Whisper it… Democracy means it’s ok not to vote

Godwin’s Law is the assertion that if any online discussion continues for long enough, someone at some point will invoke Nazism. It’s like a rhetorical nuclear device – the point at which any attempt at reasonable discourse becomes as futile as trying to get a plumber out to fix your washing machine in the aftermath of an H-bomb.

So let’s to get it out of the way early this time and state the fact that Hitler was elected; that people voted him into power.

Gandhi, Che Guevara, Jesus. None of them ever won an election.

So democracy, eh? What a crock of shit.

Well, no. It’s obviously a facetious argument. But it illustrates a point about voting: you don’t always know what you’re going to get.

The Germans who willingly voted for Hitler – and yes, there were some who may have done so less willingly than others – did not necessarily vote for the Holocaust. They did not vote for six years of war and many more of austerity and starvation. They did not vote to see their cities turned to rubble.

There has been a lot of talk this week about voting. There have been campaigns to energise the country into registering to vote (because there’s an election coming up, you see) and celebratory stories about the record numbers who subsequently signed up.

But what bothers me is the unchallenged assumption, held almost universally across what I hate calling but can only really be described as the London media elite, that voting is – a priori – a good thing.

I am not against the idea of voting. I don’t believe in Russell Brand’s unhelpful, negative world view that the act of voting props up and legitimises an unfair and corrupt system.

I have voted in the past, I have not voted in the past, and I may or may not vote this time round.

But not voting is an entirely legitimate position to take. It does not render anyone automatically disenfranchised or voiceless. Those who choose not to vote are not necessarily apathetic. Some may be apathetic, just like many people who do go and put a cross next to a name they know next to nothing about.

For the act of not voting to be described as “the grey cynicism of indifference” as the usually excellent Alex Thomson does in his blog for Channel 4, is unfair and inaccurate.

Thomson’s emotive plea to non-voters to go and exercise their democratic right draws on his experience as a war reporter in Bosnia, West Africa and Libya to show what happens when the political void is filled by power-hungry warmongers.

But low voter turnout did not cause these conflicts or countless others around the world. The absence of a democratic process did.

People throughout history have been willing to die for the right to vote. That right includes the right not to vote. If there was any threat to that right, there’s no reason to think that those cynical apathetic non-voters wouldn’t fight to preserve democracy, whatever form that fight needs to take.

Not voting does not rule you out of debates about public policy. It does not mean you can’t complain about the tax on beer or the fracking going on in your back garden. It does not mean it’s your fault if politicians do things you don’t like.

The thing about voting is that, at best, it’s just taking a punt. It’s not unusual for Lib Dem voters to speak of their betrayal at the party’s U-turn over tuition fees after they became coalition partner in 2010. But it’s not that broken promise that I think best shows the disconnect between the action of voting and its effect.

Because how many former Labour voters who defected to the Lib Dems in 2010 could have known that those votes might help prop up a Tory government that took an axe to the Welfare State like none has before?

It’s certain that a fair proportion of those won over by Cleggmania five years ago would have been horrified by a welfare reform agenda that has seen the introduction of the hugely divisive ‘bedroom tax’ and an income reduction for 46,000 households through the capping of benefits?

That doesn’t mean to say these people were wrong to vote as they did, simply that voting is guesswork and that some people don’t want to throw the dice unless they know the odds.

The high turnout for the Scottish independence referendum has been hailed as an example of people becoming engaged in politics in a way that we haven’t seen for generations. But this was direct democracy. There was no doubt about what people were choosing when they cast their votes.

For me, the referendum and – more depressingly – the rise of Ukip on the back of its unwavering commitment to an EU exit can help explain why people might not want to vote. Put simply, we can’t guarantee what we’re voting for.

It is not necessarily apathy or indifference that will lead to so many people swerving the polling stations on 7 May. It is a lack of faith that any vote will match the desires or aspirations of the person casting it.

