As a gentile with an historical association with Israel, I must admit to being greatly puzzled by the double standard that is evident in the destruction of Gaza.
In 1971-2 I spent five months at Kibbutz Misgav-am in northern Israel, situated right on the Lebanese border. I had earlier spent a year in Africa, and had flown out of Entebbe Airport in Uganda with a planeload of Indian women who were fleeing from Idi Amin’s excesses. So social discord was not unknown to me at that time.
Misgav-am had been founded in 1945 by a group of Holocaust survivors from Europe; several of the older kibbutzniks still bore concentration camp tattoos clearly visible on their forearms. The kibbutz’s main income was derived from grapefruit, but it also dabbled in oranges, cotton, dairy cattle, and fish-farming. With only about a hundred permanent kibbutzniks and a dozen volunteers, the work was heavy and monotonous. The kibbutzniks lived in modern brick quarters, but we volunteers were given 1940s-vintage timber and corrugated-iron huts and a rough ablution block. Being so close to Lebanon, this area was a favourite target for raiding Palestinian guerrillas, so the whole kibbutz compound was surrounded by a barbed wire fence with guard towers and searchlights, and there was a trench and air raid shelter outside the door to my room. Armed soldiers patrolled a few metres away. It was all very surreal, and not unlike the German POW camps depicted commonly in World War II movies.
That northern part of Israel was very volatile. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) often sent raiding parties over the border, and the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) would respond in kind a few weeks later. In February 1972 the IDF used Misgav-am as a base for a large-scale military retaliation into Lebanon, and I shared the dining room in the morning with a host of top Army brass including Moshe Dayan with his well-known eye-patch.
Eight years after my stay at Misgav-am (specifically on the night of 7th April 1980), five PLO terrorists succeeded in penetrating the kibbutz defences. They killed the kibbutz secretary and made their way to the infants’ nursery where they also killed a small boy. They then held the rest of the children hostage, demanding the release of about fifty terrorists from Israeli prisons. The first rescue attempt by the IDF failed, but a second, a few hours later, succeeded, and all the terrorists were killed. Two kibbutz members and one soldier were also killed, and four children and eleven soldiers were wounded.
Immediately after the attack, IDF troops entered an adjacent sector of southern Lebanon to wipe out terrorist bases and to intensify the pressure on the PLO. They withdrew five days later because of heavy international political pressure.
That border area of northern Israel was indeed an exciting place, and not without danger. But (I must admit) life as a young kibbutz volunteer in 1971 and 1972 was relatively uneventful.
Today (in 2024), Misgav-am has been largely evacuated of civilians as a result of increasing threats from Hezbollah, and the border area with Lebanon is a place of considerable turmoil.
In 1972, however, my wider travels enabled me to have a good look at Israel, and to assess the political and societal forces that were at work in that volatile state. It was also an opportunity to talk to some Palestinians I encountered en route, and thereby to get an alternative political viewpoint. My time on the kibbutz had cultivated in me a strong admiration for the Israeli spirit – for the guts and intelligence that had created a homeland for the dispossessed and disillusioned Jews fleeing from a world, and particularly a Europe, that had been torn apart by centuries of racism and pogroms, and the final holocaust of World War II. If I had been a Jew in Europe in the late 1940s I knew that I too would have wanted to help create my own homeland – and I was full of admiration for the national pride displayed by all the Israelis I met. It was something new to this middle-class Australian gentile used to an easy existence free from any external threats to his nation’s security. But there was something that didn’t quite gel – there was a lacuna in the logic of it all. I just couldn’t understand why the Jewish people, who had experienced so much persecution themselves, could not sympathise with the plight of the Palestinians whom they, in turn, were persecuting. There was a double standard, a deceit, about the whole situation. Zionism was all very well, but what the Jews had created in Israel was effectively not much different from the Apartheid I had seen in South Africa the previous year. Palestinians who had lived and worked on the land for centuries were being dispossessed and disenfranchised. It was morally wrong, and unacceptable – but nevertheless I felt some qualified sympathy for the Jews, and had no idea how it could all be resolved.
It was a daunting dilemma – and the more I thought about it the more certain I became that no solution was possible.
But I was young, and keen to learn.
I departed Israel on 15th March 1972 when I caught an El Al flight from Lod Airport (later renamed Ben Gurion Airport) to Istanbul. Two months later the airport terminal was attacked with grenades and machine-guns by the Japanese Red Army terrorist group, killing 26 and wounding 78.
Israel has indeed survived much during its formative years.
But now – half a century later – I fear I have no words to disguise my disgust for the actions of Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset, and the appalling genocide they are currently inflicting on Gaza.
Adrian Lipscomb
Adrian Lipscomb is a retired lawyer, travel-writer, academic and political observer. During the 1980s he worked in policy areas with the Department of Defence in Canberra and with the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO – now called the “Defence Intelligence Organisation”). In the mid-1990s he volunteered in the Solomon Islands, and was the co-ordinating author of the 1998 edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to PNG. In 2015 he was awarded the OAM. He currently lives in Urunga, NSW.
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