Ian Linden: Israel/Palestine: Ethnicity, Land, Nationalism and Religion

Jerusalem - Image: VFJ

Dr Ian Linden have this lecture at Queen's University Belfast on Saturday:

Since Theodor Herzl encouraged Lord Rothschild and the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, to embrace a Jewish colonization of Sinai, Palestine and Cyprus in the late 1890s, the historical evolution of Jewish settlement in Palestine was marked by the paired imperial concerns, Ethnicity and Land. As Uganda, proposed as a possible land to be settled illustrated, Zionism was a settler-colonial project as far as the British were concerned. The 1917 Balfour declaration was conceived to place a key region of the Middle East in the hands of people who "think like us" over the subordinate Arab population. (1) Apartheid South Africa in 1948 was a natural ally.

The Israeli State also born in 1948, brought Nationalist, and later, Religious identity into the plot with the 2018 Basic Law, challenged but endorsed by a July 2021 Supreme Court ruling. With its critical component of religious fanatics, notably Ben Gvir as Minister of National Security and Smotrich as Finance Minister, after the December 2022 government, misinterpretations of the Old Testament were used to justify ethnic cleansing.

Weaponising Antisemitism

Hatred of Israel and of Jews became part of the ideology of Islamic violent extremism that draws on a duty of jihad. ISIS identifies both Jews, 'Crusaders' (Christians) and Shi'a as the infidel enemy. The events in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have fed this hatred. At the same time, antisemitism in Britain has grown. Protection of Jewish communities has become a concern with Britain recently accused of culpable negligence in the face of growing antisemitism. But the statistics for extremist plots and attacks suggests such an accusation is misplaced. Britain for many years successfully countered all such terrorism.

It is impossible to quantify the number of young people diverted from the path of violent extremism by the Government's - much criticized - Prevent programme. But outside the Middle East between late 2017 and 2025, there were 14 terrorist attacks on Jews causing serious injury and death; 6 of these attacks occurred in the USA. In the same period no such attacks succeeded in the UK. The British police and security services stopped 43 late-stage terrorist attacks, targets usually unspecified.

In June 2017 an ISIS cell killed eight people and injured 48 under London Bridge. Two weeks later, Darren Osborne drove a car into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one and injuring nine. In November 2019 an 'Islamic' terrorist stabbed five, killing two, on London Bridge and there were three stabbings in Streatham by a "lone wolf" early in 2020.

Local Jewish community protection services, such as Shomrin look after Jewish communities including Haredis - whose distinctive dress makes them particularly vulnerable - and Britain seemed, until the terrorist attack and deaths of 2 October 2025, outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Greater Manchester, to be doing a competent job at protecting its Jewish population of some 290,000. There is some suspicion that subsequent - mainly arson - attacks had some connection with Iran which was paying third parties.

The number of UK antisemitic incidents per annum fluctuated only a little between 2017 and 2022. One case in 2020 involved three men, an amateur abduction of a Jewish record producer to extort a ransom, the choice motivated partly by antisemitism. In 2023, numbers jumped from 1,662 to 4,103, two-thirds occurring in the last quarter after the Hamas massacre in Israel and the beginnings of the resultant devastating war on the Palestinian population in Gaza. (numbers fell back to 3,258 in 2024).

Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, Israel's Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa'ar, and Britain's Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, immediately expressed their anxiety at the attack on the Manchester synagogue. They intimated, or said outright, that the "heat-wave of antisemitism" in Britain was caused by "anti-Israel" attitudes and policies of the Labour Government allowing pro-Palestinian protests which encouraged the perpetrator of the Manchester attack, Jihad-al-Shamie. Almost identical claims were made by a prominent Australian Rabbi about the Australian Labour Government after the 14 December 2025 Bondi beach Jewish killings. Several less lethal attacks on Jewish targets, 2025-2026, were may have been caused by Iran paying petty criminals to commit arson.

In the real world, Shamie was an ISIS supporter whose lethal violence was probably triggered by the horrific slaughter and destruction in Gaza. Right-wing reprisal attacks on Muslims and arson followed.

And with their horrific gunning down of Jews on Bondi beach, Naveed and Sajid Akram most likely were reacting to the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza under the direction of a Jewish State together with its history of denial of basic human rights to Palestinians, a new version of apartheid. The two terrorists claimed similar affiliations with ISIS.

