. Although emigrants created New England in the US, it’s hard to think of New England as a replica or replacement for England itself. There are several stateless or semi-stateless peoples today who either seek an independent homeland or significantly greater autonomy. These groups often have distinct languages, cultures, and historical claims to a territory but they lack a recognised sovereign state. They include Kurds, Tibetans, Basques, Catalans, Assyrians, Rohingya, Palestinians and several more. Some people argue that the return of the Jews to Judea after 1,800 years of exile is absurd, like Anglo-Saxons trying to reclaim Saxony. But such analogies are misplaced because, on the one hand, there is no longer any distinct ethno-cultural group of Anglo-Saxons and, on the other hand, there never was a complete physical break between Jews and Judea. Small Jewish communities remained in places such as Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias for centuries and, for diaspora Jews, Zion remained central in Jewish prayers, festivals, and scripture. Humanists may be inclined to dismiss this as religiously-motivated nonsense, but most humans feel an emotional connection to the lands of their forefathers. Humans are social beings who seek a sense of belonging and continuity, and land associated with ancestors is a physical symbol of identity, tradition, and rootedness, linking the self to a larger story. Humanists should, I would argue, be sensitive to such human dynamics, not dismissive of them. But of course such sentiments can lead to intractable conflict when there are rival claims over the same bit of land.

So far, then, I would argue that Zionism as a movement was understandable and it was facilitated by the international community at the highest level. Indeed, if thousands of Jews had not migrated to Palestine before the Second World War it seems likely that many more Jews would have perished in the Nazi Holocaust. If the Nazis had prevailed, many more Jews would undoubtedly have died in Palestine with the collaboration of Nazi sympathiser Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. Israel was not created in order to salve the conscience of the West for the Holocaust. It came into being as a safe haven for Jews who had been persecuted and relegated to second-class citizenship in both Christian and Muslim civilizations for centuries, and who had been threatened with worse to come as mono-ethnic nationalisms gained traction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Space does not permit me to fully explore the reasons for Arab resistance to Jewish statehood in Palestine but, as a general rule, Arab Muslims have never accepted Zionism and they have violently opposed it from the 1920s onwards – long before Israel even came into being. The 1929 Hebron massacre of Jews was a horrifying template of what unfolded on 7 October 2023. There may be complex reasons for this to do with Islamic supremacism, the religious belief that Muslim lands should always remain Muslim (the concept of a waqf – conquered land as a sacred trust), the belief that Jews are a threat to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the humiliating defeat of the Ottoman Empire, opposition to post-colonial geography mandated by the international community, the belief that Jews are infidels and analogous to the Crusaders, and so on. If Herzl could have seen into the future, we might wonder whether he would have tried harder to convince the early Zionist movement to settle elsewhere. But history unfolded as it did.

The intense and widespread animus against Zionism today, often seen on university campuses, partly derives from neo-Marxist anti-Westernism and the Soviet-inspired narrative that Israel is an outpost of US imperialism. But it also derives from the fact that Jews are no longer the underdog in their own homeland. After having suffered humiliation, apartheid and massacres for 1,800 years at the hands of both Christian and Muslim civilisations, Jews are standing up for themselves. They won’t, any longer, go meekly into ghettos and gas chambers or put up with massacres. Since the Six Day War in 1967, the Palestinians have been cast as the underdog in the Western imagination and the Israelis increasingly as the oppressor. This does of course partly reflect power dynamics but the conflict is not, and never has been, merely between Israelis and Palestinians. It is between Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, and the much greater number of Arabs and Arab/Muslim nations surrounding it. Today, Israel is fighting a war on multiple fronts against Iran and its proxy forces including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. But there are seeds of hope in the Abraham Accords and other enlightened developments.

Before Israel came into existence, the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel) faced violent attacks from their Arab neighbours intent on stopping the partition of Palestine into two separate states. The war of 1948 has been cast as Zionist expulsion rather than a struggle for Jewish survival. Judea and Samaria, which were included in the original Mandate for Palestine for Jewish settlement, have been renamed “the West Bank” – a designation which only makes sense in relation to Jordan, which captured the territory in 1948 and subsequently lost it in 1967. Countless Western diplomats and statesmen have laboured to bring about a “two-state solution”, ignoring the plain fact that the ideology of Palestinianism (see note below) aims at the destruction of Israel and the mass expulsion or death of Jews – not a Palestinian state living harmoniously with Israel. Palestine nationalism would be a good thing if it did not entail, as its first aim, the destruction of its neighbour.

