Feeling sorry for the Israelis?
- Sharen Green
- May 27
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 7
I feel really sorry for Israelis at the moment...........
Not the ambassadors who openly incite ethnic cleansing. Not the politicians who are determined on genocide. Not the soldiers who gleefully post their war crimes on social media.
I feel sorry for the Israelis who, for decades, have been working to end the occupation. They are now helplessly witnessing what could become another Final Solution, despite all their efforts.
Here are three of the many groups of Israelis who stand up for Palestinians:
All the young people in the Refuser Network who have gone to jail rather than serve an illegal occupation
The Disobedient Women who have broken the law to go into the West Bank to bring Palestinian mums and their kids to the seaside for a day
The mothers and grandmothers who turn out for Machsom Watch to give the soldiers a hard time at the checkpoints. They get up at silly o’clock to protect Palestinians who queue at dawn to get to their construction jobs in Israel – or they did until October 2023.
In my time in the West Bank, I met people in so many small groups who have been trying hard for so long to get the scales to fall from the eyes of their fellow Israelis.
Rabbis for Human Rights accompany Palestinian farmers to the olive harvest when violent settlers are out in force to beat them up, steal the fruit or set fire to the trees. And I’ve seen an Israeli doctor – part of Physicians for Human Rights – blag her way through a checkpoint to take a mobile clinic to West Bank Palestinians whose journey to hospital is blocked by soldiers in the name of security.
But the two stand-out organisations for me are B’Tselem and Zochrot.
B’Tselem documents human rights violations in the West Bank carried out against Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and illegal settlers. I worked closely with one of their field workers.
We went to a village early one morning after settlers had slaughtered a pig on the steps of the mosque. Graffiti had been daubed in the animal’s blood on the walls. To be fair, IDF soldiers were cleaning the blood off by the time I arrived, but why do such a thing in the first place? Sheer spite?
The most memorable visit was to family in a small block of flats, a couple of weeks after it had been surrounded by soldiers during the night. Lights blazing, loud hailers blaring, the family got up, dressed hastily and sat in their living room waiting for it all to be over. Apparently, the man the IDF were after lived in a different flat and was away.
A soldier started shooting through the walls. The mother of the family was shot dead. My colleague showed me pictures of her brains splattered across her husband’s clothes and her hair sticking to the ceiling. The elder daughter was still in hospital, and her younger sister was now in a wheelchair.
Without B’Tselem this atrocity would have gone unrecorded. Again, I wondered why the soldier had shot up the flat – boredom, maybe?
Perhaps the most radical Israeli organisation is Zochrot. It’s all about remembering the Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe – which happened to the indigenous people of Palestine when, in 1948, Israel became a nation state. More than 500 villages were deliberately destroyed.
Golda Meir famously claimed there was no such thing as a Palestinian and I have heard an Israeli embassy official claim that the land was empty, and that Arabs only arrived after 1948.
Zochrot has painstakingly researched the names of all the destroyed villages and tries to tell Israelis about the suffering the invention of their country has done and continues to do to the people who already lived there.
On one so-called Independence Day, Zochrot members held up the names of some of the destroyed villages in Tel Aviv. When passers-by asked them about their placards and were told, a mini-riot broke out. It was the Zochrot activists who were arrested, not their abusers.
As part of the training to be human rights monitors[i] we toured Lifta, a ruined Palestinian village with a Zochrot member and we heard how it was destroyed.
Next, we visited Yad Veshem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum. At the end of that tour we walked out onto a platform to a peaceful view of the countryside – a great relief after confronting the horrors of the Nazi genocide. But our guide pointed to a spot where the most notorious massacre of a Palestinian village took place – Deir Yassin – in 1948. The event sparked panic across the country and sped up the fleeing of over 700,000 Palestinians. They have never been allowed back.
When I returned three years later for another stint, I did the same tour with the same guide. This time we did not visit Lifta, and she didn’t mention Deir Yassin. Puzzled, I asked her if she could tell us about Zochrot. She laughed, saying I could lose my job for this.
She explained that a colleague had been fired the week before, because he mentioned the Nakba to a group of settlers who had complained. Astonishing as it may seem, it is forbidden by law to mourn the Nakba in the only democracy in the Middle East. Even mentioning it can cost you your job.
So all the creation myths of Israel are built on misrepresentation – the majority of Israelis don’t know and don’t want to know the facts of how their country came into being.
Forgetting the existence of what and who was there before is vital for the Israeli sense of entitlement.
[i] I served on the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, a World Council of Churches Scheme
Thank you Sharen. Brave groups indeed. Braving insults and worse in standing up against the majority who have no moral compass, whether they choose ignorance or not. But then, do politics chime with moral compasss anyway, anywhere?
Thank you for illustrating the commitment and courage of Israeli citizens through organisations such as B’Tselem and Zochrot, who disagree with the actions of the Israeli government and are taking action to make change happen. It is importing to remember and support these brave people, Reading this has challenged me to ask myself, what wouod I do in their shoes?