Open Letter to Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Your organization claims to be devoted to achieving justice for the Palestinian people. This is an objective which we endorse. For us it will be realized through the creation of a fully independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, where this state exists in peace and reconciliation with Israel. While your founding statement appears to favour such an arrangement, your actions belie your commitment to it. You regularly participate in demonstrations and political activities featuring large numbers of radical Islamists and other extremists who seek Israel's destruction and promote a strongly anti-Jewish programme. You engage in running apologetics for these groups and seek to present them as 'pragmatic'. You whitewash their racist platforms as understandable reactions to Israeli aggression.

You claim that Israel's conduct violates traditional Jewish values, and you celebrate yourselves as the true defenders of these values. Oddly, you invoke them only for the purpose of announcing your abhorrence of Israel and its supporters in the Jewish community. Your deep concern for Jewish principles of justice and compassion do not lead you to step forward as Jews in order to condemn the genocide in Darfur, the blood-letting in the Congo, the massacres in Chechnya or any other cases of massive human rights violation far surpassing the brutality of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians. To us it is clear that you wrap yourself in the flag of Jewish concern solely for the purpose of avoiding the tidal wave of irrational hostility to Israel as a country that has now moved from the fringes of political opinion to the mainstream of public discourse in Britain. You respond to the distortions, half-truths and libels concerning Israel and Jews that are now common currency in large segments of the British media by embracing them rather than subjecting them to critical scrutiny. In this way you seek to retain your membership in fashionable society. The perverse parodies of Jewish ritual that you stage for political effect compound the ugly absurdity of this exercise in self-ingratiation.

Your spokespeople, in their unbounded ignorance of Jewish sources, flatter themselves by invoking the Biblical prophets and the Mishnaic sage Hillel as their points of reference. They appear to be unaware of the fact that while Jeremiah, Isaiah and their colleagues criticized Israel relentlessly, they did so from within the midst of their people. They did not march with its enemies who wish for its destruction. Your self-styled rabbinic authorities also seem to have missed one of Hillel's central precepts, recorded in Perkei Avoth (Ethics of the Fathers): Do not separate yourself from the community.

We are confident that when the history of this period is written and the widespread loss of political reason that characterizes our age is finally recognized, your group will be properly consigned to a footnote in the long and dishonourable tradition of Jewish sycophancy and collaboration with hostility that has polluted the margins of European Jewry over the generations.

We stand with the people of Israel at this difficult time in their history, even while criticizing many of the actions of their government. We resist the demonization and abuse to which they are regularly subjected in large sections of the British press and public opinion. We also identify with the terrible suffering of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples. While we fully recognize that Israel has played a significant role in this suffering, decency requires that one acknowledge the fact that terrorist groups in their midst have been instrumental in causing their plight by using them to pursue violent, rejectionist agendas. We will work for peace and reconciliation among the warring peoples of the Middle East. This will not be achieved by vilifying Israel or cooperating with racists who promote its disappearance. The basis for a just and lasting settlement remains the recognition of the legitimacy, and the right to security and independence, of all peoples in the area.

The next time you march with people waving Hizbollah flags and chanting racist anti-Jewish slogans, sing anti-Israel Christmas carols in Trafalgar Square, embark on a ludicrous 'religious fast' in front of the Israeli Embassy, or take out a self-abasing ad in a major newspaper designed to exhibit yourselves as socially acceptable Jews, bear in mind that you do not speak in our name.

Shalom Lappin
Eve Garrard
Norman Geras