On 7 October 2023, Israel suffered its deadliest and most barbaric attack since its foundation. Hamas broke through the Gaza perimeter fence and went on to shoot, rape, burn, mutilate and kidnap hundreds of Jews, and even non-Jews they encountered on the other side. Young people at the Nova rave party were slaughtered in their hundreds. Far from trying to cover up these crimes, Hamas militants videoed them and exulted in the slaughter. Sympathy for Jews was short-lived as the attack was cast as justified resistance to oppression. Hundreds of thousands of people protested in cities and campuses across the world, not to condemn the attack but to blame Israel and even, in some instances, to celebrate the attacks. The 7 October attack itself was short-lived but the strategy of Hamas, meticulously planned over many years, paid off handsomely in winning the global propaganda war. Gaza had been almost completely militarised with 350-450 miles of tunnels and with thousands of entrances and stashes of weapons underneath schools, bedrooms, hospitals and mosques. Perhaps never in the history of warfare has a population been so comprehensively positioned for religious martyrdom by their own overlords, and the whole world been so easily duped to believe that “genocide” is being perpetrated by the responders rather than intended by the instigators.

The allegation of “genocide” in the current conflict is a weaponisation of language which derives from prior assumptions about the evil nature of “Zionists”. Palestinians are ethnically Arab and there are 480 million Arabs in the world today. But even if we restrict our analysis to the subset of Palestinian Arabs (around 5.6 million in Gaza and the West Bank) it's a moot point whether they constitute a distinct national group, given that the principal aim of their leaders is the destruction of the Jewish state rather than anything resembling a two-state solution. Urban warfare against a guerrilla organisation embedded in civilian infrastructure is bound to result in significant civilian casualties. The number of casualties, both combatant and civilian, should be measured against the enormous challenges of dismantling Hamas' vast underground fortress, not against the number of people killed in Israel on 7 October 2023. Very few armies in the history of warfare have provided warnings to civilian populations about planned attacks, or facilitated humanitarian aid to the civilian population of their attackers. The fact that Israel gets little credit for such efforts speaks volumes about the prior assumptions of those accusing it of “genocide”. Facts are routinely downplayed or dismissed if they do not fit the preferred narrative. On 22 August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) officially declared a famine in Gaza and Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, delivered an emotive speech about the report. Of course, we need to take such reports seriously and the international community should do everything in its power to ensure that innocent civilians do not starve. But I was struck by the fact that Fletcher completely ignored the role of Hamas in creating this humanitarian disaster. Such blatant one-sidedness raises troubling questions about the impartiality and objectivity of the UN and its agencies.

Could Israel have adopted a more targeted and surgical approach to Hamas, as they did against Hezbollah and Iran? My understanding is that serious military analysts generally say there was no clean “surgical” way to dismantle Hamas’s military and tunnel system at scale without significant urban combat and extensive demolition. Alternative strategies did exist such as intelligence-led targeted killings, special-forces raids, sabotage, and cyber attacks. This would have avoided large scale destruction of civilian infrastructure but it's unlikely that it would have dismantled Hamas. I've provided two links below to this kind of analysis.

Anti-Zionism today often masquerades as morally virtuous. But there's nothing virtuous about wanting to eradicate a country which was set up to provide a state for a stateless and persecuted people. Israel today accommodates millions of Arab Israelis as equal, or near-equal, citizens in a post-colonial and internationally-sanctioned project to create a safe homeland for the Jewish people after 1,800 years of exile.

So why has Israel become a pariah state? A full answer to this question is beyond the scope of this article, but in the current context it's obvious that many people are angry about what they see as Israel's over-reaction to the events of 7 October 2023. They want to see an end to the destruction and the civilian suffering. They want a ceasefire, more humanitarian relief, and a state for the Palestinians. Everyone of sound mind wants a good future for everyone living in the region. But how can Israel co-exist with a militarised enclave on its Western coast which is ideologically and theologically dedicated to its complete destruction?