As for spoiling the ballot paper, if there is a decent argument to suggest that drawing a cock and balls on a piece of paper is any different from staying at home, I’m yet to hear it.

The Tories’ new Right to Buy won’t fix our housing problem

I would never claim to be much of an economist, but I do vaguely understand the concept of supply and demand. At least I think I understand it better than whoever the Conservative Party is using to cook up its policies.

We are, you see, in the midst of a housing crisis. We have been for a long, long time, even if most of the mainstream media and – by extension – our politicians seem to have only woken up to the fact relatively recently.

In the most basic terms, that crisis can be summed up by the simple equation that the demand for new housing is growing at around twice the annual rate of supply of that same housing.

What happens next will be familiar to anyone who has looked for any type of accommodation in the last five years: prices go up. And that’s not just house prices, but also rent. As fewer and fewer people buy, the rental market grows and – lo and behold – the private landlords who gobbled up homes decades ago can raise rents to the point where a month in a two-bed flat in Peckham costs about the same as a fortnight in Mauritius. With lobster for lunch every day.

Three simple words: supply and demand.

So how do the Tories propose to fix this problem? Do they try to coerce housebuilders into building more homes with either the stick of jacking up tax on unused land or the carrot of subsidy for speedier development? Do they try to enforce some kind of rent control on private landlords? Do they stop expensive London homes being snapped up by investors who leave them empty while the price soars way above the rate of wage inflation?

No. That all sounds way too logical.

Instead, they offer housing association tenants the chance to become home owners by breathing life into one of Margaret Thatcher’s most popular and (as was her way) divisive policies: the Right to Buy.

The Right to Buy was one of the 1980s’ defining social policy, offering eligible council tenants huge discounts to buy their homes, provided they had lived in them for a certain amount of time. It did much to change the nature of the UK’s housing market. Today, home ownership is fetishised like never before (I’ll come back to this), while council housing has all but disappeared.

Yesterday, as the battle for the votes of Middle England intensifies, the Tories revealed that the same opportunity Thatcher gave to council tenants three decades will be offered to people renting from housing associations.

Housing associations are curious beasts. Neither public nor private sector, they are the organisations that stepped into the breach to offer (theoretically) affordable homes for people who might otherwise have been left stranded when councils stopped building.

They have always been subsidised, whether directly through grant funding or indirectly through housing benefit, but they are nevertheless private businesses and run as such.

That means that the homes the next Tory government is going to offer tenants at a knockdown price ARE NOT THEIRS TO SELL.

Even if the government legislates to force housing associations to sell – and there is already talk of a legal challenge if the idea sees the light of day – the discount will have to come out its own coffers.

If the take up of the policy is as widespread as the Tories hope, the cost is estimated at around £5.8bn homes. The National Housing Federation says that would be enough to build 300,000 homes. But why build when you can buy, eh?

Because that’s the thing about this policy – it reinforces the largely unchallenged assumption that home ownership is A Good Thing. It’s aspirational, isn’t it? Like shopping at Habitat or watching Saturday Kitchen.

But home ownership being offered at a huge discount to some tenants because they happen to have a certain type of landlord as opposed to others who, through no fault of their own, rent in the private sector is not only unfair, it creates an even bigger divide between renters and owners.

In Germany, the rate of home ownership is significantly lower than the UK’s. They have a healthy, thriving and regulated rental market instead of a society where everyone strives to own a home as quickly as possible before pulling up the economic drawbridge and sailing off into the financially secure sunset.

Yet would anyone really argue that we have a better functioning economy than Germany? Or indeed, that we have fewer social problems?

Both our economy and society as a whole benefits from a housing market that finds space for people in all situations: private renters, social renters, and home owners.

This policy, labelled as aspirational by those who propose it, will simply widen the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Both economically and morally, it just doesn’t add up.

