Rafah, 16th March 2003.
The world, my world, narrowed to a single point. The war, the wars, that had filled my thoughts raged on around. The Iraq war buildup. The brutality of the occupation of Palestine that for the past two months had crowded all else from my head, with its desperate importance – all that blurred to non existence.

London, 7th October 2023
The Anarchist Bookfair is over, I’m still buzzing but exhausted from a day running a stall and workshops. An old friend, Israeli but based in UK for many years realises I haven’t seen the news and carefully tells me what he knew so far, including that one of the kibbutzim attacked is the home of old friends of his family. As it turned out, the grandfather was killed, the rest escaped. We shared our horror at both the images coming out, and what we feared the IDF would now do to Gaza.

One of my partners says “well, they were having a rave next to a concentration camp”

“My back is broken.” The last words Rachel Corrie ever said. I took her head in my hands to stabilise her spine. She had been run over by an Israeli army bulldozer whilst we had been trying to stop the IDF destroying houses in Gaza.

London 20th October 2023
A British Jewish friend’s 4 year old nephew was killed in a kibbutz on October 7th. Other Israeli connections also lost people they knew.

Friends in Israel, many refuseniks and long-term Palestine liberation activists, tell me how shaken the left in Israel is by the Global Left’s lack of condemnation of October 7th.

For me, after 4 days in hospital with neutropenic sepsis I manage to escape and rush to Swiss Cottage to join an anti war demonstration by Jews and Israelis outside the Israeli ambassador’s house. We light Jewish memorial candles for all the victims so far, those killed by both the IDF and Hamas. We chant for an immediate ceasefire, hostage negotiations, and Palestinian liberation.

The world consisted of 4 people. I held Rachel’s head. On her right and left Greg and Will knelt beside her, focusing all they could to will her to survive. Four friends, one of whom’s life force was leaking out as we held her, told her we loved her and how awesome she was and how she was going to be ok.

Glasgow, 28th October 2023
Before the massive weekly march for Gaza I hear more than one speaker, to great applause, legitimise October 7th. I spin around, images from the massacre flashing before my eyes as I bolt out of the cheering crowd.

We desperately tried to keep our dying friend with us, but her body was breaking apart and there was nothing we could do. Helplessly I observed the thin skin around her eyes and ears blackened with blood from the bleeding in her brain. The depth and regularity fading from her breathing.

Around me there are many, non Jews as well as Jews, who seem able to be against both the attacks by Hamas, and the unfolding genocide perpetrated by Israel. Yet also increasingly in person and social media are minimisation, denial and justification for October 7th and ongoing hostage crisis. When I challenge this I’m told I’m defending genocide and that I should think about Palestinian children being bombed.

At a flashmob occupation of GoMA I help affix a long banner that drops all the way through the stairwell stating “Silence is Violence. Permanent Ceasefire Now” But when I express my discomfort at the chant leaders insisting on “When a people is occupied, resistance is justified” without any clarification that they’re not referring to the massacre of just weeks ago, I’m told that maybe I shouldn’t come to any more.

In less than an hour she would be declared dead and this tiny world would be the centre of global attention, as international media filled with the news of an American girl killed defending a Palestinian home. Suddenly my world would be talking live on TV channels from every continent, a call with a USA congressman, a packed out press conference to local and global media.

20th November 2023
My friend’s mum in Gaza died today. Her heart medication has been impossible to get because of the Israeli blockade. We didn’t talk much, but she always smiled and made me tea when I visited him. Last week 2 of his cousins were killed, and his home was badly damaged.

As well as Palestinian friends, I’m in close touch with my family and friends in Israel, especially when there’s been missiles launched towards Israel. 

My Israeli friends are involved in activism, such as protests calling for an immediate ceasefire, and mutual aid projects for the thousands of Israelis traumatised, grieving, and displaced by the war who the government has abandoned. They attend regular mass protests against Netanyahu demanding hostage negotiations instead of war, which are violently suppressed by the police.

My cousins are not political in either direction, and my emails with them reflect that. This was the hardest one I had to write:

“Mum says your grandson is now in the IDF in Gaza. I wish him a safe and speedy return home to you. It must be frightening for you, I can’t imagine.”

I think “Is my cousin shooting at my friends in Gaza?”

But at that moment there were just four of us in the world, and one was dying as we held her. Four kids from USA and UK whose life paths had happened to intersect in Palestine. Four kids in the most dangerous place in the Gaza Strip, and one of us was fading fast and there was nothing the rest of us could do about it.