It’s difficult to defeat ideologies but not impossible. Nazism was defeated by the Western allies in 1945 and Palestinianism, which aims at the destruction of Israel, could be defeated by a strategic alliance between the West and enlightened Arab states. The future of the Palestinian people does not depend upon the defeat of Zionism. It depends upon the intellectual, moral and military defeat of the ideology of Palestinianism – which is the underlying cause of Palestinian suffering. What the world needs is a “New Enlightenment” in the Middle East based on democracy, economic co-operation and peaceful co-existence.

This article is dedicated to Hope Schachter and her father Henry – a Holocaust survivor and proud Zionist.

Note on the term “Palestinianism”

I was introduced to this term by reading The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020) by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf. They use it in a specific way to mean (and I paraphrase) the belief that Palestinians have a right of return to the homes and villages of ancestors who lost them in the 1948 war, that the Jewish state must be destroyed/ dismantled/replaced in order for that to happen, and for a Palestinian/Arab/Muslim state to be established in the whole of Palestine from the River to the Sea. I oppose Palestinianism in this sense. However, the term can also be used in a more neutral sense to mean the national political movement or identity of the Palestinian people. In this narrow sense I am not opposed to Palestinianism although with certain caveats. I believe that the national aspiration of Palestinians is legitimate, just as it was legitimate when partition was being discussed in the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, but this national aspiration cannot be at the expense of extinguishing the national aspiration of the Jewish people.

Postscript: A theoretical psycho-religious account of anti-Zionism

Free Press journalist Haviv Rettig Gur interviewed anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein on 22 August 2025 (link shown below). Louis-Klein explained that there are two types of anti-Zionism. One type is characterised by opposition to, or lack of support for, the idea of Jews returning to Israel. Of course, it is a fait accompli, but some Jews, including some ultra-orthodox Jews, think that Zionism was a mistake or a religious misstep or whatever. This kind of anti-Zionism is a principled stand and is not anti-Semitic because it can be espoused by Jews. But there is a second type of anti-Zionism which comes from much darker recesses of the human psyche, and it often gets conflated with the first type. Louis-Klein argued that this second type of anti-Zionism is a form of racism. His conversation with Haviv was dense and fascinating and I can't summarise the whole discussion here. But what I would like to do is sketch a psycho-religious explanation of anti-Zionism, inspired by their conversation. It's not necessarily true or proven and it's very much my interpretation, but it's an intriguing theory. (Louis-Klein suggested that the two types of anti-Zionism can be distinguished by the use or non-use of a hyphen. I think it's better two simply acknowledge the two types and I have used a hyphen for both.)

If there is a psycho-religious explanation of anti-Zionism it might go something like this: There is a civilizational struggle occurring in the West between those who wish to preserve Western civilization and those who wish to destroy it. The destroyers include elite intellectuals who believe that the West is the fount of all evil including racism, imperialism and colonialism. Within this matrix of anti-Westernism, anti-Zionism has a very special place. It is, in effect, a concentration and projection of all the sins of the West – nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, whiteness, racism, occupation, apartheid, genocide, fascism, Nazism – onto the Jews as a scapegoat and sin-bearer for Western guilt. The Jews are held guilty of all of these crimes by a kind of international kangaroo court which logarithmically cherry-picks, distorts and presents facts to fit the redemptive narrative. Heroic jihadis stand ready to punish the Jews with suicide bombings, rocket attacks, invasion, massacre, rape, mutilation and expulsion while the West, in a paroxysm of moral grandstanding and jihadi cosplay, covertly celebrates them as brave freedom fighters. At some deep psycho-somatic level, the West craves absolution for its crimes and guilt. Offering up the Jews to be sacrificed provides relief and expiation of sin and guilt. Little wonder, then, that the West is relatively uninterested in conflicts and humanitarian disasters which do not involve Jews. They do not fit into the redemptive psycho-drama of vicarious guilt and sacrifice. Welcome, then, to the early phases of Holocaust 2.0, unfolding with intensifying hysteria day-by-day on social media and mainstream media, on university campuses, on the streets, in the UN and human rights organisations, and in the corridors of power. October 7 was our time's Kristallnacht, a genocide in miniature with more and more to follow if only the jihadis can be left in place to fight another day. Holocaust 1.0 was localised to Germany and Eastern Europe. It was eventually stopped in 1945. But today, the intifada has been globalised. How long will it take for its demonic work to fully unfold?

