After October 7th
My mother was Jewish by race/ethnicity, not by religion. Her parents and grandparents were secular Austrian Jews who had assimilated with local customs, to the extent that was permitted for Jews in Austria at that time. Restrictions on Jews, secular or not, meant that Jewish births could only be registered by Jewish authorities and marriages were only permitted in synagogues.
Until the Nazis came onto the scene, these were the main signifiers of my family’s Jewishness.
The Nazis of course did not distinguish between Jews by race, ethnicity or religion. All were subjected to the same treatment. My mother’s family got out of Austria in 1937, just before it became impossible for Jews to get out at all. Most of the family made it, but not all. My 86 year old great-grandmother and my great-aunt were waiting for another family member and missed the last train out.
They were taken by cattle truck to Auschwitz where they were murdered.
The rest of the family resettled in Sheffield, England, where they lived in a crowded house crammed full of refugee relations.
My father was German but not Jewish. The Nazis murdered his father in a camp at the age of 40.
He and my mother met and married in London after the war.
Both my parents were liberal progressives, acutely sensitive to racism and scapegoating after their experiences of Nazi persecution. They opposed apartheid in South Africa, donated to Amnesty International, and were strong critics of Israel’s slide to the right and its treatment of the Palestinians.
I inherited their values and the abhorrence of racism runs deep in my veins, visceral and emotional, a generational post-trauma response to the atrocities visited upon our family and our people.
I have always voiced my opposition to Israeli government policy in the West Bank and in Palestine, have always been critical of Netanyahu and the Israeli far-right, and have always condemned Israel’s unjust treatment of the Palestinians over the last many decades.
This has not changed since October 7th, but everything else has changed dramatically.
On October 7th 2023 Hamas – accompanied by Jihadi groups and not a few Palestinian civilians – launched a pogrom in Israel. Hundreds of unarmed civilians – including dancers at a music festival, elderly people, holocaust survivors, families and their children – were hunted, raped, tortured, burnt alive, kidnapped and subjected to summary face to face execution. All of this was filmed and much of it live-streamed by the perpetrators onto Telegram and Facebook.
The trauma of this attack for the people of Israel, a state formed as a refuge after the Holocaust, is almost unimaginable,
Israel didn’t respond to the Hamas pogrom immediately (and pogrom it was), but when they did respond, their vengeance was fierce and terrible.
The blockading of Gaza together with the intensive bombing has caused immense suffering to countless Palestinian civilians. Gaza’s infrastructure is destroyed, there is a desperate shortage of food, water and medicine, thousands have been catastrophically wounded and thousands killed.
I grieve for the victims of this war in Palestine and for the victims in Israel.
I am horrified by the cruelty, inhumanity, and corruption of the leaders of both Israel’s and Gaza’s governments.
Yet since October 7th I’ve been shouting condemnation of Hamas and the Western liberal left, and of the feminist left, rather than of Israel’s government and the Israeli hard-line right.
This is not because I’m impervious to the suffering of Palestinians, nor have I suddenly become a Netanyahu supporter or switched political allegiances.
Rather, it’s because the evidence I have seen since October 7th, of sadistic torture inflicted on Jewish children and parents, women, and elderly people, and of the western liberal sphere’s indifference – even glee – in response to this assault, has brought up painful, personal, generational family trauma.
The images I’ve seen, including video footage from Hamas bodycams, are horrific. I’ve heard verified survivor and witness testimonies. What I’ve seen and heard has shocked me to my core.
Other than the Holocaust, the Rwandan massacre, and the Hamas attack on October 7th, I haven’t seen many such images, or heard many such testimonies – though I remember the footage of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures in 2004. Once seen, such things cannot be unseen, and must not be ignored, denied, or minimised – let alone celebrated.
