By Miranda Pinch | Fri 3rd January 2025
My mother was a secular Jewish refugee who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. My grandfather, Ernst Sommer was on the Nazi death list and escaped separately. He wrote (in 1943) one of the earliest German-language novels on the Holocaust: ‘Revolt of the Saints: A tribute to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto.’ Published in Mexico City (1944) while in exile.
My mother was always very against what was being done to the Palestinians in her name as Jew. Because of this I became an active campaigner for Palestinian human rights and very concerned about the creeping rise of weaponised antisemitism. It is a threat to open dialogue and a tool to silence voices that speak out against injustice and persecution. This should be worrying for anyone who holds liberal democratic values. This trend has increased year on year, but it has reached truly unfathomable levels since Israel’s War on Gaza began.
I am a member of the Holocaust Survivors’ Descendants Network, and when I march in London, I often do so alongside them. There is a huge UK Jewish contingent on all the marches, reminding me of the strength of solidarity amongst so many in the Jewish community in this country.
Despite portrayal in mainstream media, it is not an inevitable consequence of Jewishness that you support Zionism or the actions of the Israeli government. Nor is it inevitable that all who consider themselves Zionists would support collective punishment, crimes against humanity and what Amnesty and others are convincingly describing as genocide committed by the Israeli state in Gaza as well as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. (David McDowall presented the Amnesty analysis demonstrating genocide in his article in Lib Dem Voice on 5 December 2024.)
There is a glaring irony that those who shout the loudest about conflating pro-Palestinian sentiment with antisemitism are those who are being the most antisemitic. They assume that Judaism is synonymous with Zionism or, as both Netanyahu and the Board of Deputies’ leadership in the UK like to infer, that being Jewish is synonymous with support for Israel regardless of its actions. That is a perversion of Judaism and encourages antisemitism.
As a daughter of a holocaust survivor, I grew up knowing the suffering and generational trauma that comes from genocide, but my mother always refused to be a victim. Why should an innocent population in Palestine be punished for the behaviour of Europeans? The convictions that came from such past trauma of ‘never again’ and the establishment of international law and justice seem to have been sidelined by a warped idea of superiority and entitlement and the idea that the rights of one population trump those of another.
So, like very many British Jews, I am not a pawn for pro-Israeli propaganda to use in their grotesque political game. There are plenty of Jewish voices in the UK that show the strength of pro-Palestinian Jewish sentiment including the Holocaust Survivor’s Descendants Network, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, to which I belong, Yachad, Na’amod, and others. These include a range of Jewish voices, both religious and secular and all oppose the Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing and advocate for the freedom of the Palestinian people.
Although it does not suit the pro-Israeli narrative, I and those who march alongside me are living proof that there is a vast diversity of voices amongst the Jewish community in Britain. There are organisations within Israel itself that oppose the practices of the occupation. The most influential is B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, which exists to document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) and human rights violations against Palestinians in Israel. They released one of the most influential reports of the year, ‘Welcome to Hell,’, which detailed how the Israeli Prison System acts as a network of torture camps against Palestinian detainees, including widespread physical and sexual abuse.
Breaking the Silence, an organisation made up of former Israeli Defence Force (IDF) personnel, who confidently recount their experiences in Palestine, including violations of international law they conducted whilst serving. A summary of thirty soldiers’ accounts from Operation Cast Lead in 2009 described “firing phosphorous gas in the direction of populated areas, killing of innocent victims [using] small arms, destruction of houses and mosques for no military purpose.” Such direct admission is crucial for proving the institutional approach to breaking international law within the IDF.
The Israeli Committee against house Demolitions (ICAHD), a group that uses non-violent direct-action as a means of resistance to end Israel’s policy of demolishing Palestinian houses in the Occupied Palestinian territories. The group also helps to organise the rebuilding of demolished Palestinian houses using a network of Israeli, Palestinian and international volunteers.
The work of these organisations is even more important when considering how they face such oppressive crackdown by the Israeli state. For a country that is purported to be the only democracy in the Middle East, its approach to dissenting thought is abysmal. One need only look at the former Chair of Amnesty Israel, Daniil Brodsky. He resigned a week before Amnesty International released its landmark report concluding that Israel was conducting a Genocide, because no Palestinians were allowed to contribute on Amnesty Israel’s response to the report. As he put it, ‘a common pattern in progressive Israeli spaces is that Palestinians can provide labour, translation, lived experience and trauma to feed the analysis of Israeli Jews, but cannot be equal partners who get to do the analysis side by side and set the agenda together.”
Sadly, the Israeli media is controlled by right wing interests that allow for little criticism of the Israeli government. The one exception is the newspaper Haaretz which, although harassed somewhat by the current Israeli government, continues to bravely opposed the mistreatment of Palestinians. It is read more widely in the diaspora than in Israel itself. Unfortunately, a subscription is required to read most of the articles.
This is what is so crucial about moving forward meaningfully. There are so many Jewish people, both within Israel and outside it, who are committed to fighting against the oppression of the Palestinian people, regardless of what pro-Israelis would have you believe. The way forward is to ensure that we work together, as equal partners, towards liberty and justice, towards the principles that we hold dear to our hearts as Liberal Democrats, regardless of our backgrounds.
* Miranda Pinch is a member of the Winchester local party and Communications Lead for the Lib Dem Friends of Palestine and has been a regular visitor to Palestine and Israel for many years.