Two weeks ago a letter appeared in The Guardian criticising the growing movement in the world of arts and culture calling for a boycott of all cultural activity that is either financed by, or supportive of, the government of the state of Israel. This call is not directed at individual Israeli artists and workers in the cultural area, but those who are clearly using their activities to advance the interests of the Israeli state by accepting state endorsement and / or finance. The signatories of this letter opposing such a boycott included many politicians from both the main parliamentary parties, most of them long-standing members of the 'Friends of Israel' groups in parliament. Others have a history of uncritical support for a state that has broken or ignored over 60 United Nations resolutions relating to Israel's illegal annexation of Palestinian land; has continued to build illegal 'settlements' of Jewish occupiers on this seized territory; protects these by the most heavily armed force in the Middle East, even as these illegal occupiers harass, assault and sometimes kill Palestinian residents of the West Bank; systematically destroys any hope of a two state solution through these 'settlements',  and continues its periodic murderous assaults on the defenceless citizens of Gaza.

 Among those who signed this letter were several well known writers who are now, in effect, defending and aiding the systematic and widespread persecution of  Palestinian citizens of Israel itself and those living under illegal occupation; giving support to the continued Israeli assaults on Palestinian villages and the subsequent bull-dozing of their homes, now an almost daily occurrence in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, but also common elsewhere; the arrest and imprisonment of children against all international agreements (between 500 and 700 children are arrested and prosecuted through Israeli military courts each year, most for throwing stones at heavily armed military vehicles and many are then transferred and imprisoned within Israel rather than their homeland, the occupied territories, against the UN convention on the Rights of the Child); the use of the world's most sophisticated weaponry upon unarmed and defenceless civilian men, women and children in Gaza (over 300 children killed in 2014 and 1200 adults); the continued effective imprisonment of a whole population in Gaza who cannot do anything without Israeli permission and the unrelenting West Bank occupation that has now effectively scuppered any hope of a two state solution, the very aim the signatories of the letter claim to be their solution to this one-sided and seemingly intractable situation. They appear to be completely unaware of the attempts over the last seventy years to change Israeli attitudes towards the persecution of the Palestinians  through dialogue and engagement and the implacable resistance of successive Israeli governments to change their policies in any way. The idea that this government, perhaps the most virulently anti-Palestinian regime yet elected in Israel, might in some way modify their attitudes toward Palestinian aspirations through cultural dialogue shows a breathtaking naivete.  
Signatories to this letter include: Hilary Mantel, J.K.Rowling, Melvyn Bragg, Wendy Cope, Fay Weldon and Zoe Wannamaker. Most of the others are long-standing defenders of the indefensible, but one, who has received little attention, is Danny Cohen, the Head of all four BBC television channels, its web-site and a member of the BBC executive board. The naivety or ignorance of reality shown by some of the signatories is concerning, but that someone who works at the most senior level of our most prestigious broadcasting service, a service with a duty to impartiality in all news and current affairs, can publicly give support to one side in one of the most contentious and potentially catastrophic political disputes currently unresolved, and receive no criticism or censure from the BBC Trust, is revealing of the increasingly partisan nature of BBC news coverage. The BBC is under very real threat from our current government and it seems to be protecting itself by steering its coverage of news and current affairs in a clearly right-wing direction, not only through the increasingly prevalent 'analysis' of political affairs by its own correspondents, who present any viewpoint that lies outside of the narrow boundaries of the neo-liberal orthodoxy as beyond reasonable discussion but also the continual use of 'experts' from right wing think tanks, often funded by the vested interests of the city and big business. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it increasingly difficult to defend the BBC in its current phase of well-founded fear for its future, and it will not retain its traditional supporters - those who would instinctively defend publicly owned services and resist the incursions of profit and commercialism into the structures of the BBC - by its current approach of being little more than the mouthpiece of the powerful.

