We are reeling from the terrible attack on Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Shocking, but sadly not surprising. Perhaps now politicians should dial down the hyperbole around the Middle East. Words such as “apartheid” and “genocide” shed more heat than light, obscuring rather than clarifying a conflict that demands honesty. The attack brought home the real meaning of “Globalise the Intifada”.
Israel’s government is distinct from Zionism, which is distinct from Jews. Yet most of Britain’s 300,000 Jews feel connected to the world’s only Jewish state, home to half of global Jewry. That is why events in Israel reverberate deeply.
Criticism of Israel’s actions is legitimate, but the Centre-Left’s blanket condemnations weaken us, ceding ground to the Right. We should reflect before using rhetoric that delegitimises the only democracy in the region
Israelis remain traumatised by the October 7th massacre, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and the continued plight of 48 hostages/families. Acknowledgement of that trauma here often fades next to Gazan suffering, portrayed without context. The imbalance encourages anger which is too easily channelled into demonisation of Israel itself.
At the LDFI stand at Party Conference, we faced a difficult environment. We oppose Netanyahu’s coalition and condemn the toll of war on both Gazans and Israelis. But we reject the charge of “genocide” as inaccurate, inflammatory, and often antisemitic in intent. Engaging with it feels like the Brexit “£350m a week” trap: a slogan which shuts down debate.
Israel faces an information war. The use of the word “genocide” long predates October 7th 2023, and it is chosen to delegitimise Israel, not foster peace. Recognition of a Palestinian state without defined borders or democratic institutions does not advance a two-state solution; it seemed intended to punish Israel. Gaza after 2005 was already a de facto Palestinian state but its administration chose endless war, culminating in October 7th, rather than coexistence.
I would welcome a democratic peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel, but time and again, resources have been diverted from the Palestinian people towards conflict. Some pro-Palestinian activists even in our own party refuse to accept Israel’s legitimacy. People rehearse 1948 “stolen land” narratives as if Jewish displacement and Arab displacement were not part of a wider tragedy occurring globally during that period.
Why, uniquely, are Palestinian refugees given hereditary status across generations? Why does the UN operate a special agency, UNRWA, perpetuating the grievance, unlike its approach to any other group? Why, if Gaza is called “home” by Palestinians, were native Gazans (pre-Oct 7th) classed as refugees within that area? Why do some liberals use the term “indigenous” to refer to people in Palestine when they would rightly reject such language in describing people here in Europe? Many Jews see the fixation with the Israel/Palestine as bias. Why does it attract legions of demonstrators every week? Why is it a permanent fixture on our news and in MPs’ inboxes?
Instead of grappling with those questions, leftwingers often indulge outrage through words. “Occupation” is stretched to mean Gaza-blockade, ignoring Egypt’s border. “Apartheid” is invoked despite two million Arab citizens of Israel (20% of its population) enjoying voting rights, professions, and political freedoms denied to their kin across the region. Israel alone in the region protects minorities- Druze, Christians, LGBTQ people and others-and pursues gender equality. Liberals should support, not demonise, Israel.
Some brand Israel a settler-colonial project, ignoring that most Israeli Jews trace ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa. Such racist distortions do not help Palestinians; they deepen Israeli fears and strengthen hardliners.
Our respect for international institutions is abused. The imbalance of UN resolutions -173 against Israel versus 80 against all others combined- reflects political manoeuvring, not principle. The 57-member Organisation for Islamic Cooperation’s bloc vote drives this. Pointing this out does not make us propagandists; it is an attempt at rational debate.
Where do we go from here? A Palestinian state is widely recognised in principle. The challenge is for Palestinians to define its borders and responsibilities. Until then, Israelis will understandably vote for governments that promise security, however flawed.
None of this lessens the suffering of Palestinian civilians. But their tragedy is not the whole picture. As Liberal Democrats, we must resist emotive language clouding our values. Israel, with all its flaws, is still a democracy protecting minorities and aspiring to liberal values in a region where they are scarce.
I will not mourn Netanyahu’s fall. But when it comes, we must ask: how can the West help a future Palestinian state guarantee peace, equality, and progress — for its own citizens, and for Jewish and non-Jewish neighbours alike?
* Jonathan Gale is a Lib Dem Councillor in Dacorum and Treasurer of Lib Dem Friends of Israel.
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18 Comments
@Jonathan
Thank you for this piece. I agree entirely with you, liberals must support Israel. There are, obviously, issues which must be addressed in terms of Netanyahu and his approach to handling the wider situation. But the fact remains, as you said: it is the only democracy in the region. We must support calls for peace and security, and oppose any attempts to de-legitimise to Israel.
