‘It is completely invalid to equate the modern secular state of Israel with the Old Testament chosen people of God’

Writer Veronica Zundel’s relatives were murdered in gas chambers for being Jewish, but she argues that to defend the state of Israel without consideration for the people of Palestine denies the full story.

What to say on the current Israel/Hamas conflict? Hasn’t enough already been said? ‘I wondered’, the editor of this platform emailed me, ‘whether you felt you had something of a different angle to share on Woman Alive online?’ Well perhaps I do. I have, as they say, skin in this game – on both sides.

First, and most importantly, on 5th April 1942 my maternal grandmother, great-aunt and great-uncle were murdered in the gas chambers at Chelmno, Poland – for the sole crime of being Jewish. Second, and not insignificant, for thirteen years I sponsored a little Palestinian Christian girl, from the ages of five to eighteen; and I support Community Peacemaker Teams, who act as international observers in Hebron and elsewhere of the behaviour of the IDF and the experience of Palestinians. I am only too aware of how often my sponsee was unable to go to school because checkpoints were closed, or how Palestinian children have to use different, much longer roads to school than the Jewish children do, and how on those roads they are liable to have stones thrown at them by illegal Israeli settlers – not to mention having their homes, schools and clinics arbitrarily demolished, or going hungry because their parents cannot reach their own olive groves across the ‘wall of separation’.