Nothing of course, can ever justify the taking of innocent life. But the extremist mind doesn't easily make distinctions between perpetrators, innocent bystanders and people of other faiths, nor experience empathy. This was horrifically illustrated in Hamas' killing of 1,200 and hostage-taking of civilians inside Israel on 7 October 2023.

Violent and angry personalities find reasons, religious and otherwise, for acting violently and lethally. Some 40% of those indicted for religious terrorism in UK are known to suffer, or have suffered, from mental illness. One example, in 2020, Munawar Hussain, stabbed two women in the Burnley Marks & Spencer's believing M&S funded Israel; he received a Section 37 Hospital Order under the Mental Health Act and was detained at a hospital in Merseyside.

Gaza & the Genocide Convention

In international law genocide has a precise definition. It is no intellectual exercise. Perpetrators can be, and are charged and imprisoned. South Africa's complaint in late 2023 to the International Court of Justice, ICJ under the 1948 Genocide Convention (2), resulted in an International Criminal Court, ICC, warrant for the arrests, a year later, of Hamas' Mohammad Dief, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Netanyahu has to watch whose airspace he flies over. Accusations of genocide in Gaza will have fed antisemitism. And, maybe, so have Pro-Palestine marches.

The UN Independent International Commission of Enquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory 16 September 2025 provides a detailed, lengthy and evidence-backed legal analysis of the conduct of the Israeli government and armed forces. Their judgement was based on detailed analysis of actus reus, genocidal actions of the IDF, mass killing, withholding the means of life, food, from the Palestinian population in whole or in part, inflicting serious physical and mental harm, and the mens rea, evidence of the Government intention to commit genocide. Both proofs of actions and intention are needed to establish guilt of genocide.

The Enquiry's conclusion was: "the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip". This was put in context. "The events in Gaza since 7 October 2023 have not occurred in isolation... They were preceded by decades of unlawful occupation and repression under an ideology requiring the removal of the Palestinian population from their lands and its replacement".

Were Governments to acknowledge that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, under international law they are required to intervene. The Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 were seen as Never Again events. The commission of another genocide is one of the most important moral challenges of our time. The response of Western Governments and many religious leaders has not reflected this reality.

Israel passionately rejects the charge of genocide as yet another example of antisemitism in a long history of bias against Israel. There are reasons why the actions of Israel receive particular attention in a world not short of human rights violations. It is an ally, seen as an outpost of Western democracy in the Arab world. Israel's Haaretz journalists are free to speak out clearly about the horror of Gaza. The framing of a dispute essentially about ownership of land as religious, by both Hamas and Israel's own fanatics, with the presence of sacred sites, has widened the resonances of the conflict within and far beyond Israel and Palestine. After the 1990s and the failure of the Oslo Accords, Israel gained increased attention politically from the Left. Support for those seeking the right to self-determination in Zimbabwe and South Africa had been successful. After apartheid, achieving a secure, economically and politically sovereign Palestinian State seemed like the unfinished business of dealing with settler-colonialism in the twentieth century.

The BBC suffers from accusations of singling out Israel. But the BBC covers Ukraine fully, and intermittently - regularly on the World Service - the Rohingya, Darfur, the Rwanda-DRC border area, Haiti, and South Sudan. The extensive coverage of Gaza brings a - contested - genocide of 2.2 million Palestinians into millions of homes. What else should we expect? Since the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from some 500 of their villages in 1948, "picking on" Israel was overdetermined, and the Israeli claim has some merit. Used to describe documenting genocide in Gaza, it does not.

Israel argued that journalists, for their own safety, must be under military control to enter Gaza. Reports from Gazans over mobile phones, interviews with UN personnel and doctors working in Gaza were the only available sources of information; their testimony was challenged as lies by Israeli government representatives. The role of local journalists, their courage and sacrifice of their lives to reveal the truth has been unprecedented. The numbers killed, like that of health workers, indicated deliberate targeting.

Countless Jews around the world also spoke out against Zionist extremism and the slaughter in Gaza. Picking on Jewish communities in the UK, 'casual' antisemitism and abuse, creating a sense of insecurity, as well as Islamophobia (arson at a Sussex Mosque followed the Manchester attack) did require action from the Labour Government.

