The author reflects on their personal history of family fleeing persecution and the impact it has had on their views on justice and inequality. They argue that it is our shared human responsibility to care for those who are suffering.
In recent years, I have been asked to comment on the Middle East “impasse”, though I am no foreign policy expert. I am merely one of many humanists who mourn this tragic history and rail against the failure of the international community to exert the great influence it has to bring peace and justice to innocent civilians in this area of the world.
The lessons of my parents’ early years inevitably shaped my understanding of the world. To continue in a personal mode: my teenage years were spent in a socialist Zionist youth movement. I suspect my parents, who weren’t Zionists, simply appreciated two hours of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon without children. The movement’s intention was that at the end of school, we would spend a year on a kibbutz.
My education has continued, as it should. There have been deeply unpleasant encounters with family, friends and frenemies. I am not sharing these stories to elicit sympathy but rather to reveal how deeply fractured and fraught the issue of Israel and the war on Gaza has become.
In this small corner of the world, there are 120,000 Jews. I have learnt that it is not acceptable to ask what is our relationship to the modern state of Israel. What is our response to the occupation of Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians?A bright young lawyer tells me she’s been excluded from her family’s WhatsApp group for speaking out about the occupation. A 30-something academic has been attending pro-Palestine marches.
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