An Open Letter To Keir Starmer

(Sent to The Guardian but not holding my breath that they will publish it)

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

Dear Mr Starmer, 

I was born (1964), raised and educated in Israel. I am a granddaughter of holocaust survivors on my mother’s side, and I served in the Israeli military between 1982-1984 during Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon. My entire family lives in Israel. 

In 2001, ten years after migrating to Australia, I renounced my Israeli citizenship in protest against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. In Australia I met Palestinian people as equals for the first time in my life. In Israel’s segregated, apartheid society, we had little contact with Palestinians. I gradually learned how brainwashed I was to believe that our survival as Jews was more important than anyone else’s. 

I cannot tell you how dismayed and disappointed I am with you, that you choose to ignore Israel’s settler-colonial history and aims. I have considered the possibility that you just don’t know that Israel’s aim has always been to replace all the non-Jewish indigenous people of Palestine, the Palestinians, with Jews. But I do not believe you don’t know this, nor do I believe that you are not aware of Britain’s key role in the rise of the Zionist settler-colonial movement, and the catastrophe it has unleashed on the Palestinian people and the havoc it has created in the entire Middle East. 

As a legal expert, especially in the field of human rights, surely you know that supporting settler-colonialism, continuous disregard for International Law and international treaties, not to mention a blatant genocide that is unfolding in front of our screens cannot be legally justified. The only way to justify it is to pretend it is not what it is. 

As a fellow human being, I completely fail to understand how as a person you could show so little empathy for the tens of thousands of people Israel has been murdering in cold blood in Gaza, 70% of whom are children. Are you not able to consider the degree of human suffering Israel is deliberately creating? Do you really not care? I fail to understand how you can show no compassion for the Lebanese people whose lives are now upended by Israel’s indiscriminate bombings. How removed must you be from humanity. 

You are in a position to be one of the people who can steer humanity towards a better, more collaborative existence. At the heart of collaboration must lie empathy, and an interest not only in people’s physical survival but in every human being’s desire and fundamental need to develop to their potential. Instead you choose to collude with division, violence, and with a society with a sense of entitlement. You show a narrow, limited image, and a profoundly short-term vision that cannot be anything other than destructive. You have a right to like Israel if you do, but you do not have a right to enable Israel to exterminate people and to sow destruction, suffering and trauma with such impunity. As a legal expert, you know that what matters is the crime and not the identities of the perpetrator or the victim. By supporting Israel you demonstrate a complete disregard to common or legal sense. 

I fail to comprehend your cynical choices, and your absence of concern for our fellow human beings. You need to consider what legacy you will leave behind. You will be remembered in history as a UK PM who had an opportunity to do so much good, but instead chose to support a genocidal regime. You are also out of touch with the British public. Most people are intelligent and compassionate. It’s not hard for them to reverse places with the Palestinians and put themselves and their children in Palestinian shoes. You are not helping the world, you are shamelessly contributing to the downward spiral of humanity. 

I hope you can find a moral centre to guide you on a new path, and to help you find a way to use your influence for good, rather than for more division, and more destruction and suffering. 

Avigail Abarbanel

A heartbroken human being