‘If I can help avert a cultural civil war, I will regard my life as well-lived’

There has been “a collapse in reasoned conversations since October 7,” says Josh Szeps. “There’s a worthy instinct on the Left to reflexively support the underdog. Yet many people are confused about who the underdog is.

“We see poor brown people standing in rubble, and our post-colonial guilt kicks in. Then we see a straight white Israeli male with flawless English and an expensive suit addressing US Congress, and we code his side as all-powerful,” he tells The Jewish Independent.

“But that’s a failure of imagination. It’s a failure to see the perspective of a people who were nearly annihilated, given a state and then instantaneously invaded by all their neighbours who came back for another bite in 1967 and again in 1973, followed by the intifada and the second intifada.

“If you’re going to have empathy for the frustrated aspirations of the Palestinians, you also have to have some empathy for the siege mentality that exists in Israel.”

Szeps, 46, says the difference between him and his “leftist friends” is that he doesn’t assign all the blame to Israel. “I give agency to the Arabs. They’re also a player and they make choices.

“There’s moral confusion in much of the anti-Zionist Left in conflating the misdeeds of the Likud and Netanyahu with the existence of Israel and the right of the tiny global minority of Jews to self-determination.

“It’s a tremendous but stealthy shift, from the position that ‘Israel is a flawed liberal democracy trying to do its best’ to the position that Israel is a colonial-settler project that had no legitimacy from day one.”