There was a telling paragraph in the recent report into antisemitism in the NUS. A Palestinian student told the inquiry: “I find it deeply offensive that support for Palestinian human rights is being used to mask blatant antisemitism. The advocation of Palestinian rights and valid criticism of the Israeli government should never lead to or justify racism against Jewish students in Britain.”

The comment got very little traction on social media, and none in the press. This doesn’t surprise me, because the subject of Israel and Palestine has fallen utterly to the culture wars: the sanctification of one side, and the demonisation of the other. The balance shown by the Palestinian student is rare.

The dialogue on this subject, especially on social media, veers between the idiotic and the deliberately obtuse. Dehumanising the side you oppose has a predictable consequence, which is hatred: the first step to loving someone is understanding them. Each side seeks to repress the other’s history, which is a bitter fate. One side rarely talks about Deir Yassin. The other rarely talks about Kfar Etzion.

In Britain, you are a friend of Palestinians, or you are a friend of Israelis. You cannot be both, and almost no one is neither. If you are a friend of Palestinians, you will shout “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free”.

You will not have a plan for what will happen to the Jews in Israel when Palestine is “free”.

Nor will you detail Palestinian atrocities against Palestinians, which you can read about in Amnesty’s 2021 report, if you are still reading Amnesty reports.

You will not speak in support of Ahmad Abu Marhia, the gay Palestinian who was beheaded by Palestinians on the West Bank. (There are 90 LGBT asylum-seekers in Israel just now, but you rarely hear that. It thwarts the narrative.

Or if you do hear it, it is part of some demonic Jewish plan.) You will say nothing when Atef Abu Saif, a gifted Palestinian writer, has his fingers broken with a hammer by masked men in Gaza, and nothing about the oppression of Palestinian women, if their oppressors are Palestinian men. It’s well-known that the men who think they are progressive are the least progressive, and here’s the evidence.

It is obvious that many pro-Palestinian activists aren’t pro-Palestinian at all. To be pro-something you must be willing to see it for what it is, to name it. These victims are not counted, because they are not the victims of Jews.

Many pro-Palestinian activists are transparently in it for hating Jews, and anything that suggests that Jews are less than demonic (for progressives they seem to have internalised the early church fathers’ teachings), like the Egyptian occupation of Gaza pre-1967 or the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank, either didn’t happen or it isn’t important.

And Liberal Zionists — fretful two-staters such as myself — are hated worse than Greater Israelists, because Jew-haters have more in common with Greater Israelists than with Liberal Zionists for obvious reasons. Both are racists.

I once told a famous left-wing journalist that 850,000 Mizrahi Jews left Arab countries after 1948. She looked at me and said, simply: did they? Yes, they did, I said. She replied, chewing her lip: I did not know that.

She did not know about the 1947 partition plan for Palestine or the pogrom at Kielce in Poland in 1946, which, alongside other attacks, made surviving European Jews so desperate to go to Israel.

It can be as difficult to have a conversation with Jews about IDF brutality, Israeli far-right psychopathy and indoctrination of children — I know it happens on both sides — or settler violence towards Palestinians and their property.

In one 2021 incident, a three-year-old Palestinian boy was knocked unconscious by a settler, and I don’t believe for a moment that every dead Palestinian is a terrorist. But that’s a difficult thing to say to other Zionists in the diaspora now. Some pro-Jewish advocates are openly racist.

One told me that the fall of the Edward Colston statue was equivalent to a Nazi-era “book burning”. Are we pro-slavery now because we presume the enemies of Colston are friends to Palestine? Does she understand what a book-burning is?

But that is what culture war does to you. It tricks you into supporting Donald Trump because you think he likes Jews, when, in fact, he doesn’t like Jews unless they are appreciative of him, which isn’t liking Jews at all. And that is how extremists take the space.

I am aware I will be accused of naivety. But I can’t see how the world’s most intractable conflict will be solved unless people tell the truth. Even if it solves nothing, tell it for its own sake.

For now, we have only the puppetry of culture war. Pick your side.