Being a democracy does not preclude a country from commiting acts of genocide.
“…… the only democracy in the region”
Wasn’t the Jim Crow USA, from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century, also classed as a democracy?
One of the core aspects of democracy is, or should be, equality. There is no truly democratic system unless all of those participating in it are on an equal legal footing. There can be no second-class citizens in a democracy. In the case of Israel, however, it clearly distinguishes between citizenship and nationality. It’s the nationality of Israeli citizens which determines their assigned class.
For example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity.
Thank you for the balanced and appropriate comment. Israel is a rights-based democracy so of course should be supported and helped as a fellow western country.
You distance Netanyahu’s government from Zionism and the Jewish state of Israel.
Could you explain why, in a series of surveys carried out by the Hebrew University’s aChord Center in late May this year, 87% of supporters of the ruling coalition see “no innocents” in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza…
The polls also found that 73% of voters for opposition leader Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party and other right-wing, non-coalition parties have the same view.
It revealed that support among centrist voters stood at 67%, while 30% of left-wing voters agreed. In contrast, 92% of Arab citizens of Israel rejected this view.
A majority of 56 percent of Jews supported the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” And when asked directly whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, “when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?” nearly half, 47 percent, agreed
It isn’t just Netanyahu..
I’m grateful to Jonathan for setting out the pro-Israel position, and I suspect many readers will have found it as fascinating as I did.
I agree that the use of the g word adds more heat than light. When Hitler devised his plans for Jews he got some of his ideas from what the Turks did to the Armenians 20 odd years earlier and the UK has still not recognised the Armenian genocide. Not every war is a genocide and it doesn’t have to be genocide to call out Israeli actions. What Israel is doing clearly fails the Christian just war on at least 2 points imho. The pro Palestine marches have become more hateful and antisemitic even if most marchers are only calling for Israel to stop. Trump’s 20 point plan is missing big bits but let’s hope and pray that it succeeds. It is clearly the best option for the Gaza.
If one thing stands out more than most in Jonathan’s very often astonishing catalogue of assertions, it must be the suggestion that the word genocide is a “slogan”, and can be antisemitic in its intent. Whether or not mass killing qualifies as Genocide depends on it conforming to a legal definition, not the emotions or intentions of he accuser. Equally, mass killing does not avoid being Genocide simply because the accused is offended, or finds it “inflammatory” or otherwise unhelpful. The way to avoid the unhelpful effect mass killing has on debate is to not do it.
As a man of German Jewish descent, I want Israel to survive and thrive. I have been averse to using the G word, because of the obvious holocaust connotations. However, I am reluctantly coming to the view that it is apt. That the HAMAS attack was despicable there can be no doubt, but that cannot justify the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women and children by the IDF. But be clear, it is the Netanyahu government that is culpable. Most of its members regard the current loss of Palestinian lives as not only acceptable but desirable. When I taught for a year at a school for ultra orthodox Jewish boys, I was disturbed by the widely held sentiment “the only good Arab is a dead Arab”. Clearly that sentiment is alive and well in the current Israel cabinet and that means that they are to all intents and purposes practising genocide.
On contacting a Jewish friend to sympathise over the Manchester synagogue attack, I was pleased to hear that he and his wife have been often participating in pro-Palestinian marches, in London and the Midlands. To him as to me, the knowledge of the killing in Gaza of more than 60,000 Palestinians in the two years since the Hamas atrocity is a horrific witness to the cruel apparent revenge of the Netanyahu Israeli government. That government appears also to have no acceptance of the international order and UN authority, and no pity for the hounded and starving remaining population of Gaza, while also allowing the violence and encroaching settler movement in the West Bank. As a non-political friend of mine has remarked more than once, these policies have surely unfortunately raised many fresh enemies of the Israeli state among the young people of the region.
This is a really important article. We have all been subject to the same allegations, day after day, of Israel targeting civilians. There is never proof – beyond perhaps the occasional case of indiscipline – but the principle here is that if you repeat an allegation often enough people will start to believe it, and that clearly works.
Of course if there were a genocide, even Hamas, evil beyond measure as they are, would accept Trumps peace plan in a second. As it is, clearly they think they are fighting a war, and that they can achieve a better outcome by continuing to fight it.
Trumps plan is of course not a good one, except in the most vital sense of being an end to the killing. It doesn’t have the political settlement that will be necessary for a lasting peace. But it has smoked out all the false friends of Palestine around the world who have been marching every week to “stop the genocide” as, it turns out, supporters of continuing the war and in many cases globalising the intifada to commit a genocide of their own.
