Written by Antisemitism is real. But we cannot be blackmailed into silence about Binyamin Netanyahu’s excesses
Max Hastings in The Times, 27 May
Walking alone in the fields I sometimes exclaim loudly, obliging me to assure the dogs that I am not getting at them. Dismay is instead prompted by a memory of some folly in my own past. It happened the other day when I was thinking about the Middle East. In my twenties I fell in love with Israel. After Yom Kippur 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a devastating two-front assault, I was among the first correspondents to fly into Tel Aviv to report the war.
Chaos reigned as Israel reeled, and thus reporters were able to seize extraordinary opportunities to eyeball the action. I watched as the cruelly battered tank brigades fought for Israel’s life on the Golan Heights, then staged a brilliant night crossing of the Suez Canal to encircle an Egyptian army.
I talked to many soldiers who, in those days, almost all spoke English. I was captivated by the stories of their own lives, of the modern Jewish experience. When the war ended, I wrote a deeply emotional leader page article, expressing my admiration for “a very great people, who have come closer to destruction than blind Europe seems willing to recognise”.
Then — and this is the bit that made me cringe in the fields last week — I added: “I yearned to carry a rifle beside them”. At the time, I really felt like that. But journalists should never express such sentiments, and I was castigated by some colleagues. My only excuse is that I was 27, which today seems very young.
Seven years later, I was having lunch in Jerusalem with the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz, and fulminating against prime minister Menachem Begin’s treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Amos, a liberal peacenik, responded: “People like you, who have loved Israel as a European country, are doomed to disappointment. Israel is becoming a Middle Eastern country. I hope that it will never behave worse than other Middle Eastern countries. But do not expect it to behave better.”
You can guess where all this is heading: towards an expression of revulsion, shared by countless people around the world, towards the conduct of 2026 Israel. Every day, bad stuff is being done in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza with only the most cursory foreign scrutiny, because we are preoccupied with Iran, Ukraine, Trump’s serial madnesses. Whatever case Israel may make for its right to take on Hezbollah and Hamas, many of us find wholly unacceptable the scale of collateral casualties to civilians, in the tens of thousands if not more. Palestinians have no oil, no Strait of Hormuz.
Moreover, we flinch from saying things that might cause us to be branded antisemitic. Hatred of Jews merely because they are Jews is a real force. In Britain over a lifetime I have witnessed displays of it, from some big players. But this cannot cause the rest of us to be morally blackmailed into silence about the appalling excesses of the Netanyahu government, starting the year with his successful incitement of Trump to attack Iran and most recently abasing the would-be Gaza aid bringers in Israeli captivity.
A prominent Israeli said to me long ago, when I deplored the Palestinians’ plight: “People such as you liked us when we were ghetto Jews, on the ropes” — he cited my reporting of the Yom Kippur War. “Now that we are winners, you turn on us.”
It is a contradiction that while most Arabs hate Israel, they have no time for the Palestinians. Much of the hostility derives, I think, from envy. Israel has created one of the most successful economies in the world, while if the Arab states did not have oil, they would have nothing. They toil not, neither do they do much successful spinning.
Even the Gulf states which build skyscrapers could never have poured concrete had they not started with the black stuff in the sand. Every critic of Israel, including me, finds it hard to answer the question: what could its government concede that would satisfy the Arabs?
Evidence is all around us of a Jewish genius, both in Israel and the Diaspora. Since Saladin, however, there has been scant sign of comparable Arab achievement — consider Nobel prizes, or an absence of them. Colonialism cannot take all the blame.
Beyond science and commerce, there has also been an Israeli military genius, though in recent times this has atrophied. The IDF is discovering that merely killing your enemies, no matter in what numbers, does little to resolve ancestral issues; it is likely indeed to breed a new generation of Israel-haters.
This brings me back to the Yom Kippur war, following which that passionate Zionist and terrific reporter James Cameron sent me a nice letter. He himself, he said, when covering Israel’s earlier wars, had felt the way I did: “It is quite impossible to work in combat with the Israeli army without this response, if you have any sense of history and drama.” But then he added: “I have sometimes wondered … whether this irresistible military mesmerism hasn’t clouded for us some of the political falsities.”
Jimmy was right then, of course, and is still right now. Somewhere in the past decades compassion and moderation have been banished from Israel’s polity, just as they have been surgically extracted from Trump’s United States, which licenses and empowers Netanyahu.
Superior might alone commands respect, while weakness inspires contempt. Yet it seems extraordinarily dangerous to found an entire national strategy upon an assumption of permanent military superiority. Israel has made itself the most formidable force in the Middle East. Looking back across more than half a century, however, I grieve for many fine things which it has discarded in the process.
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