I’ve been told that the Israeli military routinely inflict rape and torture on Palestinian prisoners including children. I did not know that. Perhaps Israeli torturers don’t upload footage of their atrocities onto social media in the way that Hamas does. At any rate I have not seen such footage, nor heard such testimonies. But if I came across such material, I can promise you I would not stay silent, and never in a million years would I cheer it on or excuse it as “just desserts”.
Yet this is exactly what much of the international left has done.
As someone who considered the left *my people*, I cannot comprehend the lack of condemnation, and I cannot excuse the left’s silence in place of solidarity or at least sympathy with Israeli victims and survivors.
Some say it’s not true that the left reacted this way – but there’s abundant evidence out there.
Many on both the Israeli and the Palestinian left, and many left-wing liberal Jews worldwide, have criticised the left response. We were told we were imagining it or, worse, that we’re “weaponising the Holocaust”.
Others claim that critiquing the left’s failure to condemn atrocities and stand with Jewish victims and survivors amounts to telling the left not to talk about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and actions in Gaza.
But it is perfectly possible to oppose all abuses of power, and stand with all victims of atrocities. There are not some deserving and some undeserving victims, some just and some unjust perpetrators.
ALL atrocities are unjust. All perpetrators should be condemned. All victims deserve sympathy and solidarity.
George Orwell, writing about the Spanish Civil War, commented “on atrocities” that:
“These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. The raping and butchering…, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees… – they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them”.
The fact that right-wing commentators talk about the October 7th atrocities doesn’t mean anyone else mentioning them is “weaponising”. The atrocities are real. They happened, and are not invalidated because someone you disagree with points them out.
Talking about atrocities is bearing witness. It is hearing testimony. If you refuse to hear that testimony because you believe that Israel are the party at fault and you don’t like some of the voices talking about what was done to Israelis, your advocacy against atrocities is partisan and selective.
Turning a blind eye to racism (antisemitism is racism, in case people missed that), hand-waving male sexual and reproductive violence against women and children, withholding support from victims of torture and kidnapping – this is not the humane left I signed up to.
I am critiquing the left *because* I thought the left was my side. I won’t stay silent when my side lets itself down, because the integrity of leftwing principles matters to me. If it’s just another inhumane, virtue signalling, four-legs-good / two-legs-bad mishmash of on-trend political posturing, this left is no longer my left.
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People on the left tell me they talked with their friends about their horror at the Hamas attacks. Well, that is not enough. We need to challenge our organisations, our spokespersons, our comrades and colleagues. That isn’t happening much, I’m sorry to say.
Too many left-wing organisations, groups and activists – from the very first day after the Hamas atrocities, before Israel had even responded – issued public statements, signed open letters, made speeches, and held banners and placards championing one side, saying nothing about the suffering of the other.
Far too many celebrated the atrocities as “resistance”. Others justified them saying “revolution sometimes requires violence” and “even Nelson Mandela had to resort to violence”.
Some denied the atrocities altogether or argued about how many babies were beheaded.
A whole cohort of feminist groups and spokeswomen saw fit to deny that any rapes had taken place.
Vanishingly few spoke out in support of Israeli victims, hostages and survivors.
Instead, many said we needed to look at events through the lens of a “larger frame of reference/context” – and a UN spokesman said the Hamas attack “didn’t come out of a vacuum”.
But nothing happens in a vacuum. There is always a context. And that applies as much to Israel’s behaviour as it does to Hamas. It applies to the historical persecution of the Jews, to the history of the Jews in Palestine, and to the founding of Israel, as much it does to the history and current predicament of the Palestinians.
It should surely be more obvious now than ever that Jews have good reasons for trying to create a safe haven. Yet apparently this context is the one context that we should not take into account.
I have said that mass torture in warfare is not the same as “normal warfare”. I need to clarify what I meant.
Tying children to parents or parents to children and burning them alive is not what I would call “normal” warfare. It seems a rare, cruel and unusual punishment. Binding children and gouging out their eyes or cutting off their feet/fingers in front of their parents – these are not standard war practices.
But I think I was wrong to exclude torture, rape and kidnapping from the category of “normal warfare”.
