Opinion
The Israeli flag is more popular than you’d think
Two encounters have restored my optimism that people grasp the reality of what Israel faces
December 4, 2024 11:30
3 min read
Two encounters have restored my optimism that people grasp the reality of what Israel faces
December 4, 2024 11:30“Good on you, Karen, wave it with pride,” he said, pointing to the Israeli flag hanging off the back of a chair in my living room.
I’d been to a Stop the Hate rally the week before and had meant to put the flag away and now Gary, the lovely man who has been cleaning the windows of my fourth-floor flat for the past 17 years, and with whom I have always put the world to rights on his biannual visits, had seen my Israeli flag, given it the thumbs up and, in an instant, made me like him even more than I already did.
“The silent majority is with you, Karen,” added Gary, after which we spent the thick end of an hour talking about the Middle East and how, in the main, working-class Brits understand Israel’s position and how, in the main, bien pensant liberals do not.
“What really gets me is when people say Israel should act proportionately,” I said to Steve. “I mean, a proportionate response to October 7 would be gangs of crazed bloodthirsty Israelis breaking into Gaza, raping, mutilating and murdering 1,200 Palestinians and kidnapping a further 240. Is that what people want?”
“What people want is to stop seeing those destroyed buildings on telly, night after night, Karen,” said Gary. “But we all want it to stop, don’t we? Well, everyone except the Islamists. They want to kill as many of your lot as possible.”
After Gary left, I sat and gazed through my now crystal-clear living room windows. There was a lot to drink in. My Edwardian mansion block is on one of the steepest hills in the city and the views from its fourth floor are long.
Was Gary right? Is this country’s silent majority really with the Jews? Do most people understand that evil exists and must sometimes be fought? Do they get that even in just and defensive wars, the innocent can’t always be spared?
The people of 1940s Britain did. In the final week of July 1943, between 30,000 and 40,000 Germans were killed in a single night in Hamburg. Unlike in Gaza, where Israel’s rockets are guided and where leaflets are dropped telling people to leave areas, it was intentional. In Operation Gomorrah, the city’s civilian population was unquestionably the target of the RAF and United States Army Air Forces.
Historical records show that while Brits understood the devastation to German civilian life and were able to express regret for it, they were overwhelmingly in favour of the aerial bombing. They understood why British teenagers were dying to defeat Hitler.
Does this explain why, 80 years on, support for Israel is highest among retired Brits, the children of people who were alive during the Second World War and who have, in one way or another, been schooled by its lessons? Does it also explain why poll after poll shows that support for Israel is lowest among the under-35s?
I also suspect that older Brits see Britain’s minnow Jewish community in a way their grandchildren don’t. Boomers know that Jews haven’t messed with the country, as Gary put it, and that we now have Islamists in public life who do. The fact we now have five “MPs for Gaza” disgusts him. “What has that got to do with Britain?”
When I asked Gary if he’d feel able to share these views with his other customers in my postcode, he said he wouldn’t. “Everyone’s scared of being called racist or Islamophobic, aren’t they? But you get it, you know I’m neither.”
I do. Gary has been cleaning my windows for 17 years, after all.
I also understand his fear of being labelled Islamophobic, even as I call for a bright, clear line to be drawn between Islamism, which everyone should be against, and Islam, a faith like any other.
A week after Gary’s visit, I had another flag incident. I was getting my car cleaned and opened the boot to show I’d like it vacuumed, please. Another of my Israeli flags, a small car one, is in the boot, and the three men who were about to clean my car looked very Middle Eastern. Eek.
The shortest of the men fished it out, turned towards to me and gave a big thumbs up. “Oh, where are you from?” I asked, suddenly feeling rather grateful.
“Iran,” he replied. He didn’t, like Gary, say I should wave my Israeli flag with pride. But he didn’t need to.