Robert Manne on Israel, occupation and a moral catastrophe

In 1967 the Holocaust was as close in time as 9/11 is to us today. In June, a war broke out between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. At that time Israel’s military capacity was unknown. Many Jewish students believed that the Arab armies might succeed where the Einsatzgruppen and the Nazi SS had failed.

Hundreds of us attended an evening meeting in a hall on Albert Park Lake. Apart from a small circle of Monash Labour Club rebels that included my childhood friend David Nadel, whose misjudgement angered me but whose courage I privately admired, the atmosphere was one of genuine fear and of heightened patriotism – or perhaps, in George Orwell’s terminology, of transferred nationalism.

I fully shared this emotion, the like of which I have never felt before or since. A thick fog hung over the lake that evening. It somehow seemed appropriate. I rang Uncle Hans to tell him that I had decided to fly to Israel at once to help in whatever way I could. He listened quietly, probably somewhat alarmed.

As the fog lifted next morning, so in small part had my resolve. And before I had made any firm plans, the war was over. I will never know whether I would have volunteered for service if Israel had been under threat.

More than half a century later, Israel still controls the territories on the West Bank of the Jordan River and, indirectly, Gaza that it captured in what became known as the Six-Day War. As I write these words, the disastrous consequences are playing out – the vicious murder of 1,200 Israelis by the dominant Palestinian group in Gaza, Hamas, that has been answered by the Israeli Defense Force’s destruction of Gaza with such astonishing cruelty that I feel profoundly ashamed, as a Jew, about the behaviour of the Israeli government and the level of support offered for its actions by the majority of the people of Israel and most Jewish leaders throughout the Diaspora.