Why the Fleetwood Mac reunion caused the London riots (kind of)

So Fleetwood Mac will be headlining this year’s Isle of Wight Festival. I’ll admit this is not the most earth-shattering news of the week but it disturbed me a bit. And here’s why:

It reminded me of a chain of emails that circulated among a group of my friends last year, when the Mac were embarking on one of their reunions, playing the usual assortment of enormo-domes and hacking their way through ‘The Chain’ to pick up a cheque with a lot of big fat zeroes on the end.

But this polemic isn’t about Fleetwood Mac and their right to cash in on their past glories. Nor is it about that group of friends’ musical taste. No. This is about the death of what once made pop music so life-affirmingly vital. It’s also about why this matters.

The thing is, I like Fleetwood Mac. Some of their music I like quite a lot. But I do not want to see them play live. Ever.

Why?

Because the very fact of Fleetwood Mac being back on the road – and it’s not just Stevie Nicks and co that this is aimed at, but any of the rock dinosaurs that have been bulking up their pensions via the O2 in the last few years – is the thing that is killing our cultural landscape.

In an eloquent but misguided defence of Led Zeppelin’s reunion tour in the Huffington Post in 2012, Classic Rock magazine editor Scott Rowley argued that the reason we keep exhuming the corpses of our musical youth is because none of the newcomers are cutting the mustard.

“Which new band has got one of those instantly recognisable, undeniable, country-uniting anthems that everyone knows the words to?” he asks.

And it’s a good question. And I don’t have an answer. And the reason for that is because I’m 35. I’m not supposed to have an answer. I’m guessing Scott might be a couple of years older than me, so he’s supposed to know even less than I do.

Because here’s the thing: new music (let’s qualify that – new pop music) is for young people. That doesn’t devalue its artistic merit. After all, good music is good music is good music. But the new bands that the readers of Classic Rock might universally agree are fit to hold a candle to Zep, Clapton and The Who are not going to have the same impact as the music he so reveres. Smells Like Teen Spirit, London Calling and Starman do not have the status they have because they were Single of the Week in the Sunday Times; it’s because they caught the mood of the world’s youth. And scared the shit out of old(ish) fuckers like me.

Now, thanks to Caitlin Moran and 6music, us old fuckers don’t want to be old fuckers. And we don’t have to be, because we’ve got all the money. We’ve got all the money that lets us go to gigs so the people who decide what gigs to put on have started thinking like this: “Who’s got all the money? Oh yeah, it’s those people who should have kids but don’t because they’ve got Sky Atlantic and cats that they take endless picture of instead.”

The interesting thing is that none of my friends on the email chain I mentioned (all in their 30s, professional, no kids yet) were born when the Mac were in their mid-70s pomp. Not only that, but never had I heard any of them express any significant amount of love for the band. Maybe I’m wrong and I’ve just never been to the dinner parties where a reverential hush descends  as the needle stalks its way across the opening bars of ‘Husk’. But somehow I doubt it.

Pop music used to be a necessary form of segregation between the generations. It used to say: this is for you and, just as importantly, it’s not for them.

Now, advertising executives in their 40s plan festival trips with their teenage daughters. Some of them might even smoke a cheeky spliff with them.

And what happens to the real spirit of youthful rebellion then? Well, cast your mind back three and a bit years. In every one of England’s major cities, huge numbers of people took to the streets in an orgy of apparently meaningless violence and destruction.

My main impression of that time was of groups of young people – children, basically – roaming London, looking for places to go and get involved. There was no denying that, while most people I knew were terrified, for many of those taking part, it was fun. It was the fun – the communal sense of belonging – they would once have found at a gig or a football match. But they can’t now, because they can’t afford it. Their parents are there instead.

Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend… Yeah, we all love ‘em.  But by recycling former glories, they are vampires, sucking the youthful spirit out of music to keep them from accepting the march of time in their own veins.

