An Australian-Jewish writer details how his support for the Palestinian cause has made him a pariah in his own community.
For 20 years, I’ve been called a Nazi collaborator. Traitor. Self-hating Jew. Terror supporter. Anti-Semite. “I would rather shake Hitler’s hand than yours.” Propagandist. Arab lover.
It’s strange how familiar I’ve become with all these expressions of hatred from people I’ve neither met, nor spoken to; and yet I understand why – the stakes over Israel and Palestine couldn’t be higher, nothing less than a matter of life and death for both.
The vicious comments started appearing as soon as I published my first major article in The Sydney Morning Herald. It was 2003, and I argued that many of the Israeli government’s actions paralleled apartheid-like policies, that its treatment of Palestinians centred around a racist ideology. I was far from the first Jew to write such things in a mainstream news outlet, but the response was explosive. I had touched a nerve that has followed me ever since.
At this point, in my late 20s, I’d never actually been to Israel or Palestine – that was all to change soon – but something in my reading and gut told me that what my fellow Jews were doing in the Middle East was wrong; that the control and occupation of millions of Palestinian lives at the barrel of a gun was a stain on the Jewish people.
Read the article y Antony Lowenstein in The Sydney Morning Herald.