Mass atrocities, tortures, rapes, kidnappings, burning alive and concentration camps apparently are a part of standard warfare, though these are categorised as war crimes.
Raping women is of course a standard war practice and has been throughout history and across the globe – women are always the collateral in war.
Still, I would hope that feminist organisations in particular would have seen fit to explicitly condemn the practice, when evidence of the brutal war rapes and broken pelvic bones of women, children and the elderly came to light.
I believe that the Russians have been accused of mass kidnappings of women and children. Like rape, this seems to be a standard war practice. But I think we remember the stories of these mass atrocities more than we do the stories of more conventional warfare. It’s why Hitler and the Nazis are remembered as the epitome of evil, why we shudder at Pol Pot and Idi Amin, and why so many other mass atrocity events are burned into the historic memory.
I know far more are slaughtered by bombs and shootings than at the hands of sadistic killers. But nevertheless – it’s the Mengeles, the Fred Wests, and the Myra Hindley/Ian Bradys that haunt me.
The Hamas attack was like a nightmare, a horror film. For me, it is a different level of horror from classic warfare – however brutal and hellish that warfare is.
I have no idea how Israel/Gaza can be resolved. I hope there is a way, that perhaps the voices for peace can overcome the forces of hate, but I feel very strongly that for this to happen it’s essential to condemn all evidence of atrocities, from whichever “side”, and stand in solidarity with all victims and survivors.
I don’t think people should be marching for the people of Palestine and not for the people of Israel.
I think we need to march for both, and especially for the women and children of both.
I don’t think anyone should march alongside right-wing Israeli extremists, OR with Islamic fundamentalist extremists.
I think our banners should call for the return of all Hamas-held kidnapped hostages AND for the release of all Israeli-held child prisoners.
Our speeches should condemn Israel’s bombs and blockades, as well as their prior treatment of the Palestinian people – AND condemn the Hamas atrocities and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as “representative” of Palestinian liberation.
Our banners should be against the Netanyahu govt and Israeli oppression of Palestinian civilians – AND equally against Hamas and Jihadi fundamentalism – and, importantly, against antisemitism – racism against Jews.
I certainly agree that atrocities are not the preserve of only certain races, ethnicities, or religions, and that suggesting such regarding the Hamas attack pushes a racist Islamophobic agenda.
The Nazis were white Europeans, not brown Muslims. Tommy Robinson’s gangs are racist white men.
Trump and Musk are supported by racist white supremacists.
It is not racist or Islamophobic however to recognise that certain ideologies and cultures do openly celebrate death, martyrdom and the deliberate infliction of terror as a means to an end. Incel culture for example. The Nazis for another. Islamic fundamentalism too.
Misogynistic oppression is central to Islamic fundamentalism, as is hatred of people of the Jewish race.
Ask Hamas. Ask Iran or Afghanistan. They are not shy about it.
I recognise the bad faith of many Western governments in all of this, and of course of the Israeli government, as well as the responsibility of those who elect these governments.
Equally I recognise the bad faith of Hamas, Iran, Russia and the Arab governments – elected or not.
As a feminist, I particularly loathe the misogynistic tenets of Islamic fundamentalism, and the brutal regimes in Iran and Afghanistan that force sex apartheid on 50% of their citizens.
Yes, patriarchy is everywhere, but there *are* different degrees.
The US treatment of its black and Latino populations; the UK’s scapegoating and deliberate infliction of “austerity” upon its most vulnerable citizens: women, children, migrants, the poor and disabled; the West’s colonial histories of slavery, exploitation, genocide – clearly, Western governments do not hold the moral high ground.
But for me there remains a clear difference, a *high point of horror*, between mankind’s stupid, incoherent, life-obliterating, raging greed and violent territorial warfare, and the infliction of one-on-one sadistic rapes, tortures and executions, and, somehow even worse, the celebration (by people safely outside of the conflict zone) of such acts as “resistance”.
