Published: 9 January 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
I first paid close attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict during the 2014 Gaza war and quickly decided which side I was on.
I saw a video of guests at an Israeli wedding fleeing for cover as Hamas rockets rained down. I saw footage of little girls and boys packed into concrete rooms, quietly speaking Hebrew and flinching as sirens rang. They looked like me and were speaking the language I was raised with. This had a profound effect on me.
I started to observe the hatred of Israel and Israelis that was being cultivated in many online spaces. It felt like every article, think-piece and thread condemned the Israeli government. This made me feel even more certain that it was we who were under attack, and everyone else who was wrong.
Any article even vaguely about Israel or about Jews contained the words “genocidal” and “apartheid”. There were also infrequent but noticeable doses of anti-Semitism: Jew hatred disguised as a defence of human rights.
My relatives lived nine kilometres from the Gaza Strip. Peace can feel very unrealistic when your grandmother is a stone’s throw from an active warzone. Being aware of the Holocaust from a young age, as many Jews are, I held on with great urgency to the words “never again”.
As the violence in Israel escalated, the war became inescapable. Even in Western Australia, where I lived at the time, I would pass through the city and see groups of intimidating university students flying Palestinian flags and delivering scathing speeches against a country that I was trying so hard to feel proud of.
They held a banner that shouted, “Israel is an Apartheid State”. I wondered, as I walked past them, what they would think of me if they knew I was Israeli.
Israel was a place where people voted in elections, took their kids to the beach and went to nightclubs. Palestine, particularly the Gaza Strip, was a place of violence governed by corrupt fundamentalists. I came to the most logical conclusion I could with the information provided to me – that we must do whatever it takes to protect ourselves. Protection from invasion, from anti-Semitism, from being driven into the sea.
But what role do the settlements in the West Bank play? They are not about protection. And what does uprooting Palestinian families from their ancient estates in the middle of the night have to do with defence of the country?
I always knew that the Palestinians had also suffered but started to wonder if this conflict was even in the interests of Israelis.
Since 2000, this conflict has caused the deaths of 1270 Israelis. To condemn yet another generation of Israelis to this fate is not an option – and this isn’t even touching on civilian deaths on the other side.
Today I support the two-state solution and feel that achieving sustainable peace with the Palestinians should be our priority. What changed? There was no single turning point, but rather a slow process where I learned the costs of the status quo and the urgent need to turn things around.
Israel spent 1.8 billion shekels ($750m) on the settlements in 2018. The 2019 budget allocated 63 billion shekels to defence. This was paid for by delivering harsh cuts to the Culture Ministry and reducing benefits for new migrants to Israel. Disability benefits were also left, in the words of Finance Committee MK Miki Rosenthal, “incomplete and unexplained”.
The cost of continuing this conflict is getting out of control. If the bloodshed drags on and the settlements continue to inflate, where will the next cuts be delivered -sport, welfare, housing? In a nation that can barely support its own Holocaust survivors, how many more state-of-the-art fighter jets do we need?
I long for an Israel that can harness the tradition of Jewish excellence: investing heavily in science, the arts, technology and innovation. I imagine what we could have done with all of the funds that were used to put into Israeli boys and girls in uniforms.
Since 2000, this conflict has caused the deaths of 1270 Israelis. To condemn yet another generation of Israelis to this fate is not an option – and this isn’t even touching on civilian deaths on the other side.
I have not abandoned my faith in Israel, nor have I developed a bleeding heart for Hamas. Rather, it was understanding how much has been robbed from us as a people by this violence. It is time for Israelis and diaspora Jews to come together and soberly question if these two battered chunks of land are worth the senseless trauma they consistently cause us.
The people of Israel have never known peace. They entered a state of war only a day after the Declaration of Independence and although it has never been a war of their choice, it is within their capacity to take active steps to end it.
Let us give the Palestinian people a nation of their own, begin the journey towards reconciliation and raise a generation of people to never know what the inside of an air raid bunker looks like.
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I survived a Palestinian terror attack; for me, demolishing terrorists' homes is no comfort (Haaretz)