This psycho-religious account of what is happening in the West suggests that in our post-religious age, a spectacular and global new form of religion has arisen which offers psycho-social relief by the displacement of guilt onto a sacrificial victim. But wait, didn't the jihadis say they are coming next for for us because of our decadent lifestyles, uncovered women, and lack of belief? We welcomed them in their millions under the banner of universal humanity but we were blind to their particularism and we shut down dissent with the rhetorical cosh of Islamophobia. We decided not to look back in anger at jihadi atrocities and we sacrificed the economic interests of our own white working class because of their own hideous racism and fascism. So what is the trajectory now for the West?

Further reading and watching

• Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025 (September 2025) by Professor Danny Orbach, Dr Jonathan Boxman, Dr Yagil Henkin, and Advocate Jonathan Braverman. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 213.

• The genocidal claim of genocide with Adam Louis-Klein (2025) Haviv Rettig Gur and Adam Louis-Klein explore the psychoanalytical roots of anti-Zionism in this fascinating conversation. See also @adam_louis52328 on X.

• What the world needs to understand about Zionism (2025) In this passionate lecture at a political festival in Norway, Free Press journalist Haviv Rettig Gur explains the historical background to Zionism. His YouTube posts (Ask Haviv Anything) are well worth watching for informed and balanced analysis. Gur is unafraid to criticise Israel's conduct of the war when it is justified.

• War Expert Debunks Gaza Lies - John Spencer (2025) Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster interview John Spencer who is Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy, West Point, and Co‑Director of the Urban Warfare Project. He states that the allegation of genocide is “baseless”.

• Asking Benjamin Netanyahu The Tough Questions (2025) Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster interview the Prime Minister of Israel. You won't get an interview like this on the BBC!

• 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report (2025) Chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia

  prepared by the All-Party Parliamentary Group For UK-Israel. Documents the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7–8 October 2023, including mass killings, rapes, mutilations, and kidnappings—drawing on forensics, testimony, and open-source footage.

• Tactical Lessons from IDF Operations in Gaza (2023) by Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds for the Royal United Services Institute (UK’s leading defence think tank). Offers insight into why ground infantry and systematic clearance were operationally necessary in such a tunnel-rich, urbanized environment. Stresses that although deeply problematic in humanitarian terms, urban warfare was – according to tactical specialists – the only realistic route to degrade Hamas’s entrenched military and tunnel complex.

• Gaza Is the Land of No Good Options (2025) by Raphael S. Cohen. A policy commentary from the RAND Corporation (a non-profit, nonpartisan research and policy institute based in the United States) summarizing why most strategic paths – including siege, decapitation, or targeted strikes – carry severe limitations. Establishes that a surgical campaign may reduce damage in the short term, but faces high risks of Hamas’s survival and violent reconstitution. Highlights the tragic logic: each strategic choice sacrifices something important – speed, political viability, or humanitarian impact.

• On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West (2025) by Douglas Murray, a journalist who has visited Israel and Gaza numerous times since 7 October 2023.

• After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation (2024) by Brendan O'Neill, a journalist for Spiked magazine.

Responses to some comments about this article

Saleem Barakzai wrote: This article talks about the history of Zionism but fails to state the slogan: “land with no people for people with no land”. This slogan was the foundation to search for a place for Jewish state. Palestine was not a land with no people. Palestinians (Muslims, Christians and Jews) always stayed in their homes. Romans did not kick them out and neither did the Ottomans but when Israel was established, they needed land for millions of Jews and therefore, the depopulation started for the first time in the history of the holy land. My question is: why should Palestinians pay for the crimes of the Europeans?