The report of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (set up by UNHCR) reached the conclusion that there were acts of genocide being committed. Their report runs to 72 pages with 495 referencing footnotes.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-crp-3.pdf
That is a lot of evidence.
I have read the UN Commission Report. The facts therein are terrible and it is hard not to be utterly appalled by what probably amount to war-crimes and atrocities by people who should answer for their crimes (though not all of the instances are proved and some may well require more investigation). But the report should not be confused for a balanced judgment about genocide – the crime of crimes which taints a whole nation. The conclusion is based on “reasonable grounds to conclude” (see para 7). On its own terms, the commission collected and collated all of the evidence pointing in one direction only and left out all the evidence pointing the other way.
Unfortunately, one-sided reports from an organisation like the UN will prejudice any judicial decision and ultimately undermine the rule of law.
The truth is enough. Hyperbole will not lead to peace. A balanced position is needed from our party, not stridency.
Joe Otten 7th Oct ’25 – 10:47am……. We have all been subject to the same allegations, day after day, of Israel targeting civilians. There is never proof – beyond perhaps the occasional case of indiscipline – but the principle here is that if you repeat an allegation often enough people will start to believe it, and that clearly works………..
Really? Israel’s own figures show an 83% civilian death rate.. A rate only exceeded by the targeted genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica..
Washington Post poll of American Jews from a few days ago:
39% said Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, rising to 50% among 18-34 year olds
61% said Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/tablet/2025/10/06/sept-2-9-2025-washington-post-jewish-americans-poll/
Jonathan – Your piece troubles me. It lacks any sense that Israel must do justice to the Palestinians. And until that is acknowledged there will be no peace. I wonder if you have read the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim’s ‘The Iron Wall’, which shows how across the decades it has been Israel more often than its neighbours that frustrated attempts to reach peace. Shlaim now identifies himself proudly as an Arab Jew. You point out that talk of ‘genocide’ long predates October 7. Shlaim said the same in another book written before October 7 and rejected the use of the term, but since then he has come to believe Netanyahu’s war on Gaza justifies its use.
Jonathan – You ask why there is such an emphasis on Palestine as an issue, and see this as disproportionate.
I agree, not because of the emphasis on Palestine but because of the appalling lack of interest in other conflicts such as Syria, Sudan, Myanmar or DRC. Tragically, Palestine and Israel have become symbols. Long ago Herzl and Weizmann saw a Jewish state in Palestine as a rampart against what they perceived as the ‘barbarity’ of Asia. In 1984 Netanyahu claimed that “Middle Eastern radicals did not develop their hatred of the West because of Israel; they hate Israel from its inception because it is an organic part of the West.”
These leading lights in the Zionist movement have tapped into the culture wars of the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’. On the other side, the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi movement have done exactly the same. The only way to defuse this is a peace that reflects the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians in international law.
John McHugo. You hit the nail on the head when you say Palestine and Israel have become symbols. Those on either side of a “culture war” have encouraged the image of Palestinians as an indigenous people and Israel as a western colonial nation. That image slots nicely into the “radical and” “conservative” dichotomy but it is wholly misleading on both counts. Palestinian people ought to have the same right to self-determination as Jews, Kurds, Yazidi, Balloch, and anyone else. The Palestinian cause has been successful in public relations perhaps because they have overtly associated their cause with so many other causes, so all sorts of movements including BLM, to some extent the Irish Republican Movement, some of the environmental movement and even some of the trans movement, have associated themselves with the Palestinian (originally Arab neo-Imperialistic!) flag as a symbol of solidarity. Zionism too is a movement for self-determination of the Jews who were scattered all over Europe and the Ottoman Empire including some in Palestine (anti-zionists tend to ignore the latter categories in their drive to characterise Jews as European colonists). I am not surprised that Herzl and Weizman sold Israel as a rampart to the colonial powers at the time. As to which side bears most of the blame, you can bring out Avi Shlaim, and I can refer to Einat Wilf, who makes a compelling case that the goal of the Palestinians has never been a state alongside Israel, but the absence of a Jewish state anywhere. But that is looking in the rear-view mirror. The world must do justice to the Palestinians. But setting up a state ruled by Hamas or the PA, which is based on hatred of Zionism, is not likely to achieve self-determination or justice for most Palestinians. It would just perpetuate endless war. Similarly, I cannot see how Israelis could ever be persuaded to take the risk of arming or promoting those who continue to tell them that they believe their existence as a nation is a sin.