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Everyone can, hopefully, agree that a connection to Israel should not make British Jews a target for antisemitism, which spikes every time that tensi… - Rachel Shabi
" "Everyone can, hopefully, agree that a connection to Israel should not make British Jews a target for antisemitism, which spikes every time that tensions in the region escalate. We might also agree not to infer that anyone with a "connection" to Israel automatically supports the state's violent policies towards the Palestinian people. But from there on, things get murky. One can passionately disagree with a British Jewish person’s appraisal of the Gaza war as "self-defence", but not be motivated by anti-Jewish hatred. One can be distressed by the apocalyptic images coming out of the Palestinian strip and wonder how anyone might justify such horrors, yet not be fuelled by antisemitism. But the different motivations lying behind criticism have been terribly conflated amid a fearful Jewish minority and its established leadership.
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About Rachel Shabi
Rachel Shabi (born 30 March 1973) is a British journalist and writer. She has contributed to The Guardian, among other publications, and is the author of Not the Enemy, Israel's Jews from Arab Lands (2009) and Off-White: The Truth About Anti-Semitism (2024).
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Additional quotes by Rachel Shabi
Every British Jew has their own family story – of emigration and immigration, of threats and losses, but also of community and belonging. My own family’s journey to the UK from Iraq via Israel – two places fatefully touched by the influence of empire – may explain my own lack of shock at the callous, divisive and biased treatment of minority communities by the British political class, Labour included. Remembering Britain's history is not an excuse for today's politicians, or a minimisation of the real and noxious racism that still permeates our society. But it should be a reminder that for many in Britain, the experience of racism is still the norm and not the exception.
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For decades, Israeli and Western leaders have dehumanised Palestinians, but the response cannot now be to dehumanise Israelis. Explaining the political context of the Hamas attacks and the principles of strategic armed struggle is a world away from endorsing an indiscriminate massacre. For if you think that war crimes from Hamas last Saturday are acceptable, how are you going to argue that war crimes from Israel today are not?
To lose moral consistency weakens the moral core of the Palestinian cause. To see these indiscriminate Hamas attacks as an acceptable outcome of Palestinian suffering is not a sign of solidarity; it is a form of moral relativism. To cast oppressed Palestinians as having special clearance for brutality is not a liberation struggle; it is specifically intertwining the cause with violence against civilians. And to say that all Israeli citizens are fair game (as I have seen repeatedly online) is a level of permissibility that is extraordinary. It is the same logic applied now to Palestinians in Gaza by the extremist Israeli government and its cheerleaders.
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