I still see people around social media saying ‘it’s complicated’. I still see them pointing out creases and chasms in the history of Palestine which they use to suggest firstly, it’s hard to see who Palestine ‘belongs to’ and secondly – and incredibly – that this difficulty means they can’t roundly oppose mass killing, displacement, internment and torture.

Well, if anyone says that to me again, I know what to do. Direct them to one of these books:

A Very Short History of the Israel / Palestine Conflict

This is by Ilan Pappe, and the most extraordinary thing about Pappe is that he isn’t a go-to person for the BBC when they discuss the Israel / Palestine situation. The reason this is extraordinary is that as a leading Israeli historian and Director of the European Centre for Palestinian Studies and a professor at the University of Exeter, he is probably the most experienced and best qualified academic in the UK to consult on this ‘complicated’ issue.

But the BBC do not call on him. If you already know why that is, you probably already understand the problem. Here, in a pocket-sized, 150-word paperback, he explains – quite comprehensibly, the history of the conflict. If you’d like the ‘complicated’ condensed even further, here’s my favourite paragraph in the whole book, talking about Gaza in the 1940s.

It’s hard to imagine now, but Gaza was a cosmopolitan town on the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that ran from Cairo to Damascus, and home to some of the oldest Christian and Jewish communities in the world.

… and there we have it. Whoever you are, it’s relatively easy to prove that your ancestors, or people like them, were once in Palestine. If you’ve got a headful of all that ‘complicated’, it’s easy to forget that what is described in that paragraph is a town in a normal country – you know, one of those ones where different kinds of people live and work alongside each other. Pappe talks you through how the British Empire and the Zionist movement each overlaid this situation with their ‘complications’, until they’d persuaded the world that letting Palestinians live freely in Palestine just wasn’t reasonable.

We are not numbers

I know what propaganda can do to the inside of your head so at the start of the current nightmare, as the October 7^th story exploded around us, I chose two Gazan journalists and decided to follow them in particular, so I would have a human anchor when everything got ‘complicated’, as I knew it would, because that’s what always happens when Israel / Palestine is in the news. I chose Hind Khoudary and Hanni Mahmoud.

There’s a personal cost to personalising. To start with, I sought their reports each day to see what was going on. Later, I sought them anxiously to see if they were still alive. There was a particularly horrible moment when there was an attempt on Hanni’s team while they were running a live report. My heart rate went wild whilst cameras wobbled and smoke billowed around and someone shouted ‘where’s Hanni?’

But he lived to report another day. It was a heck of a relief when Hind finally decided she’d had enough, and told the world she was getting out of Gaza.

I wrote recently about Rafaat Alareer, and his now-famous poem about the importance of personal stories. Hind is one of the young writers and reporters who are carrying on the extraordinary work to present Gaza’s story to the world, and has a piece in this collection of such stories, first gathered on the We Are Not Numbers website, here…

Jewish not Zionist

Finally, if you’d like a personal story from a Jewish woman who found her way through the ‘complicated’, here is Marilyn Garson’s book, Jewish not Zionist…

If you’re still lost in ‘complicated’ when someone starts bashing on about the Ottoman Empire, or tries to prove that no-one ever really knew who Palestine ‘belonged to’, please choose one of these books – I promise they’re not complicated. If you’ve got the picture already but would like to help out one of those ‘complicated’ people, please direct them to whichever one you think might work for them.

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