Monthly Archives: June 2024

All of Them

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We are telling the wrong stories in relation to violence in Israel-Palestine. A historical overview can open up a new story; one in which we mourn all deaths together.

Combatants for Peace Ceremony 2024

Things I’ve read / watched recently:

A video of an excellent Zoom talk organised by the fairly new group – Progressive Jews for Justice in Israel/Palestine. It contains contributions from 4 young British Jewish leaders who critique the response of the community, and in particular Progressive Judaism, to the Gaza war.

A very enjoyable read: Isaac Asimov on Dominationist Ethnonationalism about a furious argument with Elie Wiesel.

This Jewish Currents podcast on secularism, featuring older Jewish secularists furious that the magazine has introduced a Parashat Hashavua (Torah portion of the week) has produced much debate and is well worth listening to. This one on conflicts over politics in synagogues is also great.

I recently read Leon Rosselson’s memoirs, Where are the Elephants? It’s a great read, and well worth engaging with for anyone on the British / Jewish left, especially if you’re interested in political songwriting.

Do get in touch if there are subjects you’d like me to write on in future

(10-15 minutes reading time)

There has been, in the last two months, two different stories, told by two groups of people. The Jewish/Israeli story is ‘October 7th’; a day repeated on loop in the Israeli media. In this narrative the Israeli victims of the day are the only ones remembered, in addition to soldiers who have died since then ‘because of October 7th’. This is then placed in the context of a longer story, of Jewish and Israeli deaths over the last 100 years. In contrast, the Palestinian/Palestinian Solidarity story is ‘the genocide’; an approach which sometimes treats the war in Gaza as if did not arise because of October 7th and was simply a continuation of Israeli attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. This is placed in the wider context of Palestinian deaths and expulsion since the Nakba.  This narrative inevitably only mourns the dead in Gaza – understandable given how large the death toll there is – and does not consider Israeli victims of Hamas.1 What if we brought these narratives together, as part of a single story? What if we could mourn all of them, and treat them all as mutual victims of war, nationalism and empire?

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Learning from Edwin Montagu

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What a British Jewish politician from 100 years ago can teach us about anti-Zionism and antisemitism

This is the 6th Torat Albion essay. It has a more historical bent to the others and relates to my academic research more closely. Thank you for subscribing or reading, and I hope you’re enjoying the journey. I’d love this to feel like a community of enquiry rather than just a top-down initiative, so please do post your thoughts as comments or send them to me by email. If I can, I’ll incorporate your thoughts into future pieces. At some point I hope to create a Torat Albion podcast, to discuss the issues in the week’s essay with some guests, thus furthering the dialogue. And do share the posts with others who you think might be interested.

Things to read (I don’t necessarily agree with everything in them):

A rich piece on the history of the Venetian ghetto in the LRB.

A provocative but enlightening piece on philosemitism and the White House by Em Cohen

A fascinating read from August 2023 on Israel’s bizarre futurist neo-liberal plans for rail lines across the middle east

A detailed overview of developments within the anti-antisemitism movement over the past 15 years from Adam Sutcliffe

A thought-provoking collection of essays from 2022 on Palestinians imagining futures beyond the model of the nation state (free book)

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By now, most people are aware that Jewish non, or anti-Zionism exists. The numbers of such people attending the regular Palestinian solidarity demonstrations has become too large to ignore. When it comes to the history of Jewish non/anti-Zionism, most people think of two distinct groups. Firstly, there’s Neturei Karta, a spin-off from the orthodox Agudat Yisrael movement which was founded in the late 1930s in Jerusalem. Their ubiquitousness at Palestine demos has made them wildly popular amongst non-Jews who wish to state that Judaism is not synonymous with Zionism (it’s not, but it’s complicated). The other group is more obviously historic, the Jewish Labour Bund, the revolutionary Jewish socialist organisation founded in Russia in 1897 who helped founded the Social Democratic Labour Party which would eventually lead the Russian Revolution, and who would later flourish in inter-war Polish. Again, most activists are drawn to the Bund for its fierce anti-Zionist rhetoric, although its anti-Zionism was very different to contemporary forms, founded on the lack of realism involved in the idea that millions of Jews from Eastern Europe would move to Palestine and be able to support themselves there. But there is a third group which receives far less attention, and even shorter shrift: the assimilationist anti-Zionists of Western Europe and the United States.

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