“Inside Out”: Reflections on Genocide (December 2025)
Spinners, Issue 8

When I was eighteen years old I went to live in Israel for a year. I was born a Jew—my dad escaped Nazi Germany on the kindertransport in August 1939 and my mum grew up in Hendon, northwest London, her Jewish parents the owners of a tiny lampshade shop in Soho—and going to Israel was the standard “gap year” for many eighteen-year-old Jews who planned to go to university.

I’d grown up in the suburbs, by the Winnersh Crossroads, located between Wokingham and Reading, forty miles west of London, where my dad happened to get his first job as an English teacher. I was the only non-Anglo kid in my school and somehow heading to Maidenhead's synagogue’s youth club from the age of thirteen onwards—my mum persuaded me to give it a go after I completed my bar mitzvah—became an improbable gateway into a national youth movement that felt like cosmopolitanism. I ended up becoming a budding youth leader and by the time I completed my A-levels Israel beckoned.

I’m proud to say that years earlier I used to steal money from my mum and dad’s Zionist donation box. I’d take a ruler, angle it through the coin slot and shake out some change. The purpose was to go to the local newsagent to buy packets of football cards. My team was (and still is) West Ham. My dad didn’t know too much about football when I asked him which team I should support, otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested West Ham. Eventually he clocked that I was taking money and gave me a talking to. He was reasonable and didn’t punish me. So this wasn’t the moment I became an anti-Zionist.

Come my year off in Israel, I and sixty or so other “youth leaders from abroad” gathered to study—or receive Zionist instruction—for five months in Jerusalem. We talked politics and philosophy late into the night, preparing for a two state solution as we gorged on salted sunflower seeds. The tutors who ran the institute kept saying that if only thirty of us would come to live in Israel—or make aliyah, the Hebrew word for “going up” that doubles for emigrating to Israel, hmmm—we could turn Israel, still a young and malleable country, into a “light unto the nations”.

This was 1985-86, or the period that preceded the first intifada, and at the time a significant proportion of Israel’s Jewish population supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. We were told that Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was one of the great liberation leaders of our age, someone who transported the Jews from the victimhood of the death camps to national independence and self-realisation. We weren’t told that Ben Gurion repeatedly argued that following the initial establishment of the state the Palestinians would need to be removed from the land. And so on and so forth.

It was during the year in Israel that my peers and I repeatedly discussed what it meant to be a Jew. I was formally a Reform Jew, my parents having joined the reform synagogue in Maidenhead because they didn’t like the feel of Reading synagogue, which was closer to where we lived but orthodox. Although I considered myself to be a secular Jew, I travelled to Israel with RSY, or Reform Synagogue Youth, a youth movement that formed in 1978 and coopted Maidenhead only weeks after I started to attend in 1980. Once in Israel, however, I found myself repeatedly drawn to Habonim, a much older secular socialist Zionist youth movement that dated back to 1929.

One day, on a long coach ride, probably to see some site that reinforced the highly ideological and sanitised version of Zionist/Jewish/biblical history that we were being drip fed, I found myself sitting next to someone from Habonim (not one of my closest friends from the movement, as it happens). He asked me what I valued more highly, my Jewishness or my socialism. I replied my socialism, because first and foremost I thought of myself a human being, and socialism is concerned with the fundamental equality of all humans, irrespective of their nation, religion, etc. He replied: well in that case you can’t join Habonim.

Another recollection from the year in Israel: one day we were told that we were about to be given the “Palestinian version” of Israeli/Zionist history. A few moments later a man with a thick beard and keffiyeh entered the room and over of the course of the next two hours provided us with an account of the Nakba, what came before the Nakba and what came after the Nakba. Our jaws dropped collectively to the floor. Then he left. Silent, stunned, we could barely look our tutors in the eye. Then the man returned, removed his false beard and keffiyeh, and told us “What I just told you was 95% the truth and therefore 100% a lie.”

We were a bright enough bunch. I’d taken my maths O-level (as GCSEs were then called) a year early, and several in our group had been admitted to Oxbridge. Yet we all accepted the treacherous maths and accepted the implication that Palestinian Arabs, like the “orientals” analysed so sharply and powerfully by Edward Said in Orientalism, were devious manipulators who would do anything to undermine Israel’s right to exist, even messing with the actual history—even though the 5% figure was entirely spurious and given to us by a Euro-racist impersonator.

Right then, right there, immersed and pliable, we were told that we would be confronted by this kind of surreptitious, conniving, manipulative anti-Zionism in university debates and we needed to be ready.

