After the aggressive policing against anti-genocide protesters in London on 18 January, the Canary spoke with Carolyn Gelenter, who has regularly attended the marches in solidarity with Palestinians. Gelenter’s father was a Holocaust survivor, and she believes it’s important to openly express her opposition to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
She previously told us about Met Police hostility outside the BBC on 18 January, and their chaotic, ‘bizarre’ policing around Trafalgar Square. But she also described her fears regarding the government and police’s ‘loss of humanity’ over the Gaza genocide and the protests opposing it. Having seen Israeli brutality first-hand in Palestine, she reflected on the danger of people ‘just following orders’, and the fear and victimhood at the heart of the Zionist project in Israel. She also praised the moral leadership of Jeremy Corbyn on Palestine, and argued that reestablishing human connections by listening carefully to each other is key to building a better future.
The British state’s ‘loss of humanity’ over the Gaza genocide
Speaking about the intensifying state crackdown on anti-genocide protesters, from politicians to police, Gelenter insisted that “what frightens me” is the fact that some police officers “have lost their humanity”:
That is scary – more than the physical violence that they’re threatening. It’s the fact that they can look at a person, another human being, and see not a human being but this object that they have the right to beat down because they’re breaking, in their eyes, the law. That scares me.
And prime minister Keir Starmer, who has been Britain’s genocide-denier in chief since 2023, is particularly terrifying. As Gelenter stressed:
I think Starmer’s more frightening than [Tony] Blair. Because when Blair came in, I know he was a Tory, but I think he did pour lots of money into education, he had some reasonable policies internally – not foreign policy, it doesn’t matter who’s in, foreign policy is always foreign policy… But with the special relationship with [George W] Bush, I think he found God or something – he became one of those American Zionists who say ‘our prayers for the kids that are dying in Gaza’ and so on.
But Starmer was a liar from the beginning. Because he came in and said Jeremy Corbyn was his friend, he was going to keep the left, he kept much of the manifesto and the policy… We now have seen the proof in the pudding.
She laments in particular that the government is spending so much money on protecting Israel’s genocidal project rather than on housing, infrastructure and other areas in the UK in dire need of attention.
It’s not just about arming Israel, is it? … It’s actually about what it’s doing to us as a society.
Corbyn stands out as a shining light
Gelenter had particularly positive comments about former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his embodiment of morality. She said:
One day, people will look back and look at Jeremy Corbyn and see that he was actually a visionary. … He’s not a revolutionary, he’s not really radical. He’s just humane…
You probably think I’m mad saying this, but [he’s like] the Jesus Christ of his time. He is visionary in his actions – he leads alongside rather than telling people what to do. And that’s pretty way out there for our times, isn’t it?
Regarding the hypocrisy of right-wingers who attacked Corbyn with cynical allegations of antisemitism but now defend world’s richest man Elon Musk pushing us towards fascism, she slammed “the weaponisation of antisemitism”:
I think they were picking up on every tiny detail. They could pick out a thread to link to the woven cloth of antisemitism which they were weaving. I definitely think it was a red herring and a load of nonsense.
With cynical outrage over things like the pronunciation of a name, for example, she insisted that:
What’s more disgusting is that the press even took that up as a story.
‘Israel’s actions directly contribute to the rise in antisemitism’
As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she is saddened by the fact that antisemitism still exists. But she’s very clear that it’s closely connected to other issues:
I feel a lot of pain around it as you can hear and I see it as part of a bigger picture of racism that is about essentially the dehumanising of a group of people on the base of any particular criteria. And it’s driven by money. All of it.
In particular, she said:
I think the rise in antisemitism is a direct result of the behaviour of the state of Israel and its Zionist complicitors.
And she lamented that:
The Holocaust has become an industry and it’s used for the purpose of keeping people frightened, and that really saddens me – and that it’s hierarchical, that ‘you have to have been in Auschwitz to be a true Holocaust survivor’.
Relating to the rise in antisemitism, she stressed that, today, “lots more people are much more aware and saying this has got to stop”.
‘Feeling the Palestinian cause viscerally’
After surviving the Holocaust, Gelenter’s father moved to Australia. There, it was normal for many people in the Jewish community to support the nationalist cause of Zionism. Gelenter herself also lived in Israel for a while. But because she strongly believed in social justice, it was just a matter of time before she challenged her connection with Zionism.
