THERE are big people — hello, President Trump — who take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict for bad reasons. 

But that shouldn’t make us forget that the intense conflict over Israel and Palestine is also driven by very genuine passions on both sides.  

Two groups of people can look at the same situation and honestly see something completely different.

For Palestinians and their supporters, they see a national liberation struggle. They see people yearning for control of their land and their lives, facing the usual kit every other national liberation struggle faced. 

Bring on the tear gas, the mass arrests and the “special means” interrogations. Rev up the bulldozers, roll out the barbed wire.  

Load the live rounds, fly the helicopters. Shoot into the crowds, launch the “targeted killings” and the indiscriminate fire.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation is their African National Congress. They’ve had their Sharpeville and Amritsar massacres over and over.

But for most Israelis, and most of the millions of Jewish people worldwide, Israel is their national liberation struggle. 

Israel’s government lobbies hard for its interests, but millions of Jewish people aren’t just driven by this lobbying. 

Anti-semitism has been around a long time. Like other forms of racism, prejudice against Jewish people could become violent persecution. 

But with the nazis, racist violence reached a new depth. The most economically advanced nation in the world ran an industrial process to murder Jewish people, consuming six million lives. 

Before the Holocaust, some Jewish people argued that to be safe in the world they needed their own nation, in a land with historic connections to their people.  

Other Jewish folk argued that joining socialists to fight for equality was the answer. Others favoured strengthening liberalism. 

But after the Holocaust, the belief that a Jewish nation was essential to their safety won the hearts of the majority of Jewish people. 

The mass murder of European Jews made a very strong case that this was a battle for survival where Jewish people needed a homeland. 

For the millions of Jewish people who moved to Israel, this meant living in their homeland. For the millions of Jewish people who live outside Israel, this means they believe they have a nation that will argue for their security on the world stage, and provide a refuge if necessary. 

There is a minority of Jewish people who do not see Israel as “their state” and are deeply critical of “zionism” as a project — and their voice deserves to be heard too.  

There are a great many Jewish people who are shocked or angry about how Israel has behaved towards the Palestinians. 

But on the whole, most Jewish people look on Israel as their nation and as a guard against further persecution. 

This is at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zionists argued that “Palestine was a land without people for a people without land.” The land was not without people and the expulsion of Palestinians is a crime that still needs settlement. 

But many Jewish people’s desire to not be a “people without land” is understandable, in the light of the Holocaust.

Whatever we think is the solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis, I think we should understand both the Palestinian case and the Israel case. 

Oddly enough, people who don’t really care about Palestinians don’t really need to worry about how the Jewish state was born as a response to anti-Jewish prejudice and violence either. 

They can just look at the government with the army and the planes and the tanks, and decide they are the good guys.

Understanding that zionism was spurred by racist violence against Jewish people doesn’t mean we have to choose any specific resolution, but it does change how we approach the debate. 

Many compare the Israeli government’s Palestinian policies with apartheid South Africa. There are plenty of grounds — the sound of gunshots, the separations, the ID system, even the marriage laws. 

But there are differences: as the ANC struggled against apartheid, British political satire show Spitting Image entertained us with its comic song I’ve Never Met a Nice South African.

The show’s grotesque rubber puppets told us Afrikaaners were “arrogant bastards who hate black people” and so on. 

It was broad humour — there were in fact plenty of “nice South Africans,” including white Africans who risked their lives to fight apartheid. 

But the crude joke worked in a way that “I’ve never met a nice Israeli” could not. Poking fun at white South Africans and poking fun at citizens of the only Jewish state isn’t the same, because of the history of people “poking fun” at Jewish people in order to oppress, exploit or kill them. 

There is a powerful need to guard against anti-semitism when criticising Israel that wasn’t there in South Africa.

More than that, there is a real need to offer reassurance to Jewish people over their security, even while struggling to bring justice for the Palestinians. 

This isn’t really fair on the Palestinian people, who had nothing to do with the slaughter during the Holocaust. 

We in Europe were responsible for that huge and frightening crime. But it is true. During the apartheid years white South African conservatives said that unless they were allowed to repress black people the “blacks” would “murder us in our beds.” 

The ANC in turn went out of its way to guarantee security for the broader white population, even when fighting an armed struggle.  

In the mid-1980s ANC leader Thabo Mbeki told negotiators that “there is no instinct in our people to slaughter white people” and that rumours “the maid will poison the madam” were wrong. 

It didn’t matter that fear of bedtime slaughter and maid poisoning was a weird apartheid psychological tic. Or that black South Africans were being murdered wholesale by the apartheid regime and their agents. 

The ANC still made the promise. Jewish people really were taken from their homes and slaughtered wholesale. And can still sometimes be murdered because they shop in a Jewish supermarket or go to a Jewish school in Europe.  

So even as the Palestinians fight for statehood, there is arguably a greater need to guarantee Jewish security than the equivalent guarantee in South Africa.