Lo and behold, the day my best friend from Israel and I arrived in Manchester—his name was Jonny, he was from Habonim and we were very happy when we discovered we’d be studying at the same uni—we tuned in to our always-vibrating Zionist antennae, headed straight to the steps of the student union building, and positively marched up the first person we saw selling the Socialist Worker newspaper.

“Do you believe that minority people have the right to self-determination?” we asked, as if this was an entirely normal way to begin a conversation. “It depends,” replied the seller. Damn, we hadn’t been prepared for that kind of agile response. The Zionist indoctrination programme contained glitches. We’d been well-programmed but not well enough. Never mind. Next!

One more story from the year in Israel: after five months in Jerusalem, I went with the Reform Zionist group to a kibbutz that was situated right next to the Gaza Strip, Kibbutz Re’im, On the surface it was a socialist community, part of a much wider movement of kibbutzim that was frequently lauded as an example of progressive living, including in Western, non-Jewish socialist circles. All of the eating was communal and kids born on the kibbutz had until recently grown up in a creche/playgroup setting rather than with their primary family. Kibbutzniks had also only recently begun to own and keep material possessions such as TVs in their homes.

I loved my stay on Re’im. Picking grapefruits gave me greater satisfaction than any job before or since and left me feeling “connected to the land”. In the fields one female friend and I would talk nonstop and took great pleasure in debating everything as well as being ready to agree to disagree. It took me some time to realise that the Jewish-Israeli inhabitants of the kibbutz didn’t get their hands dirty, preferring to administer the agricultural production and attend jobs based outside of the kibbutz. Yet we weren’t the only labourers.

One day I caught sight of a Palestinian man dressed in work clothes standing by a gate on the periphery of the fields. He seemed to be waiting for a lift. We were kept well away from Palestinians throughout our ten-month stay in Israel and the kibbutz wouldn’t have allowed Palestinians to come into contact with volunteers or permanent residents. He was an outsider confined to the periphery of the inside.

This fleeting moment of recognition revealed the repressed reality of the socialist-zionist utopia we were being sold. Strangely, nobody told us that the Euro-egalitarian community had been constructed on land that had been stolen, or purchased under colonial duress at scandalously low prices via accumulating Zionist funds, before, during and after the Nakba. The land acquired by Jewish Zionists since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 wasn’t 95% stolen, it was 100% stolen and finagled, and nobody wanted us to see the Palestinian workers who exposed the thievery that lay at the heart of the dream.

During the five months in Jerusalem we were repeatedly told that Jewish Zionists arrived in Israel to make the desert bloom. In fact they arrived to exterminate existing Palestinian communities along with their civic society and lines of production, and after seizing the land of 750,000 displaced Palestinians following the Nakba Zionists had the temerity to reemploy the dispossessed on poverty-level wages on the condition they live only in the shadows.

The encounter, however, was a fleeting insight upon which I wasn’t yet in a position to build a narrative, and the end of my ten-month stay I concluded that it was my duty to return to Israel to contribute to the country’s development. I just had one condition; I would only return if my mum and dad emigrated with me. My dad was approaching his retirement, and somehow I found it easy to imagine he and my mum enjoying the secondhand bookstores, coffee shops and markets of Jerusalem. But the plan imploded when my dad died barely six months after my return to the UK. My grief-ridden mum passed less than three years later.

In the period that followed I found myself irrepressibly drawn to the dance floor, where the open, diverse, integrationist promise of early nineties New York house music gave me a sense of belonging, community and hope. It superseded yet welcomed my Jewishness because it carried the promise of bringing everyone together. The music and the feeling it generated were incredible at that moment. I became so attached to house music culture I moved to New York.

Meanwhile I’d started to read Edward Said, beginning with Culture and Imperialism before I turned to his other writings. Said’s “public intellectual” combination of advanced criticism along with Palestinian activism inspired me to enrol on the doctoral programme in English Literature at Columbia University in order to study with him. Previously I’d started to make my way in political journalism but had quickly become fed up with the news cycle and the UK parliamentary cul-de-sac. Then Said delivered the Reith Lectures on the theme of “Representations of the Intellectual” in the spring of 1993, just months after I’d started to work at the BBC. Inspired, I swerved.

After I joined one of Said’s Columbia seminars a more distant Habonim friend who was now working as a high-flying literary agent angled for me to write a biography of Said. He wanted me to introduce a subplot of “the Jew meets the Palestinian”. I wasn’t sure about many aspects of the proposal and asked the friend to hold back. He ignored my request and behind my back went in too hard and fast with Said’s agent. That was that. Instead I found myself writing about David Mancuso, the Loft and the rise of DJ culture in 1970s New York City. In 2003 I even started to co-host Loft-inspired parties with David in London.

