What is Israel for?

The October 7th Pogrom

During the past three and a half years, I have come to realise that the world is not the place I thought it was. I suspect much the same is true of all of us who would describe ourselves as ‘awake’.

In my case, this realisation has come through a series of jolts. First, the March 2020 lockdown. Originally, I thought this simply a massive over-reaction to the spread of a ‘flu-like virus, but clearly it presented governments with an opportunity for a power grab, to take away our civil liberties under the pretext of an ‘emergency’, and then fail to give them back again afterwards.

Then, in the late summer, I heard the first interview with former Pfizer vice-president Mike Yeadon, who explained that he knew the British government’s scientific advisors, that he knew what they knew about the spread of respiratory diseases, and therefore he could be quite certain that they were lying when they made claims about ‘asymptomatic transmission’ to justify lockdown and face masks and social distancing. Not mistaken, but lying.

Third, at the turn of the years 2020-2021, the so-called ‘COVID vaccine’ was rolled out internationally, and wherever it was introduced there were immediate spikes in mortality; yet governments worldwide were so utterly uninterested in considering this issue that it was impossible to conclude otherwise than that they had planned for these deaths to occur.

Fourth, I heard about the Midazolam scandal: how the British government had treated people suffering from COVID with the drug Midazolam, a respiratory suppressant used in end-of-life palliative care, which could not possibly have served as part of the treatment of a respiratory disease but can only have been intended to hasten people to their deaths. Thus giving the lie to the government’s original claim that it had introduced its COVID measures to protect old people, when it had in fact been killing them.

On each of these occasions I felt a jolt, a shock to my system, and each one moved me a step further along the road of realisation that our governments were not merely uninterested in protecting us, but were actively seeking to harm us.

The country that stood in the front of the queue for rolling out the COVID vaccine was Israel. In effect, the Israeli government sold the Israeli people to the vaccine manufacturers Pfizer in return for promising to supply data about the workings of the vaccination programme. In order to fulfil its part of the bargain, the Israeli government needed to ensure that as many as possible of the Israeli people were vaccinated. So it sought to coerce them, by instituting a 'green pass’ that excluded unvaccinated people from places of recreation, entertainment, education and worship.

The Israeli government and media tried to justify the green pass by claiming that the presence of unvaccinated people in public spaces would cause COVID to spread and lead to more deaths. As has now been demonstrated, this was the opposite of the truth, and it was in fact vaccinated people who were more likely to spread COVID, but at the time anyone who contradicted the official narrative was silenced and accused of spreading ‘disinformation’.

Apologists for the Israeli government argued that it went the extra mile to be first in the queue for the COVID vaccine because the country is under permanent threat from its neighbours, so a health crisis is also a security crisis. Well, yes, in the light of recent events nobody could deny that Israel is under constant threat, but what about the argument that vaccinating its much-vaunted defence forces would in fact have weakened them and rendered them less capable of responding to an external threat? There was never any actual evidence that the COVID vaccine was safe and/or effective as had been constantly claimed.

Furthermore – as was pointed out by freedom campaigners at the time – the methods used by the Israeli government to coerce as many people as possible to take the COVID vaccine, by excluding the unvaccinated from public places, was uncannily reminiscent of the exclusion of Jews (and other ‘undesirable’ social groups) from German society in the 1930s, and that coercing people to take part in a medical experiment, without their informed consent, was a clear breach of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics that had been instituted after the trials of Nazi doctors at the end of the Second World War.

I set up my campaign group, Jews For Justice, in the autumn of 2021, in order to make these specific points, my reasoning being that (in the light of our history) it is much more difficult to silence a group of Jews who are talking about these subjects than it is to shut down non-Jewish campaigners.

Which brings us to the events of October 7^th, 2023. It was the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest, so I did not hear the news until the evening. Immediately I called out the supposed story of a failure of military intelligence as ‘highly suspicious’ and suggested that we were being ‘played’ once again. (It’s on my Twitter feed @AndrewBarr2020 should anyone want to check.) It seemed evident to me that the Israeli government must at the very least have had foreknowledge of the terrorist attack and done nothing to prevent it, most likely because of the strategic opportunity presented by a massacre of its citizens to sanction a response in a manner that suited its military plans for the region.

In coming to this judgment, I was influenced by the reputation of the Israeli state as a world-leader in military intelligence – indeed the Israeli economy is dependent upon earnings from the export of military intelligence technology – and by the fact that the Israeli government had sold its people to Pfizer in a medical experiment that had cost many thousands of lives. After experiencing a series of jolts in respect of my view of the world over the past three and a half years, I (sadly) no longer found it difficult to contemplate that the Israeli government could have been prepared to sacrifice more than a thousand of its citizens for strategic purposes. I have seen no reason since 7^th October to change my mind.