It just feels wrong – a perversion of how things should be. And if you’re my age and getting all lathered up about your next weekend getting off your tits in a field before going back to your media sales job on Monday, don’t be surprised if some kids are robbing your flat back in Angel. After all, they’ve got nothing better to do.

Inherent Vice: Paul Thomas Anderson has become the chronicler of the American Dream

Last week I was lucky enough to get a ticket for a preview of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice. So this is me bragging about it a little…

But I also wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the film – and its creator – before they fade in the hallucinogenic afterglow of the film; that same dopper’s fug that seemed to have engulfed most of the patrons as they stumbled out of the Prince Charles Cinema around one in the morning, after 150 minutes of glorious sensory overload.

Undoubtedly, as with Anderson’s previous effort, The Master, this is a film that will divide audiences. Many people will be left frustrated by the slippery eel of a plot and apparent disregard for conventional storytelling. Others will revel in the richness of the tapestry:  the incredible attention to detail; the subtlety of the performances; the entrancing score from long-time collaborator Jonny Greenwood; and, above all, the obvious love for film itself poured into every shot.

To my mind, Inherent Vice once again confirms Anderson’s place as, by some way, the best and most vital director working in Hollywood today. His body of work increasingly resembles that of another generation’s leading auteur Stanley Kubrick, not just in the quality of their films, but in their breadth, scope and ambition too. Furthermore, like Kubrick, Anderson makes films that are likely to infuriate as much as they will delight. Like them, love them, loath them, each of his movies demands a second viewing at the very least. They are not Rubik’s Cube movies, like those of David Lynch, in which one feels an answer is lurking somewhere just off screen. Rather they are cinematic onions, to be endlessly peeled, sliced or diced in whichever way the viewer chooses.

But Anderson is not just a great filmmaker, perhaps the greatest to have begun making movies during my own lifetime. He is also, I believe, the great unconscious chronicler of the American 20^th century – a century whose popular and political culture is best viewed through the prism of film.

There are art forms that, through the happy confluence of technology and tastes, become the lens for a particular time and place. Just as 19^th century Europe can only be truly understood, from an aesthetic point of view, with reference to its sweeping novels, and, arguably, the early 21^st century, with its atomisation of cultural experience, has found its truest artistic expression in the TV box set, so the multiple strands of 20^th century Americana are impossible to grasp without cinema. It was born in, reached it apogee and began to see its influence fade all within the compass of that incendiary 100 years.

And so Anderson, whose filmmaking career only began as that century was drawing to a close, has now produced a series of movies (his five ‘big’ films, putting to one side the smaller scale, though no less impressive, Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk Love) that express the towering hopes and broken dreams of five distinct times in the life of America.

In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’ bombastic self-made oil prospector Daniel Plainview is almost a cypher of the American dream itself, striking out west at the turn of the century in search of black gold. His empire is built from nothing, beginning with him, literally, scratching at the earth.  Plainview shows that, in the New World, there are almost no boundaries to the possible.

Plainview talks about building new communities around his oil wells, yet all the film shows is how the pursuit of profit – to quote another movie overtly about capitalism, the ‘greed is good’ philosophy – ultimately destroys communities, families and faith in anything other than money. The American dream in TWBB may not turn into a nightmare, but it is an unsettling one.

Move forward a few decades and The Master shows an America that is recovering from the trauma of the Second World War. Unlike the previous war, this was one that came close to America’s doorstep and, although it ultimately emerged as the world’s new superpower, the psychological scars were deep. The Master, an examination of the relationship between a cult leader and its newest devotee, illustrates the need many felt to find some meaning in the post-war landscape. As in TWBB, The Master’s protagonists are doomed because they can never find happiness at the end of their quest. In TWBB, it is the quest for money, power and influence, while in The Master, it is for meaning and self-knowledge. But in both films, these single-minded characters are left beaten and unfulfilled.