June 2024
I think they’re all destroyed now. Those homes where I found nothing but hospitality, humour, compassion. Where, even in 2003, people were exhausted, desperate, living under privations even then. Attempts at building decent living conditions destroyed regularly. The farm greenhouses, nurtured into existence over months, bombed flat in seconds. Regularly people shot just going about daily life, such as the man with learning difficulties, a street cleaner, who was shot smoking a cigarette outside his mother’s house in Rafah shortly after Rachel Corrie was killed, but with no international outrage. I walked the streets, many knew I was Jewish (as were perhaps a quarter of international solidarity activists in Palestine) and the only threats from Palestinians to my life was perhaps giving me obesity due to how difficult it was to stop them feeding me! Even though none of them had much. I will never ever forget my 3 months in Rafah. You taught me so much about ways of retaining humanity and relating to other humans, under unimaginable conditions. Your lives are not worth less than Israelis. Your children are as deserving of conditions in which they can thrive, not starve and be terrified. I am so so ashamed of what Israel is doing. That I once loved that country. And even my friends and family in Israel itself aren’t safe because they are all disposable to this cold, hate filled, murderous ideology. I don’t think many of the people with whom I shared endless pots of sweet tea with maramiya are still alive, or in any way healthy. All those family homes I slept in are destroyed. The kids I knew would have been parents by now – did any of their children survive, and if they did how is their physical and mental development after famine? How is their emotional health after endless fleeing and learning new definitions of “safe zones”? I’m so sad and angry and frustrated. We have failed to stop a genocide, and our government has actively supported it.

This is what War means. This is the detail in every casualty statistic. People holding their loved ones as their soft flesh disintegrates from the sudden penetration of the hard metals of war; tanks, guns, bombs, shrapnel. Bodies and lives broken. For what?

Glasgow, 6th October 2024
For weeks the Jewish spaces of Glasgow have had adverts for the communal vigil for October 7th, which many people in the community feel personally connected to. I was working, but many friends went, as it was the only public October 7th vigil for the Jewish community. 

We’re a very small community, less than 0.1% of the population of Glasgow, with only 3 synagogues and 1 shop. For this vigil all the official organisations within the Jewish and Israeli community were listed, and that included the Israeli consulate. This is unsurprising as Israelis living in Scotland (who have many different political opinions, and cannot be pigeon holed as being pro genocide) wanted an official vigil for the 1 year anniversary.

Apparently their presence in the list of organisers was enough for GGEC (Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee - an umbrella group in Glasgow which has been organising the majority of demos etc since Oct 7th) to call a counter demo. They did not say in their publicity for this that it was a community vigil co-sponsored by synagogues via our Jewish representative council, but instead had highly emotive language around Palestinian prisoners, calling for picketing of an “Israeli embassy event” and that “Genocidal propaganda will not go unchallenged”.

A friend told me

“There were super aggressive people with Palestinian and Lebanese flags screaming the entire time, playing super loud music, siren noises, megaphones, literally drowning everything out, and yelling stuff like calling all the people who were at the vigil genocidal swine, rats, etc. This woman was trying to talk about how her brother was murdered on October 7, and you couldn’t hear her because people were yelling horrible things over her. All the speakers, Rabbi Rubin, MPs, other people, yelling into the microphone to have their voices heard over all the noise and chanting. It was actually horrible, like everyone just felt really attacked and angsty.”

Birmingham, December 2024
With 2000 attendees, Limmud is easily the biggest gathering of Jews in the UK, so this must have felt like an easy gig for the Israeli ambassador, hardright Tzipi Hotovely. Yet the organisers kept it under wraps until just 4 hours before she was due to speak. A few of us mobilised immediately, networking, sending messages, and making easily hidden signs to hold up. They’d put her in the showcase main conference room, with seats for 1000, but only about 80 were in the audience. And after the introduction, as she tried to start speaking we stood. I was even more nervous than I am tonight, but as I turned I saw that over half the audience was also on their feet, unfurling A3 sheets accusing her of genocide, calling for a ceasefire, and enumerating the numbers killed. After we were escorted out, elated at our success, we went to the neighbouring room, set up or 200 but standing room only as people had piled in to hear from Gazan and Israeli peace activists. The tide is turning!

Each war death is a unique human being, just like your mother, father, sister, brother and child. Communities deemed “war zones” by too powerful others living remote lives moving infantry pieces over plans of “strategic areas”. A little to the left and suddenly that village is ground underneath the caterpillar tracks of War. The tanks roll through. The fighter jets race overhead. Communities and lives are wrecked.

June 2025
Israel has now attacked Iran. As usual I message my family and friends, all of whom are terrified, and if they can, staying in shelters, though many Israelis don’t have one. “Everything is terrible and we had 3 nights of this. In Gaza they had so many more and no shelters”

I see posts celebrating Iranian missiles, and expressing how “They” deserved it, when a hospital in Israel is hit.

