Children of the Holocaust

Anne Karpf is a columnist in the Saturday Guardian's Family section. A writer and broadcaster, she is, most recently, the author of The Human Voice (2006)

I've just been talking on the phone to an aunt in Israel - a Holocaust survivor like my mother. After swapping news about the family, the subject of the Middle East came up. Though our views sometimes overlap they also differ because, despite her strong criticism of the current Israeli government and despair over their incursion last year into Lebanon, she's ultimately a passionate defender of the state.

Our conversation was heated but never less than amicable: what struck me was how long it is since I've had such a vigorous exchange of views about the Middle East with other Jews in Britain with whom I disagree that didn't end with me being accused of something - from being self-hating, to undermining the very future of Judaism. In fact, from what I've read and what my aunt described, I get the sense that the quality of debate is far more frank and uninhibited in Israel than it is here. This is why I signed the Independent Jewish Voices declaration.

Growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s as the child of Holocaust survivors, I learned not what some educators now like to glibly claim as "the lessons of the Holocaust" - be nice to your neighbour - but the opposite: lie low. The majority of British Jews either lived exclusively in Jewish communities or avoided drawing attention to their Jewishness.

This changed in the 1980s and 1990s, and a new confidence emerged, bringing an explosion of interest in Jewish identity and history. But as the situation in the Middle East has developed, it feels as if we're stepping back in time. Jews are under pressure, not least from many fellow Jews, to uncritically endorse everything that the Israeli government does, or else to lie low, almost disavowing their Jewishness for fear of being identified with an occupying power.

I refuse both positions. I grew up in household where practically every meal was conducted to the sound of heated political argument. This isn't unusual: the yeshiva (an academy for the study of the Torah) is fundamentally a place where one Jew likes to shout his viewpoint louder than the other, where knowledge is advanced by the fierce contestation of conflicting interpretation. The idea of a single Jewish orthodoxy is a sign of weakness, not strength; of fear rather than confidence.

It's been hard for me to speak out about the Middle East: most surviving members of my family live in Israel, and for a long time my family's experience made me anxious about the repercussions that could come from speaking one's mind.

Yet the more that the Israeli government claims to act on behalf of all Jews, the more I feel obliged to make my dissenting voice heard. In this I draw inspiration from the long Jewish tradition of fighting for human rights, other people's as well as one's own: Jews have been prominent in virtually every major modern movement for civil rights and social equality.

I also refuse the idea of "our civil rights versus theirs", as though justice for Israelis and Palestinians were not only divisible but also mutually exclusive. This is a form of polarisation beloved by those unwilling to expose their arguments to counter-evidence, who prefer slogans to dialogue, and who promote a false idea of winners and losers. In my view this formulation has played a significant part in perpetuating the conflict in the Middle East.

I want my children to grow up proud of their Jewish identity, and to know that there's no contradiction between being Jewish and fighting for human rights. I've put my name to Independent Jewish Voices to defend and enlarge a public space for debate, to assert that there's more than one variety of legitimate Jewish opinion, and in rejection of the idea that you can be against either anti-semitism or Islamophobia but not both.

Lying low is no longer an option.