The bomb shelter reserved for “volunteers” at Kibbutz Dafna in northern Israel was definitely substandard. It was damp and smelly, more like a lavatory than a fortified bunker, and not considered fit for the kibbutzniks: a pampered species compared to us. But when the Soviet-built ordnance started raining down on us, it did its job. We emerged, unharmed, the following morning, blinking into the dawn light. The terrorists had not succeeded in hitting the kibbutz with a single Katyusha rocket.
No, I’m not embedded with the Israel Defense Forces on the Lebanese border. This was in 1981 and I was just 17. My father had packed me off to Israel after I’d failed all but one of my school exams. His hope was that I might grow up a bit if I was forced to earn my keep – and it worked. Up in the Golan Heights, miles from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s rocket launchers, I awoke from my dope-fueled slumber, looked around and discovered a cause that I’ve held fast to ever since: Zionism.
I’d already developed an interest in politics at this point, partly because my father was friends with several Labour politicians in London. They would sometimes come to dinner and have good-natured arguments – unilateral vs multilateral nuclear disarmament, for instance – and I’d join in. But I’d never really immersed myself properly in an issue before. On the kibbutz, the Arab-Israeli conflict was pretty much the only topic. They weren’t all Zionists, but I listened carefully to their arguments, read the Jerusalem Post every day, talked to some of the old-timers who’d been there since 1948, and had little difficulty in picking a side.
Most people are familiar with the case for Israel by now. The Jews needed somewhere they could call home and where they’d be safe – or relatively safe – after the Holocaust. The victorious powers in World War Two had done a poor job of protecting them in Europe and this tiny sliver of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean was the only homeland on offer.
The Nakba is a myth – Israel didn’t expel 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. Rather, many left voluntarily, having been advised to by neighboring Arab countries who declared war on the fledgling state. Israel has attempted to make peace with the Palestinians numerous times and has made, or offered to make, significant concessions but every olive branch has been rebuffed. To describe it as an “apartheid state” is a calumny, with Arab Israelis enjoying the same civil rights as Jews.
It wasn’t just that I found the arguments of the Zionists more convincing. I also, rather vaingloriously, identified with the chosen people. Later, I came across a passage in Wilfred Thesiger’s autobiography in which he recalls Orde Wingate, the great World War Two general, explaining why he’d become a philosemite. As a schoolboy at Charterhouse, he’d found a passage in the Bible which described “people against whom every man’s hand was turned, yet they remained bloody and unbowed.” That resonated with him because he’d been so unpopular with his classmates. I felt that same sense of connection for the same reason.
The Nakba is a myth – Israel didn’t expel 700,000 Palestinians in 1948
I was also swept up by the story of the Jews. There was something compelling about a people returning to their homeland after being expelled centuries earlier. Everywhere you went in Israel was laden with historical meaning but this was a country propelled into the future by its history. Back in England, I had found self-seriousness an irksome quality but in Israel it gave the people grandeur and weight. I fell in love with them.
So it won’t surprise you to learn that I side completely with Israel and America in the current conflict and feel deeply ashamed that our Prime Minister has tried to keep Britain out of it. Does the “anti-Zionism” of the Labour left run so deep that Sir Keir Starmer is prepared to risk a breach with our closest ally because it has made common cause with Israel against the murderous Iranian regime? If the next government is some ghastly coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, I will think seriously about emigrating to the Holy Land. For me, as for those early Jewish settlers, it will be like coming home.
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