I wrote a shorter version of this essay in March 2023. The events which followed eight months later have given it an air of prescience it doesn’t deserve, as the Hamas attack of October 7th was, for all its un-needful cruelty, just a logical outcome of the situation which Israel had spent seventy-five years creating:

My mother was a refugee, having fled Germany with her parents, first making their way to Holland, and then, in 1938, when that country was threatened, coming to England. She eventually married an Englishman, and, determined that her children – my brother born in 1943 and me born in 1946 – should feel no connection with Germany, refused to let German be spoken in the house. She adopted the English way of life and raised us to think of ourselves as English first, Jews second.
Her mother and father, both Orthodox, made alyiah in 1948, visiting England regularly every year thereafter, at some point taking the opportunity to ask of my mother that they should be allowed to take my brother and me to Israel to bring us up as, to use her words, ‘good Jews’. She refused outright, and as a result she and her parents were estranged, and they never came to England again.
But her feelings about all this must have been much deeper and more painful than she allowed us to see.
There came a brief moment which proved to be of the greatest significance to me since it caused me after much thought to reflect on my understanding of my Jewish inheritance and of the part Israel played in defining that inheritance.
By chance I was visiting my parents as the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 were occurring and television reports were showing what was happening, including Israel’s role in facilitating the massacres. It was horrifying to see just as it was, but then my mother said, out of the blue, ‘It’s about time we got something back.’
My response was. ‘How could you say such a thing?’
My father stood up and left the room, I think fearing what might follow from this exchange: he knew well how fractious my relationship with my mother had been all my life. But my mother said no more, though there were tears in her eyes. I too said nothing; but I was thinking furiously, as was she, just not about the same things. I do believe she bitterly regretted her comment, but I realised it must have come from a very dark place which she had determined to keep in darkness because it was too painful to bring into the light; though it may have explained, at least in part, her quick,sometimes explosive, temper, of which I was often the victim.
In any event, we never spoke of Israel again. It would not have eased things between us.
I did however come finally to a judgment of my own as regarding Israel and the particular choices it has made.
The need for vengeance can be a powerful need, and may or may not be justifiable. But those who choose to revenge themselves on innocents when the guilty are out of their reach are choosing the path of evil, and to justify that revenge on the basis of a religious faith is to make a mockery of the very concept of faith. Ultimately, they take the risk of themselves becoming the object of revenge. How can it help end the suffering of the Jewish people by causing suffering to another people?
Dogmas, religious and political, are infinitely dangerous when they takes primacy over simple humanity. They hurt not only those who are victimised by them, but in time those who promote them. Surely that is one of the chief lessons to be learnt from the Third Reich.
I don’t know how much my mother understood that. It is clear from the atrocities committed on Sabra and Shatila, and all the others that Israel has perpetrated, that far too many Israelis haven’t.
And when I recall that Israel is the home my grandparents whom as a child I loved dearly wanted for my brother and me, I wonder, with a sense of eerieness, what would have become of us if my mother had not been so determined to keep her family together? It’s not something I like to think about too much.
But I do know that my mother’s decision to leave her Jewishness behind her never really worked, and I was always conscious of that part of my heritage, and of recent history: which is why I think I understand my mother’s pain. I do not know exactly what she and her family went through in the years immediately before I was born because I was not there and it was never spoken of. But I know that she carried a burden of emotion all her life, and her remark was just the tiniest hint as to how heavy that burden was.
I see this distinction: there is how she and many other Jews chose to bear this burden, and there is the Zionist choice. I have come to understand that I am, whatever my mother’s wishes were for me, a Jew; but I will never walk the path of the Zionist. I choose to be at peace with my neighbours and I ache for my fellow-Jews in Israel to one day make peace with theirs. That is the path my mother chose, despite the loss first of her homeland and then of her family, and that is the path I walk down now; and for showing me that path, my mother, aleha hashalom, has earned my profoundest gratitude.