Sympathy for Israel

I’m part Jewish and part Huguenot, so I grew up with a lot of sympathy for the dispossessed.

As a student in the 1960s, I had a lot of sympathy for Israel and we gloried at some of their exploits in the Six Day War. We also felt sympathy for the Palestinians when such as Michael Elphick (?), the esteemed BBC correspondent, told of the squalor of the camps and how they had been treated by the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Syrians.

But over the intervening years, that sympathy for the Israelis has evaporated, as increasingly they have used more brutal methods to suppress terrorism. And surprise surprise, they’ve made it worse.

Look at my name, when the cameraman died, it all came home to me.

As an aside, my next door neighbour was a Colonel Charles Leverett of the Royal Engineers, who was in the King David hotel, when it was bombed by the Irgun. He told me stories of the British mandate, which I’ve only heard from one other person, who was a respected Israeli academic. Jew and Arab lived a lot more peacefully in those days, but the truth has been hijacked by the zealots and militants on both sides, so it has been lost.