Meanwhile as the NYC mirror ball sent out shards of hope, the deteriorating, ever-more-cataclysmic situation in Israel-Palestine combined with what I took to be my complete inability to contribute to change led me to retreat. Ongoing conversations with a dear uncle who was politically progressive until Israel came into the conversation also led me to turn my focus elsewhere.

History didn’t stop. Israel perpetrated massacres against the Palestinians in Jenin in 2002, and in Gaza in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014. Although I averted my eyes to the death toll, which I can now see totalled 48 Jewish Israelis dead vs 3,974 Palestinians dead, I did sign up to the academic boycott of Israel and BDS movement in March 2015, and started to argue that Israel was an apartheid state. Meanwhile Tony Blair embraced neoliberalism before perpetrating war crimes in Iraq. Ed Miliband, Labour’s second successor to Blair and its first Jewish leader, said he’d recognise a UN-mandated independent Palestine. That encouraged 70% of Britain’s Jews to vote Conservative in the 2015 election. Ed lost badly.

Then Jeremy Corbyn—this older guy who continued to believe in this thing referred to in ye olden days as socialism—entered the campaign to become Labour’s next leader. He swept me and hundreds of thousands up in a rush of hope, yet even before his victory was confirmed the Jewish Chronicle launched a vicious, unfounded attack that accused him of antisemitism. The quick formula? Conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism and create noise.

I joined the “Jews for Jeremy” group and watched on in dismay as the institutional British Jewish community followed by the entirety of the British establishment coopted the smear campaign. Jonathan Freedland, yet another close Habonim friend from my year in Israel, who’d gone on to become an influential op ed columnist at the Guardian and was by 2015 was very much an ex-friend, made a key contribution to the toppling of Jeremy. For real.

Less than four years later, the al-Asqa Flood of 7 October 2023 was initially shocking to me. Some 1,139 people died. We were told again and again that it was the worst death toll of Jews since the Holocaust. Always the Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust, a seismic catastrophe I understood through my dad’s family experience, yet also, according to the mainstream Jewish-Zionist establishment, the only genocide that has ever counted in history, it sometimes seems. A cousin of a cousin of a friend died on that day. The mother and father of a family member’s friend were taken hostage. Even if the Palestinians unquestionably had a right to resist, it was a lot to take in.

Kibbutz Re’im happened to be one of the kibbutzim caught up in the 7 October massacre. In the days and weeks that followed scores of articles recounted the trauma experienced by nearby kibbutzniks, attendees of the Nova Music Festival and others that day. One hundred Hamas fighters were said to have invaded Re’im, where I’d picked grapefruit 30 years earlier. According to one source they murdered seven residents, according to others none. Only Ha’aretz reported as late as July 2024 that on 7/10 the IDF activated the Hannibal Directive, allowing Israeli soldiers to fire on Israeli civilians in order to prevent them from being taken hostage. I also wondered came of the Palestinian worker as well as his friends and family.

It didn’t take long for the barely-disguised lies of Israel public diplomacy arm Hasbara—fictionalised, Orientalist stories about mass rapes, microwaved babies and incinerated bodies— to be exposed. I already held the corporate media sector in low regard and had quit the BBC in order to pursue something more engaged. Yet to see the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times repeat fiction as fact was still eye-opening. Soon after I would rub my eyes again as it became transparently clear that hundreds of the Israeli-Jewish civilians who died on 7/10—the number is hard to confirm because Israel refused to allow qualified personnel to comb the scene—were killed by the IDF. The mainstream media didn’t carry stories on any of this and also didn’t report that of the total 1,139 Israeli-Jewish deaths more than 370 were IDF.

Nobody is saying that the murder of a rounded-up 770 Israeli-Jewish civilians is insignificant. The number is shocking and any loss of civilian life is tragic, even if it is easier to mourn the loss of a civilian peace activist than a civilian racist. Given the state of mainstream politics in Israel, where there’s virtually no sign of support for a two state solution, it’s hard to imagine that many of the civilians who died on 7/10 were committed to Palestinian justice or cared about Palestinian life. What goes around comes around. Also in Israeli the category of civilian is hard to establish given that military service is compulsory, that Israel is on a perpetual war footing, and at any given time the IDF can call up however many “civilians” it needs.

