Palestine
"I'm Jewish but I don't support Israel"

I'm from a Jewish family. Like loads of Jewish people in Britain, I don't practice the religion and I'm very assimilated. But unlike a lot of Jewish people I oppose Israel. I want to say why I refuse to allow the terrible things that the Israeli Army is doing every day to the Palestinians to be done in my name.

Israel was set up after world war two when six million Jews were annihilated by the Nazis in concentration camps. But it was set up in a country where - until 1949 - the majority of the people were Palestinians, most of them Muslims and Christians.

The UN put forward a partition plan to divide Palestine between Palestinians and Jews but in a series of wars the Israeli armed forces and militias took the lot. At Dir Yassin and other places, Israeli commandos massacred the local population and drove them out.

Israel often says it is the only democracy in the Middle East. But it uses a racist citizenship law to define who can and cannot live in Israel. In this way it creates an artificial Jewish majority in the country.

This is called the Law of Return. It means that I can go to Israel and declare myself a citizen as soon as I get off the plane. But a Palestinian, whose family lived there only a generation ago, is not allowed to 'return'. Instead they are forced to live in refugee camps.

The Prime Minister of Israel is called Ariel Sharon. He was responsible for the mass murder of Palestinians in refugee camps at Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon in the 80s. Now he is tearing up peace treaties and ordering the assassination of Palestinian activists. The vast majority of people killed in the struggles in Israel and Palestine over the last year have been Palestinians, including scores of children.

Some people say to me that I should support Israel. But why? To me, the lesson of the Holocaust is not 'do it to someone else' - it's to oppose injustice and oppression, whoever is carrying it out. During the oppression of Jews in Europe under the Nazis, some brave people in Germany resisted what their fellow Germans were doing. They risked being called a traitor because they knew what their government was doing was wrong., They refused to say 'my country right or wrong'.

I hope I would have been like that if I'd been in their shoes. That's why I won't let my background stop me from speaking out against Israel.

Some people think the answer is to have two states in Palestine - one for the Palestinians and one for the Jews. I can't see that working. To have a Jewish state in Palestine means keeping the racist Law of Return. Otherwise there would not be a majority Jewish population.

It is a tragedy that the attempt to build a Jewish state was carried out in a land that was already populated. But the consequence of this is that a specifically Jewish state can only exist in Palestine alongside racist discrimination against Arabs. It is this that has caused the endless cycle of bloodshed and war.

The only answer is for a state in which Jews and Arabs can live together, with no special privileges for any national, ethnic or religious group - a socialist Palestine for all its citizens.

This means I support the rebellion of the Palestinian youth and REVOLUTION's efforts to build a youth movement in Palestine that can bring a socialist message into the struggle.

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