Around the turn of the 21st century, she said, it started to become harder for her to reconcile supporting progressive causes but not speaking up about the occupation of Palestine. With the US invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israeli occupying forces cracking down on Palestinian resistance in the Second Intifada (‘shaking off’ or uprising) from 2000 to 2005, she said:
The hypocrisy of getting involved in all these campaigns and just ignoring what’s going on in Palestine just got too much.
I had the knowledge, but I didn’t know it viscerally.
Something then shifted for her. And she got more and more involved in solidarity efforts with Palestine.
Having a gun pointed at you has an impact
She shared one particular experience in Palestine, saying:
One year, I was on a demonstration with Palestinians in one of the villages [in the occupied West Bank]. Soldiers had thousands of pounds’ worth of weaponry. And there were this kind of row of kids.
Soldiers were firing rubber bullets, tear gas, sound grenades and so on at the kids. And as she asserted:
I’d been on lots of those demos, and it’s a pretty horrendous experience.
She added that:
I just did not want to be tear gassed. It’s such a horrible experience. So I moved right to the front. And because I was a white woman, it kind of gave me a status… so I was able to move up to the front without being shot at. And I looked this soldier in the eye, and I went: ‘Why are you doing this? I’m Jewish. My father was in the Holocaust.’ And he looked at me like ‘you fucking traitor’.
In this moment, she said:
I suddenly thought, ‘if my father had chosen to go to what was Palestine then [after the end of the Second World War] instead of Australia, I could be that person. I could be there looking at me as a traitor.’ And it really profoundly impacted on the way I started to process what I was doing and seeing.
Having a gun pointed at her in occupied Palestine, she said, did a lot for her “notions of death and facing death”.
How to break through the fear and hate
Gelenter explained that many Zionists around her “hate [Benjamin] Netanyahu, and they hate the occupation”, but that’s not enough to speak up for Palestinians. She said that, in large part because of the horrors of the Holocaust, “Jews are very fearful people”. And this means that:
Some of them would never support what was going on, but they couldn’t quite come to not having a Jewish state, [to the idea] that it needs to be one democratic state for all its people.
But she is critical of Zionists she knows, because she stresses:
They feel the suffering for fellow Jews, but they don’t see Palestinians as human beings, and if you cannot feel their suffering as your own, then you are not practising common humanity. And that’s what Hitler was, and all the people that followed him. It’s an inability, because of your own distress and fear and pain, to see somebody who has a different religion, or a different skin colour, or a different sexual orientation, or even a different gender …. as human.… If we can’t see that humanity in everybody, we’re fucked.
She knows how tough it is to break through to people who already have this type of mindset. Nonetheless, she gave an example of how someone had welcomed her into their home despite disagreeing with her political positions, and how sharing time together actually made a small difference. “Zionism is absolutely entangled with victimhood”, she insisted. “It plays on people’s fear”. But if you open your ears and approach people with empathy and kindness, it can make a difference. “You can’t talk to people. You have to work alongside them and build the relationships and not react.” After this time together, her host respected her position and said they’d be happy to go and visit Palestine with her.
The path forward
Gelenter believes in the importance of showing the world that descendants of Holocaust survivors oppose the genocide in Gaza and the crimes of the Israeli occupation in general. Standing clearly as a Jewish person on the anti-genocide marches in London is “something so powerful I can’t tell you”, she said. When she first started doing it, she stressed:
Grown men were coming up to me weeping, and saying ‘thank you’.
But she also insisted “I’m just a human”, and that’s why “it’s my responsibility to be speaking up for Gaza”.
In the long run, she emphasised, we need to spend time together as humans to build connections again. We need to listen to each other deeply:
It becomes easier then, if we have a disagreement over something, to talk about it, because I see you as a human, because you’ve given me the courtesy to listen to my story. And that’s really something we don’t do.
We could build connections locally by picking up rubbish or fighting to open a childcare centre, for example. And that’s different from working in a political organisation. We just need to approach our communities with kindness, “reaching out with love and not competitiveness and ‘my idea is better than yours’”.
Featured image via the Canary