The most important point to draw out with regard to the civilian deaths on 7/10 is that via the Hannibal Directive the IDF murdered scores and more probably hundreds of Israel-Jewish civilians. that day. The propagandised exceptionalism of the massacre also collapses when compared with the vastly higher number of Palestinians murdered by the IDF in successive massacres in the years that ran up to 7 October; the proportion of Palestinian vs. Israeli-Jewish deaths between 2002-23 is more than 80:1. Then there are the 44,000-plus Palestinians who’ve officially been murdered since 7/10 [as of December 2024]. As far back as July 2024 the Lancet estimated that if those who lie dead under Gaza’s landscape of rubble are accounted for the toll could exceed 186,000.

The notion that the West has always led “the rest” in terms of openness and fairness has long lacked credibility thanks to its history of rampant colonialism and ongoing determination to maintain hegemony at all costs. Yet it was harder to discern the complete hijacking of the West’s heavily-corporatised media and political system before Gaza became the first genocide to be live streamed. What we have watched unfold in real time via social media along with the reports of independent journalists plusoutlets such as Al Jazeera amounts to the implosion of Western liberal democracy.

At the heart of it all we are supposed to believe that while Jewish Israelis have rights and their lives count, Palestinians don’t have rights and their lives don’t count. I can’t think of a single mainstream politician who has pointed out that because Gaza (and the West Bank) are occupied their Palestinian inhabitants have a right to resist that is recognised in international law. The racism is naked, exposed.

For the last 14 months the supposedly liberal/progressive press along with the supposedly liberal/progressive end of the political mainstream represented by the Democratic, Labour and Social Democratic parties have supported a discursive and legislative agenda that have been skewed to maintain Israel’s mythological “right to defend itself” as well as straight-up genocide.

Friends of mine in the US, including at Columbia University, became caught up in the vicious nationwide campus clampdown. A Berlin-based Italian artist friend told me that she and her peers can’t apply for grants anymore because they wouldn’t pass Germany’s new anti-semitism benchmark because of their solidarity with Palestine. Post-Brexit I considered applying for German dual citizenship, which I could claim thanks to my dad, but then read that I’d also have to agree to Germany’s support for Israel if I wanted to be successful. I resolved to not apply. I didn’t even want to apply.

Whatever media platform I and millions of other solidarity supporters took to in the days that followed 7/10, we were expected to denounce the Hamas massacre before we made any other comment, as if the history of the conflict began on 7/10 and not with the systematic dispossession triggered by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when 95% of the population of Palestine was still Arab Palestinian. Any mention of prior Israeli massacres, or the right of the Palestinians to oppose apartheid, or the immediately genocidal character of Israel’s response, amounted to antisemitism. Keir Starmer, who quickly and intuitively supported Israeli’s “right” to stop water and electricity going into Gaza, a transparent a war crime, portrayed those of us who participated in the mass demonstrations in London as, again, antisemitic.

Yet instead of persuading us to question our assumptions, I and millions if not billions of others only deepened and intensified our support for the Palestinians.

On a personal level I found myself being instantly hounded by a group of people I first became acquainted with during my year in Israel. They started calling me an antisemite. A friend I’d developed a lifelong friendship with after picking grapefruits together on Re’im, a friendship that continued after she emigrated to Israel, got in touch to terminate the friendship because she found my support for a ceasefire as well as my use of the word genocide unacceptable. As Zionism lurched to new levels of intolerance and paranoia I learned to become worried if I wasn’t called an anti-semite. Meanwhile the weaponisation of anti-semitism—a form of racism that when actual should be combatted, yet has become tragically intertwined with genocide—went viral.

During this whole period I’ve become absolutely clear that I’m an anti-Zionist. Before 7/10 I would say that I didn’t identify as a Zionist and didn’t believe that Israel should have been created in the first place, but it existed and that was what we had to deal with. Israel still exists and we still have to deal with it, but it’s only now, perhaps pathetically, that I’ve felt ready to confirm that because I oppose the way Israel was created as well as its horrific conduct ever since its creation that, yes, I’m opposed to its existence.

I’m not advocating war against Israel or the destruction of Israel—we’re always supposed to want to destroy Israel. I’m advocating that the international community pressure Israel into accepting a single democratic state solution in which everyone lives together in peace. This is a position I’ve supported as an ideal ever since I lived in Israel. South Africans managed to live in a unified state after apartheid and Israeli-Jews repeatedly insist that whatever is going down in Israel/Palestine is less extreme than SA apartheid, so let’s give it a go. If a single democratic state can’t be achieved, the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is currently the official aspiration of Hamas and I’m not going to say that Hamas is wrong. Of course Hamas and the Palestinian leadership must be in charge of negotiating the future.

