by Jonathan Dale
The recently issued ‘Guidelines on Antisemitism’, published by Friends House in the midst of a genocide, have created a storm of controversy, as you will quickly realise if you look at the succession of comments on this website and the letters of protest in the Quaker Friend magazine.
I was astounded from my first reading. I have closely followed hundreds of Quaker position statement but never before felt so frustrated at the way in which the effort to be fair minded to one community results in a messy lack of fairness to another. These are my principal reservations and criticisms:
- The stress in the Guidelines on the unique nature of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazi regime is highly problematic. It comes, at the precise time when the state of Israel, established for Jews to escape from genocidal pogroms and the long history of antisemitic treatment, has embarked on a genocide itself against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. How is it that a people and to an extent, a faith, facilitates its own participation in the genocidal destruction of its near neighbours, with such strong levels of internal support? Why should it be unacceptable to suggest that a people who suffered a holocaust should be especially vigilant and faithful to avoid perpetrating one themselves. Certainly, as a few of my ancestors were slavers, I would expect to be challenged not to perpetrate such oppression. And, further, to be challenged to find appropriate ways of making amends.
- At the same time, the Guidelines make clear that criticism of Israel may be antisemitic, whether deliberately or unconsciously. What are we supposed to make of that? What criticism of Israel is too strong? The Guidance just talks about the importance of context. Strange, then, that the Genocide in Gaza and the West Bank (developing) is not mentioned. I chant “Israel is a Terror State” with the Palestine marchers in Manchester each Saturday. I believe it to be true. This is in part a matter of definition. The Guidance looks at both the IHRA and the Jerusalem declarations but leads us to favour the former as organised Jewish opinion is “mistrustful” of the latter. But the former warns much more strongly of a danger of criticism of Israel sliding into antisemitism. No doubt this does happen. But I do not believe that it applies to most criticism of Israel. Moreover, to try to make Quakers hesitate or moderate their criticism of a country engaged in ruthless oppression of a subject people, ethnic cleansing and a pitiless genocide is an insult to our Quaker stress on plain speaking.
- And then there are tropes, the long standing conspiracy theories as to Jewish wealth and power and the like. I don’t want to further the trope but I do think I should be able to say that the British establishment seems to me to be much more sensitive to the well-organised lobbying of the Board of Deputies of British Jews than towards any Muslim voices.
- And I would go further down this route, to try to explain the establishment’s failure to call out Israel’s genocide, despite popular opinion siding with Palestine. My hunch is that there is an undeclared neo-colonialism and equally brutally, racism, at work. The Jewish Israelis, I believe, are seen as closer to “us”, whiter than the Palestinians. Our Establishment over time has found it easier to identify with them. Needless to say, this is not in the Guidance. Indeed there is hardly anything in it of the context of the creation of the Western-enabled Jewish state and the endless conflict with the Palestinians who remained – and indeed with communities of Palestinians exiled all over the Middle East.
- My last word – in this article – on criticism of Israel deals yet again with the admonition to make sure that one’s criticism of Israel is not out of proportion. In other words, criticism is acceptable only so long as it is matched by one’s concern for the Uighurs, the Sudanese, the Ukrainians etc. This is the result of a stultifying Quaker timidity. The UK has a special responsibility for the creation of Israel, failing in its expressed obligation to ensure that Palestinian interests were protected. This conflict has also been running for 80 years or more and the UK Government has been wickedly supporting the oppression of the Palestinians both by its actions and its failures to act
- PS. This may seem harsh. I am aware of the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish dream of a safe haven. I am aware that they fear an attempt to drive them out … but they have never really tested this out by offering genuine olive branches rather than uprooting and burning Palestinian olive trees. I also fear deeply for the corrosive effects on the Israeli Jewish population both with hundreds of thousands of young men and women engaging in horrific acts of violence, almost without pause; and even more, being schooled to think in terms of such actions being perpetrated with almost total impunity. What does that do to the soul?
2026 April 20
Quaker Socialist Society 