Israel has to defend itself or where will we go?

Israeli soldiers gesture in an armoured vehicle as they drive along a street near the northern town of Kiryat Shmona close to the border with Lebanon on October 10, 2023. Israeli forces on October 10 launched artillery fire at Lebanon after rocket fire towards Israel, the army said. (Photo by Jalaa MAREY / AFP)

In May 1945 a lone Russian soldier approached the Brinnlitz Nazi labour camp on a horse. He had come to tell the inmates they were free. Delighted as they were - the soldier was rewarded with hugs - the newly liberated men and women were also bewildered. Where would they go now?

Realising that their liberator was, like them, a Jew, the former prisoners peppered him with questions. “Have you been in Poland?” they asked, since that was where most of them had come from. “Yes,” replied the officer, “I’ve just come from Poland.” “Are there any Jews left up there?” The officer told them what was simply the truth: “I saw none.”

So where should they go? The officer looked them in the face: “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east - that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” He paused and added: “They don’t like us anywhere.”

Thomas Keneally tells this story in his book Schindler’s Ark, a volume that recounts one of the Holocaust’s most extraordinary stories. But sadly there was nothing exceptional about this exchange. At the end of the war, of those Jews who survived, very few could ever go home. Certainly nobody in my family did.

Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark. Picture: Richard Saker/Getty Images

And it was that - the many hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews with nowhere to go - that played a big role in changing my grandfather’s mind about Zionism. That, and the reflection that the experience of Jews over the previous decade had vindicated much of the Zionist argument.

My mother’s father, Alfred Wiener, had been one of the leaders of Germany’s Jews in the 1920s and 1930s and articulated the view of most German Jews at that time, though by no means all of them. He supported those Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine, but he didn’t support the creation of a Jewish state there.

As I relate in my recent family memoir, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, in 1927 Alfred published a highly successful book based on his travels in Palestine. He argued strongly against the Zionist project. There were, he said, too many Jews in Europe to fit into such a tiny area, the economic ideas of the settlers were utopian, and (he was a considerable Arabic scholar) peace with Palestinian Arabs would be hard to come by. His critics said that his survey of the area was biased and described him as “one of the leaders of German anti-Zionism”.

The great tragedy for the Jews is that while Alfred was right about the difficulty of Jews living safely in Palestine, the Zionists were right about the impossibility of Jews living safely in Alfred’s Berlin. The tension between Alfred’s view that Jews belonged in Germany and the reality of the rise of the Nazis contributed to the nervous collapse he suffered in 1933. It was a challenge to all he had stood for. A challenge to his very identity.

By the end of the war he had gone beyond this. The death and displacement of millions, including so many who were close to him, made him a pragmatic supporter of a state of Israel. It seemed to him obvious that there had to be an answer to the question asked by the Brinnlitz prisoners. Where do we go now? My paternal grandfather, also not a Zionist before the war, felt the same.

Alfred Wiener, Daniel’s maternal grandfather, in the Fifties in the library that bears his name. Picture: Finkelstein Family Collection

So we became a Zionist family, having never been one. We did not move to Israel because (unlike many others) we had alternatives. But we supported its creation, regarding it as an obvious necessity. A century of slaughter and oppression of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, had made the case for a safe space for Jews unanswerable. And the repeated failings of other states to open themselves to Jews, even when they knew of mass murder, meant that this safe space would have to be a Jewish state.

Daniel Finkelstein’s grandmother Lusia with her husband, Dolu, and son Ludwik, in Tel Aviv in April 1945. Picture: Finkelstein Family Collection

And the United Nations reached the same conclusion. In 1947, having toured Palestine and visited Jewish refugee camps in Europe, it proposed to divide the land between Jews and Palestinian Arabs with a state for each. The Jews accepted, the Arab states launched a war. And the Palestinians are still fighting this partition plan.

Like my grandfather in 1927, I understand why the Palestinians did not want to share the land. But like my grandfather in 1947, I cannot see any choice but sharing. And while sharing is rejected by the Palestinians I cannot see any choice but to resist - stubbornly and absolutely and, when necessary, with force, even great force. For Israel must be defended. The question of Brinnlitz remains - where else are we to go?

This then is the question to put to anyone who says they are “pro Palestine” or wish a “Free Palestine” or waves the Palestinian flag. Do you mean in a state alongside Israel, within safe borders? In which case, yes, there is much to talk about. Even though it’s difficult and both sides have debating points that are hard to get past, yes, let’s talk. Or do you mean a state instead of Israel? In which case, no, definitely and firmly not.

Forty five per cent of the world’s Jews now live in Israel. Where else are they to go?

The murderous rampage of Hamas, the killing, the raping, the kidnapping, is so shocking, so sickening it seems almost frivolous to say that it was also ironic. The apologists for this action suggest that Israel’s security measures - its fence, its border posts, its searches - are so oppressive that they are part of what is to blame for what has happened. Yet these terrible acts show that the security measures were necessary.

For this invasion was not a protest march that got out of hand. It was not a complaint about living conditions. It was the latest war launched by Palestinians to demonstrate their unwillingness to share the land. And it cannot win. If the world wants peace in the Middle East, it must ensure that what Hamas has done is not rewarded, or compromised with, in any way. Only once the failure of such violence is obvious to them and to the Palestinian people will it ever stop.

My grandmother was one of seven siblings and the only one to survive the war. Of what happened to her loving sister Dorotea - who sent food parcels to granny when she was exiled to Siberia - there is little record. Nor of how her brother Wilhelm - after whom I am named - died. All we know is that they were shot, or burned, or buried alive, or starved, or gassed, or drowned. With their spouses. And their children.

Every year at Holocaust memorial day politicians arrive and say solemnly “never again”. Now is a test of whether they really mean it. Israel has to defend itself. Or where will we go?