For all of the complexity, embracing anti-zionism as a progressive position has felt cathartic. Nor do I care what Zionists might say. Even the ones who believe themselves to be progressive have been all but silent during the genocide. They’ve forsaken my mind and my heart, along with the minds and hearts of millions of others, hundreds of thousands if not surely millions of them Jewish, forever.

It’s also been salutary to engage with the aftermath of 7/10 from the point of view of someone who has published histories of the New York DJ, music and party scene of the 1970s and early 1980s, as well as been involved in co-hosting two Loft-inspired parties in London, Lucky Cloud Sound System (initially with David) since 2003 and All Our Friends since 2018.

Right after 7/10 I had an intersection of people who were into DJ culture as well as Zionism ask me how I could call for a ceasefire—yes, a ceasefire—given that Hamas had murdered dancers at the Nova Music Festival. The implication was that the life of a western dancer was worth more than the life of an Muslim. I felt my ties to the wider dance scene weaken and decided to stop selecting music by Jewish Israeli producers who were silent never mind openly pro-genocide.

In the first All Our Friends email to go out after 7/10 we announced that we would play anti-war songs at our forthcoming party. Afterward the party I received an email from a pro-Israeli invitee who told me that instead of playing Mike Anthony’s “Why Can’t We Live Together?” I should have stopped the music and broadcast a video of the 7/10 massacre to show people what the Palestinians are really like.

Another dancer assaulted me on social media to ask how I could support a peaceful resolution when two gay men can’t kiss in Gaza. Well, Hamas has never instituted shariah law and I’m repulsed by the pinkwashing of genocide, as if genocide is a justifiable response to anything. At the next All Our Friends party, held in May 2024, party guest DJ Nikki Lucas, a musical activist, spontaneously unfurled a Palestinian flag while playing Cheikha Remitti “Rimitti Riddim” to rapturous applause, touché.

I’ve reached the point where I feel no affinity with those who are intent on defending Israel come what may. Although I don’t believe in a specifically Jewish god, I’ve always taken pride in the way the Jewish religion along with communal practices have inspired so many great thinkers and writers, from Marx to Trotsky to Freud to Kafka. I have time for the 10 commandments as an important ethical milestone, especially the commandment “though shalt not kill”. Yet somehow Jewish Zionists have forsaken this fundamental moral position in order to fulfil a dream rooted in nationalism, racism, domination and murder. As the Israeli historian and critic Ilan Pappe observes, “Most Zionists don’t believe that God exists but they do believe that he promised them Palestine.”

This has also been a period of unprecedented hope. Even reasonably well read Zionists understand that Hamas carried out the 7/10 attack because it felt it had no choice but to disrupt an imminent normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would further marginalise Palestine. Since then Israel has become the world’s number one pariah state. Jews have also discovered a voice and unity that exists outside of the institutions that, along with Netanyahu, falsely claim to represent the Jewish community. The last fourteen months have witnessed the unfolding of a mass mobilisation campaign that is unprecedented in terms of popularity as well as global reach.

Along the way it’s been heartening to see so many Jewish people at the demonstrations in London. Jewish speakers have been regularly welcomed onto the podium and applauded to the heavens when they’ve declared solidarity with Palestine. Calling out the hate-speech of Starmer, one Jewish speaker declared there was no safer place to be a Jew than on the rallies. The reception was ecstatic and brought a tear to my eyes. I also cry whenever I watch Paddington. Then again Paddington is a displaced migrant who believes in being friendly towards strangers.

With solidarity comes hope and to have hope amounts to a lot right now. During and at the conclusion of each demonstration I invariably end up feeling a sense of optimism as well as joy, reassured that I’m not alone, that together we are stronger, and that those who are following events in Palestine and beyond take strength in what we do collectively. Every move amounts to a contribution, and it can only be through millions upon millions of micro-contributions that change will come, as it inevitably will. Although the circumstances are different, the feeling I get from the demos connects with the feeling of collective joy that’s always also generated at a good party. David was right to point to a line that exists between the street and the dance floor. It’s called collective joy and is rooted in solidarity.

The fight continues. Free, free Palestine. In our thousands in our millions we are all Palestinians.

Reading and viewing

Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, Israelism
Norman Finklestein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
Illan Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel
Edward Said, Orientalism
Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn

This version of the article includes edits.