The UN Enquiry

Israel denounced the Commission's conclusions as support for Hamas, biased, a "blood libel"; "outrageous" and "baseless". The "blood libel" was a resonant reference to the mediaeval belief that Jews were killing Christian babies for their blood.

The IDF claimed that by dropping leaflets and making phone calls to Palestinians to evacuate their homes -before reducing Gaza to rubble - they always tried to minimise civilian casualties, a regrettable consequence of all wars. Many Gazans were unable to move. There were no "safe areas". Two years of almost unbroken bombing and shelling, a death toll of over 75,000, countless more buried under collapsed buildings, over 70% of verified deaths women and children, makes nonsense of any claim of restraint. The only choice left to ordinary Palestinians was to choose where they would probably die themselves or lose family members. Israel continued to insist they are fighting in self-defence when in reality only a few thousand Hamas fighters remained conducting guerrilla warfare while tanks and bombers made Gaza uninhabitable. Meanwhile on the West Bank Jewish settlers attacked Palestinians with impunity.

Was the UN investigation biased? Of the three members of the September 2025 UN Independent Commission, Navanetham (Navi) Pillay, is a distinguished South African human rights lawyer who, as a judge, presided over the International Tribunal for Rwanda from 1995, and between 1999-2003 was its President. She prosecuted perpetrators of hate speech and genocide against Tutsi. Miloon Kothari, was convener of the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN (WGHR) from 2009 to 2014. From 1995-2000, Chris Sidoti served as Australian Human Rights Commissioner, and between 1992-1995 as the Australian Law Reform Commissioner. He co-founded the independent Special Advisory Council for Myanmar after the coup d'etat in 2021. His ongoing research is a study of the military's genocide of the Rohingya.

Within three days of the 7 October attack the UN described Hamas' actions as war crimes. Navi Pillay's record, her cluster of awards and honorary degrees from around the world, her successful campaign to make rape in conflicts legally a discrete war crime, speaks for itself. Like any highly experienced senior judge, her only consideration would have been to apply the Genocide Convention to the ascertainable facts coming out of Gaza. As it happens, I learned about the demanding requirements in the legal definition of genocide from Chris Sidoti. He impressed me with his erudition and integrity. Over 70% of Professors of Holocaust studies have joined them - reluctantly - in declaring it genocide in Gaza. A single, off-hand, angry comment by Kothari about Jewish "control" of the media, some time ago, warrants suspicion of potential bias, but, with no legal training of the three he was least likely to determine the Enquiry's judgement.

The Church Response

Palestinians now have bitter grief and unimaginable suffering to digest: both genocide and a new form of Middle East apartheid. The road to their future has been obliterated. There is no going back to their past, or, for most, their homes. Jews globally face a sharp rise in antisemitism, and in Israel the loss of 1,200 fellow citizens, and several hundred soldiers at Hamas' hands, along with their reputation for human rights violations being added to by that of being principal warmonger of the Middle East.

Forty years ago, at the height of mobilization against apartheid and repression in South Africa, theologians saw contemporary events as a Kairos, a critical moment, one of great opportunity and great danger (3). For Palestinians now, the opportunity is to build on the weakness of Hamas and Trump's - fickle - pressure on Israel. The danger is that accountability for genocide will be brushed under the negotiating table, the price for the peace-plan getting beyond phase one, a blow seriously undermining international law, possibly beyond repair.

The Vatican responds to human rights violations and conflicts wherever they occur. So what has the Catholic Church said about Gaza - where a tiny Christian population still cling on, made famous by Pope Francis' daily phone calls to Holy Family Church?

On 29 September 2025, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, speaking at the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly, gave an informed global tour d'horizon including Ukraine, the Rohingya, Darfur, the Rwanda-DRC border area, Haiti, and Sudan, plus a clear statement of the ethical norms governing the behaviour of soldiers in battle. He did not use the terms genocide or war crimes. But on Sunday, 17 November 2024, Vatican News and the Italian daily La Stampa had quoted Pope Francis saying that some international experts had declared "what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide", and asking for clarification. (4)

Papal statements name no names and are traditionally generalised. In a message to the annual Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conference on 30 June 2025, Pope Leo wrote how he was "witnessing with despair the iniquitous use of hunger as a weapon of war". Archbishop Gallagher in his UN speech said: "military personnel remain fully responsible for any violation of the rights of individuals and peoples, or of the norms of international humanitarian law. Such actions cannot be justified by obedience to orders from superiors". The IDF seemed likely to be the un-named military personnel in mind.