I don’t want to get lost in the detail here, that’s a job for others; what interests me are the consequences of arguing whether (or not) the Israeli government consciously failed to prevent the 7^th October pogrom. The freedom movement has split over this issue, not least the Jewish and Israeli parts of it. And it’s the Israeli government that benefits from a split among its most vocal critics.

The most prominent of the Israeli ‘citizen journalists’ to have argued for a deliberate – rather than accidental – failure of military intelligence, Efrat Fenigson, has been very measured in her judgment. Yet this has not prevented her former friends from turning upon her in a public and personal manner. The lawyer Gal Gur, who also has a significant on-line following within Israel, described on social media how she and Efrat had previously been friends and allies in their criticism of the government’s COVID policy but had parted ways because they had a different approach to truth and information: she alleged that Efrat was no kind of journalist but just a marketing person who knew how to promote herself. ‘She is not a reliable source for facts since she doesn’t investigate anything. No facts, only rumours, speculations and her own opinions based on nothing.’

Here in Britain the influential independent Jewish journalist Karen Harradine has from the beginning been very critical of both the British and Israeli governments’ COVID policies in her articles in The Conservative Woman. More recently, she has been outspoken about the antisemitism which is poisoning (and discrediting) the freedom movement, something that certainly needed saying. Karen too has launched into Efrat Fenigson for propounding ‘batshit crazy conspiracy theories’, insisting that ‘Israel was overwhelmed for many reasons, including underestimating Hamas, being distracted by woke politics, weakened and divided through lockdowns. It did not “let it happen”. To assert this is a blood libel and lets the jihadists off the hook.’

The term ‘blood libel’ refers to the canard dating from the Middle Ages – but still widespread in Arab countries – that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood in religious rituals. I really don’t see how this can bear any connection to the suggestion that the Israeli government countenanced the pogrom. Nor do I see how this argument would ‘let the jihadists off the hook’. It doesn’t make them any less guilty. They just found it easier to murder the people they intended to murder anyway.

The events of 7^th October have split the entire international freedom movement along pre-existing fault lines. Campaigners on the Left (who tend broadly to be pro-Palestinian) have turned against their former allies on the Right (generally pro-Israeli), and vice versa. So much for the claim one was hearing until recently that the old Left-Right divide no longer existed!

And (as I’ve mentioned) the pogrom has amplified a division among Jewish and Israeli freedom campaigners, between those who subscribe to a ‘cock-up’ and those who favour a ‘conspiracy’ interpretation of events, between those who continue to insist that the criminal actions of governments over the past three and a half years can be explained entirely by reference to incompetence, negligence and corruption, and those who argue that we need to look at the bigger picture. This division has simply been refracted through the prism of the recent pogrom in Israel.

Certainly it is possible to be critical of governments’ COVID measures, and even to compare them to the policies of Nazi Germany, without necessarily believing that they reflect a conspiracy to transform liberal democracies into totalitarian technocracies. Campaigners who step back from such a conclusion would no doubt insist that they are demonstrating intellectual rigour. But one might equally suggest that they could have shown a little more curiosity as to why governments might have chosen to institute policies they perfectly well knew would prove harmful.

It’s also possible that both interpretations – both the cock-up and the conspiracy theories – are correct. They’re not mutually exclusive. Personally I have been pondering the question, ‘How far stupid? And how far evil?’ ever since the spring of 2020. I see no reason to doubt that both stupidity and evil-doing have played a major part in recent history.

There is also a specific issue relating to Israel. The Israeli state was founded in order to protect Jews from persecution – not so much because of the Holocaust but because of the centuries of Jew-hate and pogroms that preceded the Holocaust – and so if the Israeli state has abandoned its role in protecting Jews from persecution then it has lost its raison d’être and should to be regarded as a failed state. I wonder if that prospect is too terrifying for some passionately pro-Israel Jews to contemplate.

The argument over whether (or not) the Israeli government countenanced the October 7^th pogrom also relates to the status of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) in Israeli society. If the Israeli state deliberately failed to prevent the pogrom, then this suggests complicity on the part of the IDF, at least at some level of command. Most Israeli citizens are required to spend time serving in the IDF, which is regarded by the public as a national institution, and as an army of the people, rather than as an instrument of state repression. To suggest that the IDF might have been corrupted, at any level, remains for many Israelis unthinkable, whatever they might be prepared to believe about the Israeli government.

