The difficulty of facing up to what Israel is and what it represents is, of course, particulaly stark for many Jews - not only in Israel but in countries like Britain. Through no choice of their own, Jews are more deeply implicated in Israel's crimes because those crimes are carried out in the name of all Jews. As a result, for Zionist Jews, protecting the settler colonial project of Israel is identical to protecting their own sense of virtue.
In the zero-sum imaginings of the Zionist movement, the stakes are too high to doubt or to equivocate. As Zionists, their duty is to support, dissemble and propagandise on Israel's behalf at all costs.
Nowadays Zionism has become such a normalised part of our western culture that those who call themselves Zionists are appalled at the idea anyone could dare to point out that their ideology is rooted in an ugly ethnic nationalism and in apartheid. Those who make them feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel's oppression of Palestinians - and their blindness to it - are accused of being "offensive".
That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel's racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.
This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism - one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists - designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel's crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.
Into the fire
Arriving in the UK from Nazareth at this very moment is like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Here the battle over Zionism - defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it - is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party's ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phoney grounds.
Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.
And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism - the latest cover story for apartheid Israel - moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.
The fight for justice for Palestinians resonates with so many of us precisely because it is not simply a struggle to help Palestinians. It is a fight to end colonialism in all its forms, to end our inhumanity towards those we live alongside, to remember that we are all equally human and all equally entitled to respect and dignity.
The story of Palestine is a loud echo from our past. Maybe the loudest. If we cannot hear it, then we cannot learn - and we cannot take the first steps on the path towards real change.
[This is a transcript of a talk I gave to Bath Friends of Palestine on 25 February 2022.]
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