The pursuit of happiness is at the core of what it is to be American. It’s even written into its declaration of independence. It certainly also seems to be the ultimate goal of the myriad characters in both Magnolia and Boogie Nights, but there is precious little available.

The seed of the destruction of the hedonistic dreams of Boogie Nights – captured brilliantly in its incredible opening three-minute tracking shot – is present from the very start; no party can go on forever, especially one built on sex and drugs. When the comedown arrives, in the form of William H. Macy shooting his wife and himself on the very eve of the 1980s, it hits everyone hard.

Magnolia, Anderson’s multiple story evocation of a day in the life of lonely Californians, is much harder to pin a theme on. But, for me, the over-arching motif is the selfishness and venality of so many of the characters. They seem to believe that, through status or money or sex or therapy, they can achieve some kind of happiness, but this rarely involves other people, except as bit-parts in their own pyscho-drama. In that sense, it is very much a movie about the 1990s and the people of that decade, weaned on self-serving psycho-analysis, who never look for any meaning in life beyond the confines of their own head space. The irony, as Anderson shows, is that all these people are crying out for is a modicum of kindness, of compassion.

So where does this leave Inherent Vice, a film apparently about not a lot? In place of any discernible plot, this is a film about the dissolution of the counter culture itself. Tellingly, Inherent Vice’s most referenced cultural touchstone is not a musician or artist, but Charles Manson, a delusional murderer. The characters, not least Joaquin Phoeniz’s hippy private eye Doc Sportello, are left at the end of the 60s wondering what it was all in aid of.

At the start of the film, Doc watches a TV advertisement for a new housing development in which a cop and part-time actor named ‘Bigfoot’ uses the vocabularly of the hippies (“far out”, “groovy”) to sell them uniform beachfront condos. Later, Owen Wilson’s presumed-but-not-actually-dead sax player turned snitch tells Doc: “I don’t belong here”. It’s a line that could have come from most of the film’s characters. They don’t belong anywhere anymore. Whatever or whoever they were once raging against have won and, what’s worse, co-opted their own style, their philosophy and even their language. All that is left for them to call their own is Manson and his twisted version of anti-authoritarianism.

As with most of his films, Anderson is showing us the aftermath of all the fantastic hopes and dreams that only a country as young as America could foster.

Inherent Vice will, hopefully, not be the last great film that Anderson gives us. But it may well prove to be the conclusion of a series that shines a critical, if still affectionate, light back on his country’s recent history in a way that few artists – let alone filmmakers – have managed before.

The Brooks Newmark sting shows that the tabloids sometimes do themselves no favours

Radio 5 Live’s incomprehensibly popular sport panel show Fighting Talk features a round called ‘Defend The Indefensible’ in which contestants have to deliver a 20-second monologue in support of a statement or view that most people would find distasteful or morally wrong. At times, it can be quite funny.

Occasionally I find myself in a similar position when talking about my profession.

I love journalism and I love being a journalist. On the whole, I find my fellow hacks to be engaging, interesting, witty company. I also subscribe to the view that the British print media, which has been in fire fighting mode for most of the last three years, is among the best in the world because of – not in spite of – the tenacity of the tabloids.

Tabloid journalism, a very British institution in itself, is also prone to suffer from another trait peculiar to our islands: snobbery. Or, more specifically, class-based snobbery. The vast majority of my acquaintances (yes, middle-class, professional Londoners) have very little relationship with the tabloids other than to dismiss them as, at best, an insignificance or, at worst, a pernicious, untrustworthy mouthpiece for vested interests with no apparent ethical grounding.

Fairly often these views are formed without recourse to actually reading the papers themselves. The red tops are seen as a puerile amalgam of tits, football and celebrity gossip, while the Mail titles are simply held up as The Great Evil by people whose world view suffers from just as much myopia by being filtered entirely through the lens of The Guardian and it’s off-the-peg liberalism.

