d so much pain for all of the last year. What the world sees in Gaza is a benighted strip of land that Israel has crushed, heedless of the consequences for civilian life. What Israelis see is a cruel Hamas enemy that revealed its true face on 7 October and which has embedded itself inside and beneath the streets and homes of Gaza, using the entire population as a human shield, so that when innocents die there, it is Hamas who should bear the blame.
You can keep on like this, each example exposing the gulf that separates Israel from a swath of world opinion. But all this only points to the deeper difference. To most outsiders, Israel is a regional superpower, backed by a global superpower. It is strong and secure. But that is not how it looks from the inside. Israelis see their society as small – the size of New Jersey – besieged and vulnerable….
There are two things to say about this yawning gap between how the world sees Israel and how Israelis see themselves. The first is that there is one group that is exposed daily to both perspectives and often finds itself caught in the middle. I am thinking of diaspora Jews, who see what Israel does, and how it looks, from the outside – and yet know, from friends and family, how it feels on the inside.
Well yes, and there also many of us, not Jews, who can see why Israel feels compelled, finally, to confront its enemies. After October the 7th the status quo, surrounded by Iranian proxy armies bent on the its annihilation, and the total extermination of the Jews, was no longer an option. Though of course it has been diaspora Jews who've suffered most, given the extraordinary surge in antisemitism across the western world over the past year – not helped, it has to be said, by newspapers like the Guardian.
The second is that if there is to be any hope at all of ending the terrible bitterness that fills that part of the world and radiates far beyond it, then those who stand on opposite ends of the yawning gap have to try, if only for a moment, to see how things look from the other side. Israelis need to think hard about the impact their actions, so eminently justified in their own eyes, have on all those around them. And the rest of the world could do with putting themselves in Israelis’ shoes every now and again, to imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by enemies who dream of your death and who, just one year ago, tried their damnedest to make those dreams come true.
Who still dream of your death, and who are still trying their damnedest to make those dreams come true.