Caritas Internationalis is the Church's highly experienced official humanitarian body with a presence all round the world. On 25 August 2025 Vatican News carried an article entitled Caritas Internationalis: Famine in Gaza Violates Genocide Convention, an excoriating denunciation of the deliberate starvation of the Gazan population. Yet aside from Independent Catholic News, the Caritas statement has hardly been reported.

At the level of Bishops Conferences, engagement with public issues deemed political is tentative except for immigration (though both Francis and Leo put pressure on American bishops to speak out). In the case of Gaza, there is also the Church's history of antisemitism demanding sensitivity in dealing with extremist Zionism.

The Church advocates reconciliation, mediation, thus adopting a position between the contending parties, not taking sides. Its language has to be appropriate to the task. But the experience of the South African Dominican theologian, Albert Nolan OP in the exceptional context of apartheid, challenged this approach. "There is no neutral place between the tortured and the torturer," he would say. The dilemma of Church leaders in such circumstances grows when there is reluctance to admit there are enemies. Or there is no clear idea of who or what is the enemy. Yet the language of the Magnificat at evening prayer at the Dominican priory in Johannesburg, was uncompromising and clearly took sides. "He pulls down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the lowly."

Reconciliation is hard and complex. Easier to talk about in principle than practice. Reconciliation between, say, family members is different from reconciliation between nations and groups defined by different characteristics, cultures and histories. The other caveat, directly relevant and more often noted, is that the call for reconciliation can seem coercive unless concern for justice is integral to it - as traditionally advocated by the Church.

As well as preaching the Gospel and promoting ethical norms, bishops seek to share their feelings: being "deeply shocked", or "saddened", with "hearts that go out to the victims". But, any analysis of root causes, who is responsible and must be made accountable, is rarely shared. Israel and its outsize American-funded military force has the power and wields it. A commitment to, and implementation of, a Christian understanding of power should not be curtailed by inveterate caution.

Unfortunately, in today's world "speaking truth to power" can damage a nation's economy and future. But not so for the Church. Truth, justice, and peace, we owe to the Palestinian people. Peaceful protest at the plight of Palestinians and at the version of apartheid practised by the Israeli State has to continue.

What we immediately owe to the Jewish - and Muslim - community in Britain is effective action to counter hate-speech. March organisers should make it clear that chants that are antisemitic, and slogans such as "globalise the intifada" or "from the river to the sea" open to interpretation as advocating indiscriminate attacks on Jews or ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews, must cease. They distract from a central purpose of the marches: protest against the conduct of the Israeli State. Protest must highlight specific IDF war crimes and genocidal action such as deliberate starvation. Chief Rabbi Mirvis needs to make it absolutely clear that he condemns these actions. His failure to date to do so gives the impression to those who are ignorant of the widespread Jewish condemnation of the genocide that British Jews support the Israeli war. And, of course, the British government must decide whether it cares more about avoiding retribution from Trump or countering the collapse of international law and its conventions.

(1) Marwan R. Buheiry 'The Implications of the Israel-South Africa Alliance MECC Symposium Theology in Situations of Conflict Beirut, 5-8th December 1980
(2) www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/the-pope-genocide-the-war-in-gaza
3) The Kairos Document: A theological comment on the political crisis in South Africa, Institute of Contextual Theology, September 1985 on behalf of Kairos theologians.
4). Pope Francis Hope never disappoints. Pilgrims towards a better world Hernán Reyes Alcaide, Edizioni Piemme 2025.

Professor Ian Linden is Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, London. A past director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, he was awarded a CMG for his work for human rights in 2000. He has also been an adviser on Europe and Justice and Peace issues to the Department of International Affairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. Ian chairs a new charity for After-school schooling in Beirut for Syrian refugees and Lebanese kids in danger of dropping out partnering with CARITAS Lebanon and work on board of Las Casas Institute in Oxford with Richard Finn OP. His latest book was Global Catholicism published by Hurst in 2009.

To read Dr Linden's blog see: www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/