But the truth is that without the kind of journalism people describe, pejoratively, as ‘tabloid’, some of the biggest and most important stories of recent years would never have seen the light of day. And the fear on Fleet Street is that the ultimate fallout from phone hacking, Leveson et al will be an end to the kind of kind of brave reporting that led to the exposure of the Thalidomide scandal, cash for questions and the cricket match-fixing affair.

The more eagle-eyed may have spotted that only one of those examples appeared in a tabloid paper. But they are all borne out of having a free press that works unencumbered by fear of disfavour from any part of the establishment. And that, I believe, is a legacy of the clout – both financial and popular – of the tabloids.

The problem isn’t that sometimes they get it disastrously wrong (cf Hillsborough and The Sun) but that sometimes they don’t accept they have done so.

All of which brings me to Brooks Newmark. Mr Newmark, until last weekend the Tory minister for civil society (which sounds like a job title from ‘The Thick of It’), was caught out in a sting operation when he sent some distinctly unministerial photos of himself to a woman he believed was a female 20-something PR worker but was in fact a male 20-something journalist.

Irrespective of the personal rights and wrongs of a married 56-year-old man sending impromptu dick shots to a woman apparently young enough to be one of his five kids, the suggestion – as has been made by the Sunday Mirror, which broke the story – that there is “a clear public interest” is laughably disingenuous.

The public interest, so the argument runs, derives from Newmark’s involvement in Women2Win, a group he co-founded and aims to attract more Conservative women into Westminster. But this argument relies on a number of assumptions that make the case anything but clear.

The facts are that a government minister – a man of some power and influence – was sexually attracted to a woman he met online, that he was also in a position to help her professionally, and that he sought to arrange a meeting with her. Also, that in the course of their online relationship he sent and asked to receive explicit photos.

There is every chance that Newmark’s interest was only sexual, that he was willing to exploit the power imbalance between him and ‘Sophie’ to lure her to his parliamentary lair and have his wicked way. But is it beyond the bounds of imagination to believe that he wanted to encourage young women, including ‘Sophie’, into politics and also happened to become sexually involved with one? Would such a relationship, were it ‘real’, be inappropriate? Probably. Would it be unusual? Certainly not.

Westminster is filled with MPs in relationships with younger researchers. Some of these are openly known, others less so. It is casting huge aspersions on those involved to suggest that all are based on lies. Yet that’s what we’re saying if we make the assumption that Newmark’s interest in ‘Sophie’ was an exploitation of his position and nothing more.

The very fact that we are left to make assumptions about what was going on in Newmark’s head in the first place is what separates this kind of prurient scandal from legitimate investigations into the workings of the political machine. The lobbying scandal, the result of another sting operation – this time from the Telegraph – that led to the resignation of Tory MP Patrick Mercer, did have a clear and unambiguous public interest. Yet because both investigations involved similar mechanics – reporters inveigling themselves with MPs by posing as something they are not in order to trap them – they could come to be seen as one and the same.

That is why we cannot just throw around a public interest defence whenever there is the suggestion of hypocrisy among our politicians. Sure, Brooks Newmark hardly comes away from this episode smelling of roses, but the question we need to ask is whether his exposure – and the methods used to make it happen – were necessary.

If there actually wasn’t “a clear public interest” – the key word being “clear” – then leaving the press at the mercy of a newly established regulator, eager to show its teeth, could put at jeopardy future investigations where the public interest cannot be doubted.

That is why, much as I want to defend the practices of tabloid journalism that so many turn their noses up to, on occasions it does itself no favours. This is one of those occasions.

Gaza, my parents and why Mira Bar Hillel is wrong to say British Jews are scared to speak out

Back in 2003, my British Jewish mother joined the two million people who marched through London to protest against the coming war in Iraq. I didn’t join her, partly because the organisers used the slogan: ‘No war on Iraq; Freedom for Palestine.’

While I felt I broadly supported both causes, there was something about the conflation of the two that left me feeling uncomfortable, particularly as a Jew.

