Under Netanyahu’s Nasty Party, Is Israel’s Reputation Now Irreparable?

In the immediate decades after the second world war (1939-45) sympathy for Jewish people was at its highest level in perhaps all their near 4000-year-old history.  First as the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed in full and then as succeeding generations were constantly reminded in the news and in books, studies and films.  In part because it was a story that needed revisiting to fully get to grips with the evil and the madness of the Nazis and to ensure it never happened again.

So how is it that a nation that once had the sympathy of the world, now finds itself a pariah state on a level not seen since South Africa in the apartheid era?  And disturbingly, below even that appalling indictment of human nature.  It hasn’t happened overnight.  For years, Israel’s treatment of its own Palestinian citizens left us disturbed with Jewish ‘settlers’ stealing their land.  This was a creeping form of genocide against Palestinians. ‘Replacing them’ in the West Bank, acre by acre of stolen land.  Now outright war on them confirms it.  The recent widespread destruction of Gaza shows that the genocidal policies that were once only suspected, are now brazen and undeniable.  The positions taken and actions pursued, have confirmed that under Netanyahu in particular, Israel has become a rogue state.  

But it wasn’t always so.  That younger generations who march in outrage at the death and destruction in Gaza only focus on recent history, is a direct result of what they have witnessed in their time.  Actions taken by successive Israeli governments but at their zenith under Netanyahu.  Older generations have had longer to consider and history itself to weigh up.  History worth reviewing to keep things in context.

When Israel finally came into being in 1948, it was at the end of a violent struggle against the British, who still controlled what was then Palestine – a part of their dying empire – and their Arab neighbours, who also sought to control it.  At the time, many in the Western world recognised that Jewish people needed a place to call their own if they were to be safe once and for all.  Especially after what they’d been through. 

As a people and a religion, does any community have such a long and tortured history?  Let’s take stock and try to understand that their desire to form a nation state is an act of survival.  The first recorded act of mass expulsion of Jews was from Jerusalem to Babylon as captives of the Babylonians in 586 BCE, where they remained for decades.  Jews were then expelled again from wider Judea by the Romans between 70–135 CE. This was the beginning of the mass emigration from their homeland eventually leading to widespread populations of Jewish communities from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, Russia and eventually even the new world.  But the persecutions and expulsions continued.

The most significant according to historians were exile from England in 1290 under King Edward and from France, first in 1306 and then again in 1394.  Then in 1492, the long running Spanish ‘reconquest’ of Spain expelled the Muslim rulers who had inhabited most of now Southern Spain and Portugal for centuries.  King Ferdinand gave the Jewish community (who had lived with relative safety under their Muslim rulers for seven hundred years) the choice to convert to Christianity or be exiled.  Most fled to Portugal rather than convert, only to be expelled from Portugal in 1497 by King Manuel. 

Small enclaves of Jewish communities managed to return over centuries, eventually establishing themselves throughout Europe, the Middle East and Russia.  However, while active and successful in business and commerce, the arts and science, wherever they went, they were persecuted and discriminated against.  Often violently with Pogroms of organised massacres of Jewish populations, especially in Russia.  First in 1903 and then again in 1905 in a period of unrest.  Worse was to come during the Russian civil war of 1918-20 when up to 250,000 Jews were estimated to have been killed in state sponsored mass killings.

The largest of all expulsions of Jewish people from their homes came after the creation of Israel.  Up until the early 1960’s, there were up to one million Jews living in the middle east.  Scattered across all the Arab countries and Iran.  Now it is estimated there are only 15,000 Jews left in the region.  Naturally, the bulk of them fled to Israel. 

So the motivation of Israelis – to survive – is clear and understandable.  But at what point do Israelis recognise that survival also means an accommodation with your near neighbours, not an implausible permanent state of war and conquest.  Will the violence ever stop?  Is there a political movement in Israel capable of bringing some sanity to the country?  When a country burns through its political capital and turns itself from sympathised with, to despised, it’s extremely hard to rebuild their standing in the world.

While Israel has a right to exist and a right to self-defence, the horrors inflicted on its citizens by Hamas on October 7^th, 2023 (especially the unspeakable sexual violence) does not give it the right to destroy and displace every Palestinian that it can.

While my generation hold out some hope for the state of Israel and remember all too well why its citizens feel forever threatened given their history, it is not older people of the world they will have to deal with here on in.  Modern generations only know a violent Israel.  An Israel where a sizeable cohort of racists and supremacists pursue vile acts of cruelty against not only Palestinians in Gaza but in their own country.  If Israel does not see itself as capable of living in peace with its neighbours and is pursuing its own final solution to the “Arab problem,” it is bound to repeat the mistakes of the absolutists of the past and eventually suffer the same fate.

In the coming October elections, Israelis will have to consider what they want their country to be and how they want to live.  They have a chance to be not only at peace with their neighbours and the world but also at peace with themselves.  But if Netanyahu and his nasties are returned that could be a long time coming – if it ever comes at all.