The Truth is Simple, but Unwelcome

A version of this interview was published in Church Times on the 1st December 2017.

Robert Cohen is developing a reputation as one of Britain’s leading Jewish dissidents. He has been ‘writing from the edge’, as he puts it, since 2011, primarily about interfaith relations and Israel/Palestine, in a monthly blog titled Micah’s Paradigm Shift. The reference is to Micah 6:8: ‘What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’

So far, so uncontroversial, maybe. Many of the people that he implicitly criticises, Christian and Jewish, would endorse that prophetic call. However, the conclusions that Cohen comes to are sometimes very different from theirs. In particular, he insists that the leaders of both the Anglican communion and the Jewish community in Britain should be standing up for the Palestinian people.

When I meet him in north London, in the new Café Palestina in Kentish Town, we begin by discussing Jewish-Christian relations. ‘The work of reconciliation since the Second World War,’ he says, ‘whether it’s high-end theological discussions or local communities getting to know each other on the ground, has revolutionised relations. And it has been absolutely necessary – perhaps even more so for Christians than for Jews.’

Christians need to be reminded of the part that church teaching has played in the persecution of Jews over the last 2,000 years. ‘It’s almost impossible to understand the history of anti-Semitism without understanding the role of the Church, and churches need to keep saying that, because it’s very easily forgotten.’

That shameful history makes it difficult for church leaders to challenge what is happening now in the Middle East, he says. ‘The idea that the state of Israel has to exist exactly as it does today has become so central to Jewish thinking and Jewish identity that it has sort of merged into Judaism, right across the spectrum from Liberal to Orthodox. As a result, it is very hard to be critical of Israel, or critical of what was originally a 19th-century political ideology, Zionism, without being accused of being anti-Semitic.’

No doubt, I suggest, that was why the Archbishop of Canterbury, addressing the Board of Deputies of British Jews in 2015, spoke of ‘religiously-sponsored violence’ by Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu radicals but made no mention of violence by Jews in the occupied West Bank. ‘There is a problem’, Cohen says, ‘when you take on too much responsibility for the history of Jewish oppression, that it prevents an honest, critical conversation about Israel.

‘Meanwhile, the leadership of the Jewish community wants to close down debate. But that conversation urgently needs to take place.’

In June this year, the National Coalition of Christian Organizations in Palestine wrote an open letter to the World Council of Churches, asserting that in East Jerusalem and the West Bank ‘discrimination and inequality, military occupation and systematic oppression are the rule.’ Quoting the call of Isaiah 1:17 to ‘seek justice [and] defend the oppressed’, it entreated the global Church to offer ‘costly solidarity’ rather than ‘shallow diplomacy’.

Cohen echoed this call in his blog for July, without equivocation. ‘Jewish-Christian dialogue is about to go through the wringer,’ he wrote, ‘and not before time. Longstanding relationships with Jewish neighbours and clerical colleagues will deteriorate long before they can be rebuilt with new foundations. But costly solidarity requires no less.’

His own commitment to the cause of justice for Palestinians came by degrees, he tells me. His parents had grown up in the United Synagogue (‘the mainstream movement of Jonathan Sacks and Ephraim Mirvis’) but had moved to the more liberal Reform movement when he was young. They were Zionists almost by default. ‘I don’t remember Israel being talked about very much at home. I didn’t know what happened to the Palestinian people in 1948; I didn’t understand that there was an occupation.’

He spent five months or so in Israel after leaving school, but still ‘had no idea about any of that’ until 1987, his final year at Manchester University, when the First Intifada began. ‘I sat in the library when I was meant to be revising and read all the articles I could find, in the New York Review of Books and Foreign Affairs, trying to find out who these Palestinians were. I suddenly realised that they were a people with a culture and a history that they were just as proud of as my people were of theirs.’

Later, the Greenbelt Festival helped to develop his thinking. His wife had been going to the festival since she was a teenager, but he first went in 2007, only because Billy Bragg was on the bill. He started going to the talks, and heard the American Jewish theologian Marc Ellis and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. ‘Ellis’s book Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation became a key text for me,’ he explains. ‘He argues that the Jews are now no longer an oppressed people but an empowered people and asks: What are we doing with that empowerment?’ Cohen’s own conclusion is that in Israel/Palestine ‘we’re making a terrible hash of it.’

Finally, in 2011, he went out there on a trip organised by the small Christian NGO Amos Trust, specifically to meet some Palestinians. It was then that he started his blog. ‘It gave me the confidence to say what had been churning around in my head for years. Actually, the moment when I thought, “I’ve really had it with Zionism” came when I was talking to Palestinians not on the West Bank but in [the Israeli city of] Nazareth and I realised that 70 years after the foundation of Israel they were still second-class citizens. Yes, they can vote, and they can sit on the same park bench as Jews, but that doesn’t mean there is equality.’

He rejects Justin Welby’s claim that the situation is ‘very complicated’. ‘Certainly it has a long history and you could spend a lifetime reading books about it, but it’s much simpler than people want you to think. The fundamental issue is a massive power imbalance between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

‘They aren’t two equal sides arguing over how to share a piece of land where they both feel they have national rights. The Palestinians aren’t occupying Israeli land, they aren’t denying Israelis freedom of movement, they aren’t controlling their water supplies, they aren’t arresting them in the middle of the night. Ultimately it’s about who’s got power and who hasn’t.’

He speaks quietly, without obvious heat, but his blogs, though carefully written and nuanced, don’t pull any punches. He ‘wanted to have a conversation with other Jews’, he says, but has found that easier said than done. ‘Those who do read me tend to be those secular, left-wing Jews who would agree with me and perhaps like the fact that I have a slightly more Jewish spin on things than them. I don’t think I’ve made any inroads into the mainstream, though I can’t believe that I’m not on their radar. I am very much an outsider in my own community.’

The unpopularity of his standpoint is exacerbated by his own biography. One pro-Israel activist who reads his posts ‘and then wades in’ calls him a Jino, a ‘Jew in name only’. ‘He tells me I don’t have the right to talk about Israel because I’ve married out, my children are Christian and my wife is a vicar.’ All of which is true, and was made public in his blog.

He and Anne met as students at university, where he was reading politics and philosophy. They married 25 years ago, in a ceremony hosted by the Quakers and based on silence, so that ‘there wasn’t any liturgy or hymns to make my family feel uncomfortable.’

Both of them, he says, have been ‘on a journey’, trying to understand their relationship to their respective faiths, but they have always been very supportive of each other’s beliefs. ‘When we had children, we decided that we wanted to have the boys circumcised; but the older children have been baptised and confirmed as well. They would see themselves as Christian, but they know that they have this whole other heritage and as a family we celebrate both faiths as well as we can.’

Certainly, he still considers himself a Jew. ‘I have faith and in terms of belief and outlook and attitude towards Scripture I would place myself in the Liberal Reform Jewish tradition I grew up in. I read the Bible, and if I’m in a church service and the Gospel is read I remind myself that this is Jewish writing which is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, and particularly the Hebrew prophets.’

He clearly sees himself standing in the tradition of Isaiah, Amos and Micah and aspires to be ‘a prophetic Jewish voice’ himself. Who he is married to, he says, is ‘really beside the point. Either what I’m saying is right or it isn’t. Christians and Jews have got to talk about these things and we’ve got to talk about them in an honest way.

‘We Jews have got to acknowledge our culpability in what has happened to the Palestinian people, and that has to be the first step in trying to reach a just settlement.’

© Church Times 2017

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