Back in my childhood years of the the 1950's and early 60's, discussions of the Israeli state were occasionally picked up on my juvenile radar as they arose in the many political discussions that took place in our flat between my mother and her political colleagues (she was, by now, working at Labour Party headquarters in Smith Square in London, editing a small magazine called Labour Woman). These discussions usually centred on the enthusiasm of youthful members of various socialist groups for spending time in Kibbutzim in Israel. There was a romantic idea that the Kibbutz was a small socialist cooperative founded on egalitarian principles. This was often allied to another romantic myth that has been carefully cultivated by the Israeli state that theirs was a country heroically defending itself against overwhelming odds, trying to bring civilisation to a largely empty desert whilst all the time being threatened by the surrounding hostile Arab territories. The long association of the Jewish working class with socialist movements in pre-war Europe and the terrible European genocide suffered by the Jews in Europe all served to support the founding myth of the state of Israel and many young socialists in Britain and other European countries travelled to do voluntary work in Israeli kibbutzim. Many returned somewhat disillusioned. The influence of the 1960 novel and film, 'Exodus' in planting the state's creation myth in the popular imagination cannot be overemphasised.
The reality of the founding of Israel has now been incontrovertibly shown to be the very opposite of this persuasive myth. Work by Israeli historians including Benny Morris and, most significantly, Ilan Pappe have shown that mandated Palestine was, of course, heavily populated with Palestinian farmers and artisans. That the Zionist forces were heavily armed and considerably better organised and prepared than the Palestinian population and their Arab neighbours, and that it was largely through carefully planned terrorist action - the destruction and complete eradication of Palestinian villages, sometimes with the massacres of their citizens (February 1948 the village of Qisarya where 1500 residents were violently expelled and their homes destroyed, Barrat Qisarya where 1000 more were similarly treated, Kirbut Al-Burj and Atlit followed and the order to "blow up 20 houses and kill as many villagers as possible" saw an end to the village of Sa,sa where in fact over 30 houses were blown up and about 80 villagers killed*) that the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestine was initiated - what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe. This was part of a detailed plan drawn up by Israeli forces known as Plan Dalet. This outlined an explicit strategy for taking over Palestinian communities and expelling the Palestinian population: "operations can be divided into the following categories: destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines and debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it.  In the event of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.” 
The systematic attack by Zionist forces on largely unarmed and undefended Palestinian villages led to the flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and to permanent exclusion from their ancestral homes. There are now some 2 million Palestinians still living in refugee camps in Jordan, 760,000 in the occupied West Bank, 460,000 in Syria and 420,000 in Lebanon. All are denied any right of return to the places where they or their ancestors once lived. Indeed, the towns and villages from which they were expelled have been erased from Israeli maps and the villages themselves razed to the ground and built over with Israeli replacements. Palestinian history has been eradicated from the landscape. There is, of course, a terrible irony in a largely European Jewish military force expelling, through systematic violence, another ethnic group and creating an Arab diaspora, while Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories are subject still to appalling discrimination by the Israeli state. It is, though, heartening to see the growing number of Jews throughout the world who courageously take on the ideology of terror and discrimination now entrenched within Israeli politics and who are supporting the policy of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions that is now beginning to trouble the state of Israel. Groups like Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States and growing numbers of affiliates to the movement throughout the world are trying to replicate the success of the similar campaign against apartheid era South Africa.(Worth remembering that there was a very close, but secret, relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa who gave each other material support in the period when the rest of the world was isolating the racist regime in S. Africa). It is, of course, the growing success of the BDS movement that has given rise to the desperate nature of the letter that initiated this post.
* Source: Ilan Pappe - "the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"

I see I have neglected to come back to my grandfather on my father's side as promised in the last post. He always professed to being a communist, although I don't think he ever joined the communist party. He could never bear to have to listen to what someone else may think let alone be instructed by anyone else. Not sure the communist party would wear that attitude. He did, though, in the years after the war, volunteer to go to help - not Israeli kibbutzniks - but to rebuild destroyed roads in communist Yugoslavia, and I remember him showing me photos of him in vest and cord trousers pushing laden wheelbarrows up large mounds of rubble. This was no surprise to me, since he seemed to be permanently dressed in a vest and cord trousers; it was his default mode of attire for all occasions. He was proud of being the oldest volunteer in his group, just as he was inordinately proud of his general physical state - hence the permanent singlets to display his toned upper body. Yes, he was a vain and self-important man, opinionated and domineering to my put-upon grandmother. They lived in a very large detached Edwardian house and my grandfather had turned one of the downstairs rooms into a small gymnasium with weights and a rowing machine. Here he 'worked out' as we say now, but then, took his exercise. He also had a couple of young men who came to use his equipment in the evening and he would give them advice on their fitness regime. He was able to give advice to anybody on anything, as it happened, and freely delivered this all the time. Such philanthropy. He was what some would call eccentric, others a megalomaniac.