My response: A point of historical accuracy – the Romans did expel Jews from Judea in the second century. I accept that the slogan “land with no people for people with no land”, coined in 1843, was an inaccurate portrayal of Palestine in the 19th century. It was recognised as inaccurate as early as 1905. But Saleem seems to have lurched to the opposite simplification. His rhetorical question “why should Palestinians pay for the crimes of the Europeans?” implies that there was a pre-existing permanent population in Palestine and that Jews were simply handed a slice of Palestine as recompense for the Holocaust. History is much more complicated than this popular myth.

By 1948, there were substantial populations of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine, some of whose ancestors had been there since antiquity and some of whom were fairly recent immigrants to the region – both Jews and Arabs. Sorting out the “indigenous population” from recent immigrants is well-nigh impossible. It’s true that Jewish migration had been driven by persecution in Europe and Russia, but it’s also true that, after 1948, Jewish migration was driven by ethnic cleansing from Muslim Arab countries – estimated to be around 800,000 people at the time. Saleem’s question could therefore be expanded to ask “why should Palestinian Arabs pay for the crimes of the Europeans and other Arabs?”

But there are other principles to consider. Given that Palestine had a multi-ethnic population, particularly so by 1948, why did Arabs object to a post-imperial arrangement whereby different groups could have their own sovereign states? Britain had already created Jordan from the original Mandate for Palestine and both of the proposed states in the remainder of Palestine would have had mixed populations, just as Israel today has a sizeable Arab population. This is what was happening all over the world in the post-imperial era as separate nations came into being. The mass exodus of Arabs from their homes and villages in 1948 was driven by a war which they started when they rejected the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan (see historian Benny Morris for a detailed and nuanced account of what actually happened). So let’s repeat my question: why did Arabs object to a post-imperial arrangement whereby different groups could have their own sovereign states? Maybe the answer lies in Islam’s negative attitude towards Jews, as well as a desire for the Middle East to be dominated by Muslim Arabs forever. What a tragedy for the whole region that they did not choose the path of compromise, pluralism and peaceful co-operation.

David N asked: What’s the difference between “annihilation” of Hamas and “genocide”?

My response: Words should be used accurately. It’s a common tactic to use extreme words in ideological warfare. For example, people who oppose abortion sometimes use the highly emotive term “murder”. Prosecuting a war against an enemy which has attacked your country and retains the ability to do so, even if such a war entails civilian deaths as a tragic secondary effect, is called “war”. Calling it “genocide” does several things. It expresses understandable disgust at civilian deaths using the strongest term available. It’s an exercise in armchair psychologising about the “real” motives of the protagonists. In the context of Israel, it also generates the thrill of irony: “These Jews who suffered the worst genocide in history are now doing the same to the Palestinians! Maybe Hitler was right!” If you are going to indulge in such reasoning, your facts and logic need to reach a very high bar.

It may the case that there has been an element of punishment and revenge in the Gaza onslaught, judging by some angry and emotional statements that have been made in Israel about what happened on 7th October and the subsequent suffering of hostages. Punishment and revenge are not necessarily immoral. Indeed some philosophers claim that they underlie our human sense of justice and they can deter further aggression. Be that as it may, the Gaza war does not amount to genocide. Genocide means a systematic and deliberate attempt to wipe out an ethnic or national group. The war in Gaza has killed a lot of combatants and non-combatants, perhaps around 3% of the pre-war Gazan population, but essentially it is a war against a jihadi military force which has embedded itself in civilian areas and which could easily protect its civilians but chooses not to, for the purposes of winning the propaganda war in the West. Every time someone shouts "genocide", they are helping Hamas to prolong the war and the suffering of Palestinians.

Marion G wrote: Thank you David for this article and for your willingness to speak out against dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric. The examples you’ve highlighted show how some rhetoric, though framed as righteous or angry humanism, is really just blind hatred and it’s a stark reminder of how even some of the most intelligent hearts and minds can be influenced by propaganda and narrow, binary group think. Your article is an important corrective, demonstrating how reason, human empathy, and nuance can guide our responses, even in contentious debates. Thank you for taking the time to write and share this perspective, it genuinely matters and sets a strong example of humanist allyship in these very difficult and distressing times for the Jewish community and our allies.

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