Over the past decade, dozens of people have asked me to explain why I shifted my political sympathies from an apparently pro-Palestinian to pro-Israel position.
My stock answer is to imply that this is not the case by arguing that my fundamental opinions have not changed. I tell everybody that I have always been pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict.
But to be honest this response is only a partial truth. There is no doubt that my emotional sympathies have switched since the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000. Prior to that time I mostly tended to side with Palestinian arguments when they collided with mainstream Israeli positions. This pro-Palestinian sympathy dated back to my experiences in 1982 as a naive 17-year-old first-year university student caught up in the ill winds and polarisation of the Lebanon War debate at Melbourne University. I had been shocked by the enormous brutality of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and was also appalled five years later in 1987 by the aggressive Israeli response to the first Palestinian Intifada. These events had engendered a gut sympathy for the Palestinian national cause above feelings of solidarity with my fellow Jews in Israel, although I never shared the "abolish Israel" position that was then popular in many left groups.
Publicly I always claimed to be pro-Israel as well as pro-Palestinian, and argued that a two-state solution was as much in the long-term interests of Israelis as Palestinians. But in practice my language was biased towards the Palestinian narrative. For example, writing in the now-defunct Jewish intellectual journal Generation in 1997, I criticised other Jews for failing to "display any empathy for, or any understanding of, the Palestinian position", and arrogantly suggested that those Jews who failed to support two states were too concerned with specific Jewish rather than broader universalistic rights.
One negative consequence of my bias was that I tended to politically excuse Palestinian terrorism as acts of a desperate people living under occupation (the so-called "root causes" thesis), and downplay the traumatic impact of these actions on Israeli political views and fears. Using Western cultural assumptions, I constructed the Palestinians as helpless victims who lacked agency and could be absolved of responsibility for their actions. In contrast, my friendship with Israel was limited to statements of solidarity with left-wing Israelis who shared my two state views. I tended to caricature most other ordinary Israelis as implicit or explicit supporters of the Greater Israel project which ignored the enormous diversity and plurality within Israel's liberal democratic political system.
Later the events of July and then September 2000 drained my pro-Palestinian sympathy, and forced me to apply the same critical analysis to Palestinian views and actions that I had always applied to Israel. The Palestinian demands at the Camp David negotiations for an unconditional return of 1948 Palestinian refugees to Green Line Israel rather than to a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip suggested that they had not come to terms with even the basic parameters of a two-state solution. Shortly afterwards the indiscriminate violence and extremism of the second Palestinian Intifada finally removed my infantile prioritising of one form of national rights over another. I now accepted that the Palestinians had and always have had political choices, and that their actions seemed to be driven by a zero-sum political culture which demanded absolute rather than partial justice.
Politics is not only about ideals and philosophy, but also about political alliances. In the pre-2000 period, it was possible to be pro-Palestinian and to work cooperatively with pro-Palestinian groups in favour of Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation, but also support Israel's right to exist. Most of the Australian left had followed the PLO political line which recognised Israel implicitly in 1988, and explicitly in the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993. There were very few Palestinian advocates in that era who did not at least publicly recognise the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
In contrast, it was much more difficult in those years to be pro-Israel, but also oppose the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and support two states. Most of the Australian Jewish leaders seemed to be defenders of the Greater Israel project, and intolerant towards any political solution which involved legitimising Palestinian nationalism.
Strangely, those political positions have virtually reversed themselves since September 2000. Most Australian Jewish leaders today publicly support two states, and it is hard to think of any local Jewish spokesperson who seriously defends the Greater Israel project. It is now relatively easy to be pro-Israel, and at the same time to espouse the two-state views traditionally associated with left-wing Israeli groups such as the Meretz Alliance and the Peace Now movement.
In contrast, it has become very difficult if not impossible to be pro-Palestinian, and support a two-state perspective. Many Australian leftists who strongly advocated peace and reconciliation in the Oslo era have instead regressed to the earlier pre-1988 PLO position in favour of Israel's destruction. It is now called in this politically-correct era the so-called "one state solution" instead of the earlier terminology of a so-called "secular democratic state". In practice, it means that Israel will cease to exist either by military violence or political coercion, and will be replaced by an exclusivist Arab state of Palestine, neither secular nor democratic, in which Jews will at best be allowed to remain as a tolerated religious, not national, minority.
The malevolence and irrationality of the second Palestinian Intifada has also helped me to finally understand the factors that caused the 1948 Palestinian Naqba or Catastrophe. Like many left-wing Jews I enthusiastically read Benny Morris's seminal work The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the late 1980s, and concluded that Israel bore the major responsibility for the Palestinian refugee tragedy. But the dynamics of the Second Intifada suggest a more critical historical interpretation. On both occasions (1947-48 and 2000-02) the Palestinians had initiated a conflict and lost. They had then blamed the Israeli victims of their aggression for acting in self-defence and winning instead of acknowledging that the war had been a horrible error.
In 1948, the Arab states had refused to take responsibility for resettling the Palestinian refugees as permanent and equal citizens in their countries as the Israelis had done with an equally large number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and instead duped the refugees into believing that they would be able to return to their former homes inside Israel. Similarly in 2000-02, the Palestinian leadership refused to acknowledge that their actions had caused the deaths and injuries of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis, and achieved absolutely nothing. If the Palestinians had not reneged on the commitment they made in the Oslo Accord to peaceful negotiations they almost certainly would have confirmed an independent state with the support of Israel by the end of 2001, and currently be celebrating its 10th anniversary. Instead, they are now arguably further away from securing an independent state than at any time since 1992.
Today like most left-wing Jews I continue to oppose the views and actions of the Israeli hawks, and particularly the settlers movement and their apologists whose ethnocentrism is indefensible. My long-held position in favour of a two-state solution based on the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign Jewish state within roughly the pre-1967 Green Line borders, and equally the right of the Palestinians to a secure independent state within the West Bank and Gaza Strip is obviously not shared by the hardline Bibi Netanyahu and his government. But just as I remained proud to be an Australian during the Howard government years whilst vehemently rejecting the policies of the Coalition government so I proudly remain a strong friend of Israel and its people regardless of the views of its current government.
Dr Philip Mendes is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy & Community Development in the Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine at Monash University.