 In the room next to his gym was a room whose only function seemed to be to house the telephone (at this time, a clear sign of the well-to-do). Around the walls of the room were stacked orange boxes, all of them filled with stacked magazines. These were divided into three categories. The largest housed hundreds of copies of a magazine called 'Soviet Life' to which he subscribed so that he could regale us all at meal times with the latest developments enriching the lives of those in the soviet union - those not in the gulags, on the whole. The next group of boxes held the more esoteric 'China Reconstructs' - the very title promising so much excitement. This usually had full size pictures of Chairman Mao on the front, or ecstatic Chinese workers. Both these magazines were large format and printed in colour and both entirely baffling to a child under the age of ten. The third magazine was smaller and was devoted to body building and featured pictures of flexing young males, liberally covered in body oil and wearing only thongs. Had I been older, these might have aroused a few suspicions  - whether they aroused anything in him, I know not. Hidden among these particular magazines, though, were surreptitious copies of 'Health and Efficiency', featuring many tasteful pictures of young bare-breasted women playing volleyball with the ball always strategically placed.I couldn't help but notice that the magazine featured women almost exclusively. Even at this young age, I could relate 'health' to the images - but 'efficiency'? I'm still puzzled today.
The house had a large front room that housed, not only chairs, table etc. but also one of my grandmother's two grand pianos. She was an accomplished pianist and music teacher. Behind this room was my grandfather's workroom. This had to be seen to be believed. When you entered you were confined to a central narrow passageway that led between two floor to ceiling mountains of what can only be called junk, piled haphazardly and precariously to what seemed an enormous height. The passage led to a work bench with large drills, clamps and turning machines. Once, my brother and I climbed through the huge pile of discarded boxes and assorted debris on the left hand side, and underneath everything we found two pre-war motor bikes propped against the far wall. My grandfather was a hoarder of epic proportions. The work-bench was part of his entrepreneurial activities. He had owned a factory in a nearby town that produced plaster garden ornaments, among other things. He had once tried to develop a new kind of model from a new material and he set up the prototype in the kitchen - my grandmother's province entirely, normally - and left it working overnight. Part of this equipment was a large glass jar that, at some point in the process, exploded showering the kitchen with glass and embedding many large shards deep into the wall. Had my grandmother been there she would have been torn to shreds. His only comment - "humph, someone must have tampered with it".
One of his - many - unacknowledged weaknesses was severe deafness. He would spend large parts of the day watching test matches on television when they were on, always 'Grandstand' on Saturday afternoons, and anything else that interested him the rest of the time. To get around his deafness, he would plug a joined series of twisted light flex wires attached to what looked like second world war pilot headphones that would be clamped to his head and he would sit, in his vest and cords, for hours plugged in to the black and white set. The headphones, of course, had the effect of cutting off the sound to anyone else who might have wanted to watch, not that this concerned him in the slightest. However, he would have a habit, when something particularly annoyed him of suddenly turning round and shouting at anyone who happened to be in the room "Did you hear that! What nonsense! Did you hear the rubbish he just spouted?" Well, no we didn't, we haven't heard anything for the last three hours. But of course, he was oblivious to anyone else.
One of my favourite memories of him was when some builders were re-tiling part of the roof. This was a large, three storied house with a high, front-facing gable and they had scaffolding and a ladder running from ground to roof. The two builders were carrying hod-loads of tiles laboriously up this seemingly endless ladder. My grandfather, who knew everything about everything, imperiously stopped them before they had got a few rungs off the ground. "No, no, no. Come back down here now. You're moving all wrong here. Now then " he instructed, "watch me. Right, keep your back straight - really straight. Lift hod like so, right to left shoulder. Adjust for comfort. Now, move your legs from the hips - got that? From the hips (I was trying to think of how else you might move your legs, but I was stumped). Now, with back straight, up we go one leg at a time moving only from the hips." And up he went with loaded hod right to the roof. Back down he came having unloaded the tiles. "now, you see what I mean. The way you were moving you're likely to do your back.Okay?" 
"No, not really. I didn't quite get that" was the response "do you think you could show me again?"
"Righto young man" came my grandfather's reply, now, load up the hod and watch carefully". 
It took five attempts before they'd got it and finally let him go.