Author Archives: Miranda Pinch

My mother was a secular Jewish refugee who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. My grandfather, Ernst Sommer was on the Nazi death list and escaped separately. He wrote (in 1943) one of the earliest German-language novels on the Holocaust: ‘Revolt of the Saints: A tribute to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto.’ Published in Mexico City (1944) while in exile.

My mother was always very against what was being done to the Palestinians in her name as Jew. Because of this I became an active campaigner for Palestinian human rights and very concerned about the creeping rise of weaponised antisemitism. It is a threat to open dialogue and a tool to silence voices that speak out against injustice and persecution. This should be worrying for anyone who holds liberal democratic values. This trend has increased year on year, but it has reached truly unfathomable levels since Israel’s War on Gaza began.

I am a member of the Holocaust Survivors’ Descendants Network, and when I march in London, I often do so alongside them. There is a huge UK Jewish contingent on all the marches, reminding me of the strength of solidarity amongst so many in the Jewish community in this country.

Despite portrayal in mainstream media, it is not an inevitable consequence of Jewishness that you support Zionism or the actions of the Israeli government. Nor is it inevitable that all who consider themselves Zionists would support collective punishment, crimes against humanity and what Amnesty and others are convincingly describing as genocide committed by the Israeli state in Gaza as well as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.  (David McDowall presented the Amnesty analysis demonstrating genocide in his article in Lib Dem Voice on 5 December 2024.)

There is a glaring irony that those who shout the loudest about conflating pro-Palestinian sentiment with antisemitism are those who are being the most antisemitic. They assume that Judaism is synonymous with Zionism or, as both Netanyahu and the Board of Deputies’ leadership in the UK like to infer, that being Jewish is synonymous with support for Israel regardless of its actions. That is a perversion of Judaism and encourages antisemitism.

As a daughter of a holocaust survivor, I grew up knowing the suffering and generational trauma that comes from genocide, but my mother always refused to be a victim. Why should an innocent population in Palestine be punished for the behaviour of Europeans? The convictions that came from such past trauma of ‘never again’ and the establishment of international law and justice seem to have been sidelined by a warped idea of superiority and entitlement and the idea that the rights of one population trump those of another.

So, like very many British Jews, I am not a pawn for pro-Israeli propaganda to use in their grotesque political game. There are plenty of Jewish voices in the UK that show the strength of pro-Palestinian Jewish sentiment including the Holocaust Survivor’s Descendants Network, Jews for Justice for Palestinians,  to which I belong, Yachad,  Na’amod,  and others. These include a range of Jewish voices, both religious and secular and all oppose the Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing and advocate for the freedom of the Palestinian people.