A friend of a friend is killed in Be’er Sheva. Naomi stood in protest vigils for the hostages and against the war every day since October 7th. She was a librarian, and volunteered in reading books to blind people.

A refusenik friend, who’s always been very clear about the privilege she has within Israel that helped her to refuse, tells me:

"One of the soldiers who died in an explosion today, in Khan Yunes, Shahar, Munab, there’s a picture of him, holding a sign saying “We don’t have children for unnecessary wars”. And yes, he was in the army. He was also Ethiopian, and it’s his only gateway into Israeli society. And he should have refused, but he still held that sign and they’d just buried him. This is shit. A 17 years old boy who holds this sign understands something…"

What possible question can this be the right answer to? How can destruction this brutal birth anything worthwhile? What dehumanising of other human beings, what racism must we hold to ever justify such slaughter?

Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine created fertile ground for the hate-filled rightwing rhetoric of Hamas. Just as hundreds of years of antisemitism culminating in the holocaust created fertile ground for a rightwing, supremacist Zionism. And that in turn was the result of Nazism finding fertile ground from the humiliation and economic destruction of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles following their defeat in World War One. 

We need to have the humility to realise that our own politics are largely formed by our own backgrounds. We like to think we’d refuse conscription and take the months in prison instead, but we don’t know what its like to have to make that decision at 18 after being raised in a highly militarised society.

I think partly we demonise others because we don't want to face that it could be us. The evidence shows that human behaviour is in large part configured by our context. The idea that people are inherently rightwing or leftwing is a nihilistic dead-end. If we don't believe that people can change, and are shaped by their experiences and what they hear around them, how can we believe in social change? And given that, let's not celebrate the deaths of those who had the bad luck to be born in Israel. I don't think the left celebrated German deaths during the worst excesses of The Second World War's Nazi atrocities. 

Let us address the root causes of this fertile ground for rightwing, everywhere we see it, including those moving to the right in our own country. Any group can fall for ethno-nationlism, given the right context. We can undercut this shift to the right by fighting alongside ordinary people for better living and working conditions, and by reinforcing internationalism, intersectionality and solidarity.

Many on the left are keen to post their celebratory protest selfies with Neturei Karta (an anti-zionist haredi/ultra orthodox sect) ignoring your actual Jewish comrades who are trying to explain how actually conservative and reactionary this group is. 

It can feel as if the Palestine movement wants Jews but only the “good jew” kind who come without any criticisms or the subjectivity that we are more likely to have. For instance I know few non Jews who are personally connected to any Israelis, whereas most UK based Jews do have personal connections. The dehumanisation of Israelis that is a natural trauma response to watching the horror in Gaza, is more likely when you don’t know any Israelis. Most Jews were raised to be super, deeply aware of hundreds of years of antisemitic pogroms, the Holocaust (I’m within the majority of Jews in UK who lost (distant) family members), and the specifics of antisemitic racism (and I am *not* talking about criticism of Israel which obvs I don’t think is necessarily antisemitic) I feel that makes a huge difference to our perspectives, even those of us who are solidly for Palestine liberation. For me, it’s meant I’ve struggled when I see dismissal and even approval of Israelis being killed. I also just haven’t witnessed this about the civilians of any other country which is perpetrating terror, eg Russians. All war is horrific and that nobody deserves to be killed because of where they were born. I am not criticising all Palestinian armed resistance, I’m specifically talking about that which targets Israeli civilians. Though Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine created fertile ground for the hate-filled rightwing rhetoric of Hamas, there is no such excuse for the rest of us.

I don’t know what people want from the Jews born and living in Israel now. They come from a variety of situations and many do not have another citizenship. Many many fled without their possessions from countries such as Iraq, Yemen and Libya, under the antisemitic backlash that followed 1948. I have a friend whose family is “old yeshuv” and has lived in Palestine for hundreds of years. I hear lots of oversimplifications, ignoring this reality.

Personally I think there should be a completely equal state with equal rights for everyone. Probably a single state over the whole river to the sea if we have to have a country at all. But I also strongly feel that it’s not up to me, from thousands of miles away, to have a say in that, beyond opposition to the current apartheid, occupation and genocide. And it feels so urgent and important to end the oppression of Palestinians that to be honest i think detailed questions about what i want instead is a distraction, as well as not being any of my business.

And I’d like us to show that Jews don’t need to be fearful in the here and now, that Jewish safety is taken seriously right here. That all peoples’ lives are sacred and that we stand against all brutality and dehumanisation. In this way we create a world that is just, free and peaceful for all.