I’m sitting in front of a big screen, crammed with 40 or more others in the back room of a pub. The film starts, and we’re watching one of those brain-melting Trump-style mass rallies, all flashing lights, reverberating electronic drums and streaming flags. Bright-eyed crowds are standing waving their arms, screaming in excitement – but there’s no entertainment going on as far as I can see: just a rather fat, unappealing business-suit wearing man with a mic doing rabble-rousing. What is it, televangelism?

I don’t know how much of this I can stand. I know it’s a generational thing. I was deeply shocked on a school placement a few years ago to discover this is what assemblies look like in chain academy schools nowadays. Duddle-um duddle-um PRIDE! FLASHLASHFLASH! Duddle-um duddle-um ASPIRATION! FLASHLASHFLASH! Duddle-um duddle-um ACHIEVEMENT! FLASHLASHFLASH!

The only difference is that where the US evangelist types appear to be carried into rapture by this stuff, your average British school kid manages to ignore it, and carry on doing what they do on their mobile phones throughout….  Phew. The film’s moved on from the deafening rally. The flags were Israeli. The event was an AIPAC conference in the US of A.

I sat up and started listening hard. I was a Labour Party officer during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and had some very unpleasant experiences before stepping down, so I was an avid reader of Asa Winstanley’s Weaponising of Anti-Semitism: how the Israel lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn. Winstanley is a meticulous investigative journalist and there is plenty of evidence out there still, to show how often his explorations into malpractice in the Labour Party uncovered signs of AIPAC activity and funding….

Recommendation

You know, I could talk about this film all night, so I’ll just put a link here, and recommend that you get your local PSC or TU or whoever to arrange a showing, then I’ll give you my three best ‘takeaways.’

***Addendum Oct 2024 The full documentary is now available on YouTube ***

Takeaways

Here are the three big ideas I’d like to pass on after watching and discussing that film…

Israelism

First, Israelism is a really useful word, let’s use it – not least because political manipulators have been busy leading both legislatures and police into equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Israelism is not Judaism – either as a tradition or as a religion. There are plenty of religious Jewish people who do not see Israel at the centre of their beliefs and ambitions and as for cultural Judaism – I’ve had so many interesting conversations with Jewish friends about this – they tend to start out on topics like honour and responsibility, then get into family traditions and festival-keeping, and the importance of being ready to provide hospitality to a stranger. Nothing about doing battle against anyone and everyone for the sake of Israel.

Israelism is not Zionism. At least it doesn’t sound like that to me. Self-identifying Zionists I’ve met tend to be avid readers of ancient scripts and you can’t generally talk to them for long before they start regaling you with details of battles ‘we’ (we who?) won against long-gone tribes that they somehow identify as Palestinians in ill-defined bits of the land that might, in ancient times, have been part of what is now Israel / Palestine. Here’s a memorable example.

So, this new thing that seems to consist entirely of a nebulous support for Israel and a belief in the endemic violence and unreasonableness of Palestinians is ‘Israelism’. The film spent quite a bit of time on a woman working in a US university as an ‘Advocate for Israel’.  She said she loved Israel, said it vehemently, but when encouraged to say more, she said nothing about landscape or climate, culture, architecture or people, she just said ‘it’s in the blood. I’ll always love Israel’. You can’t argue with a stance like that – there’s nothing to get hold of. When she talks about the campus where she works, she says they’re lucky because this university is ‘mostly apolitical’ whereas some campuses ‘are anti-Semitic.’ Those are your choices – apolitical or anti-Semitic.

They just want to stay in that hazy, ill-defined, entirely uncritical love-affair with Israel. And that means not thinking too deeply about Israeli politics. Palestinians barely exist in their minds. Therefore, the only possible reason anyone opposes them is anti-Semitism.

Keep talking

Second, for those of us who are trying to apply reason in order to stop a genocide, that ‘apolitical’, emotional commitment to Israel can be very frustrating – but it is possible to break through it. One of the young people featured in the film had had an AIPAC approved upbringing, had been to Jewish schools, had taken advantage of those funded trips for Jewish youngsters to visit Israel but, her ‘Israelism’ began to fall apart when she listened to other students at uni talking about the experiences of Palestinians, and she couldn’t help noticing that the Israelists had no answer to the problems they were discussing.

So we need to keep talking about what Palestinians are going through, and keep posing those questions to everyone who’s been trained to avoid actually thinking.

Promoting insecurity

And finally, two ex-IDF interviewees, one a US citizen, the other Israeli, spoke about the belief that for Israelis to feel safe and secure, Palestinians have to be unsafe and insecure. They spoke about their realization that the purpose of the IDF presence in the occupied territories is purely to be visibly in charge and unchallengeable. The night raids on people’s houses, the posing on rooftops, all the destructive business with tanks, bulldozers and armoured jeeps, is about reinforcing the message – we are here, and we do what we like. Be afraid.

Beyond Israel, particularly in the UK, people are aware of Palestinians, so organizations like AIPAC rely on maintaining the idea that Palestinians are inherently violent and dangerous, so the world will believe they must be contained. As though every one of them, men, women and children, are ISIS, are terrorists, are potential rapists and child killers, who must be regularly and energetically cowed so Israel can stay in control.

It doesn’t matter how many Palestinian civilians are killed, it doesn’t matter how many IDF vets confess to sexual violence or attacking children, you must believe that it’s Palestinians who are incurably dangerous.

In other words (in my view anyway) this is all about rampant racism. ‘Give them an inch and they’ll be after your wife’. One of the things that really surprised me, watching that film, is the number of IDF soldiers who are US citizens – gun-toting young men, who take a year or so out to go and give the Arabs what-for.

So what do we do?

At heart, that’s what Israelism is all about and that’s why, for the sake of all Palestinians and Israelis, for the sake of all Americans and Europeans, we have to stop our politicians subscribing to Israelism and to do that, we have to stop the disgusting lobbying and shadow-funding of our MPs by organizations like AIPAC, organizations that have anything but genuine UK interests at heart.

There are hardly any blatant settler-colonialist states left in the world now. We’ve learned how badly that doesn’t work. It’s a repressive system based on racism that can only create violence and misery.

That’s why South Africa are taking Israel to the International Criminal Court over what’s happening in Gaza. Do watch Israelism if you get the chance, and do please reassure anyone who doubts this — aiming to dismantle the settler-colonialist state in Israel does not mean aiming to harm Israeli people, let alone to harm Jews anywhere else in the world. It means putting an end to the state and the colonialist mind-set that are based on hate and division. As the ex-IDF soldier from Breaking the Silence says in the film, the only way to free both Israeli and Palestinian people is to end the occupation.

We in the UK can’t do that directly but we can work on persuading our politicians to find their courage and join the efforts for – first, a ceasefire in Gaza and second, a genuine attempt at reconciliation and a #FreePalestine. So please, keep active, keep going to those demos, and keep talking about Palestine.

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