I asked my mother how she felt about this. She had experienced war during the years she spent in Israel in the 1960s and ’70s, and answered that it was worth doing anything that could help prevent further bloodshed. It was a very simple, pure answer and – in the years that have since passed – has left me feeling ashamed that I didn’t join her on that distant February day.

I was reminded of this conversation last week, reading and listening to Mira Bar Hillel’s repeated assertion that the vast majority of British Jews support Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and, more disturbingly for me, that those who don’t are scared to speak out because of threats of recriminations.

Mira and I got embroiled in a (relatively civil) argument on Twitter, during which she asked why Jewish journalists and commentators in this country hadn’t condemned the actions of the Israeli government and challenged me to do so.

Along with many of my friends and family, Jews and non-Jews alike, I do utterly condemn these actions. After all, it takes a particular type of person to either revel in or even rationalise the killing of children. But the debate over the conflict itself is not what I want to address here. Frankly, I do not feel sufficiently qualified to do so.

But I am qualified to talk about the feelings I had when listening to Mira last week. And speaking to friends and family, I don’t think mine was a unique reaction.

It is as wrong to suggest that Jews in this country are overwhelmingly in support of the bombardment of Gaza as it would be wrong to say any other large and diverse ethnic grouping have a collective view of any event thousands of miles away.

More importantly, it is inaccurate and irresponsible to suggest that the Jewish community has imposed some sort of code of silence on anyone who wants to speak out against Israel.

In my experience, the reaction of most British Jews to the events of the last few weeks is as far removed from that of the patrons of the so-called ‘Sderot cinema’ – the gathering of Israelis watching the bombing of Gaza from a hilltop village – as is possible. Most Jews, particularly those who retain strong connections with Israel, are distraught at what has been happening, talk of little else and, in many cases, are ashamed.

“Not in my name,” wrote Mira in a comment piece for The Independent. She repeated the emotive phrase during an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme last week. The clear implication is that those who do not speak out, who do not categorically condemn Israel, share some of the blame.

She has been accused, laughably in my view, of anti-Semitism. She is not an anti-Semite, but what she has done is help those who want to boil an incredibly complex situation down to a simple equation: Jews vs Palestinians. On a number of Twitter postings, she has used the words ‘Jews’ and ‘Israel’ as shorthand for one another, as if it were the Jewish people ordering air strikes on Gaza. I understand that she is making a point, underlining her argument that Jews in this country and elsewhere should be more vocal if they feel opposed to Israel’s actions.

If Jews have not rushed to condemn Israel – and many, including signatories of last week’s open letter to The Guardian calling for a military embargo, have – it is surely because we realise that kneejerk reactions on either side have never led to a lasting peace. Condemnation is fine, but only if it comes with understanding and a desire to find a solution.

I asked my father, an Israeli who grew up in New York before returning home to serve in the army and finally settling in London 40 years ago, how he felt about Gaza.

His answer, I believe, reflects the views of many broadly leftist Jews in this country:

“My feelings are no different to those I’ve had about previous conflicts, going all the way back to 1973,” he told me. “Guilt, followed by rationalisations, followed by shame — the last with increasing intensity at every new crisis point.”

We feel sadness, anger and, yes, confusion because – rightly or otherwise – we feel closer to this conflict than to others around the world, where we may be much readier to pick sides and apportion blame.

We know that the language of division, of ‘us against them’, only entrenches two sides which require no further incentive to dig their heels in, whatever the damage to their own people.

I have no doubt that Mira Bar Hillel’s revulsion at the actions of her native land is genuine. I am equally appalled by what I am seeing happening in a country that is, whether I like it or not, a part of me.

The difference between us is that I believe using divisive rhetoric is not likely to hasten peace but plunge us even further into a bloody and unnecessary conflict. Challenging Jews to pick a side or be left with blood on our hands is only going to inspire more hate, and surely that is the last thing Gaza needs.