There is also another, deeper question here about the purpose of the Israeli state, which I’ve not seen considered elsewhere in relation to the pogrom and its consequences. As I’ve mentioned, the State of Israel was founded (in 1948) to provide a home for Jewish people after centuries of persecution. The Zionist movement, which was responsible for the creation of the State of Israel, was a secular and political rather than a religious project, but from the beginning the Zionists had to make accommodation with religious Jews who saw the return to the Holy Land in a very different light. David Ben-Gurion, the principal founder of the State of Israel and its first Prime Minister, had intended to establish the state along secular lines but was compelled for political reasons to make a deal with religious parties, known as the Status Quo Agreement, under which four principles of religious Judaism – the day of rest (the Sabbath), the dietary laws (Kashrut/Kosher), the form of marriage and the method of education – were incorporated into the laws of the new country. Ben-Gurion had not expected the Status Quo to prove a problem because he thought that orthodox Jews were a marginal group who would become less important as time went on. Contrary to Ben-Gurion’s expectation, orthodox Jews have grown significantly in numbers and in political influence through the 75-year history of the State of Israel.

It is the ever-growing political influence of Religious Zionist groups that provides the background to the recent pogrom. One subject on which all parties agree is that Israeli unity has been weakened over the past year by a political dispute over two different perceptions of the State of Israel, over whether it should be a state of all its citizens – a state like any other – or a Jewish state with Jewish laws. This argument spilled out into protests in the streets, involving supporters of both sides, which continued for months. Hamas were perfectly well aware that Israel had been weakened this year by internal disputes, which encouraged them to launch their attack.

I am a little wary, as a British Jew, of telling Israelis how I think they should run their country – they would probably tell me that it is none of my business – but on the other hand we diaspora Jews always suffer blowback from events in Israel, so it would be unreasonable to deny us the right to comment upon them.

I cannot see a long-term future for Israel if it is simply a country like any other. Israel is unique in the world in being the only Jewish state. At the same time, according to its Basic Law, it is also a democratic state. It is moot whether these two notions – being a Jewish state and being a democratic state – are complementary or contradictory. There have (perhaps not surprisingly) been endless discussions on the topic. One tends to see a lot of aphorisms such as that Israel is not as democratic as proponents of democracy would like it to be, and not as Jewish as religious campaigners would like it to become. It’s an uneasy balance.

The point that I’d like to emphasise here about being a Jewish state is that such a state needs to hold itself to Jewish ethical and moral principles. I have no truck with foreign, non-Jewish self-described ‘human rights advocates’ and ‘peace campaigners’ who seek to hold Israel to a higher standard than other countries. I wouldn’t necessarily say that they’re ‘antisemitic’ but they certainly do not stand on the moral high ground on which they imagine they find themselves. On the other hand, Israel, because it is a Jewish state, should definitely hold itself to a higher standard than other countries. Israel should hold itself to the standards of Judaism.

To quote Aharon Barak, former President of the Israeli Supreme Court, ‘The fundamental values of Judaism are the fundamental values of the state – namely, love of man, the sanctity of life, social justice, doing what is good and right, preserving human dignity, the rule of law, etc. – values bequeathed by Judaism to the entire world.’ 

It all goes back to the Exodus story. I just don’t think it’s generally understood how important this story is, from a political perspective. It doesn’t matter whether it represents historical truth. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re religious. What matters is the impact of the Exodus narrative upon subsequent history.

What I mean by the Exodus narrative is that before the Israelites escaped from Egypt there was no concept of human rights or freedom. The world was seen as a matter of competing forces in which might was right and the place of those at the bottom of the pyramid seemed to be fixed for all eternity. But then the Israelites escaped from bondage and spent forty years wandering in the wilderness, time they needed to readjust from thinking like slaves to thinking like a free people. With the Exodus story, and the Mosaic covenant on Mount Sinai, that is the covenant between G-d and the Israelites in which Moses acted as the intermediary, with this covenant came the introduction to the world of concepts such as human rights and civil liberties, and the opportunity at long last to break the cycle of oppression. It is no accident that the Exodus narrative inspired liberation movements from the English and American Revolutions to the anti-slavery and civil rights campaigns. And – whether one is religious or not, Jewish or not – I am convinced that it should still inspire us today.

The Torah (the ‘teaching’, the Five Books of Moses) remains for observant Jews the principal source of instruction on how to conduct their lives. This sentence, or one very like it, appears there repeatedly: ‘Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 23:9).