"You Must Renounce Your Heritage"
That's what the "anti-Zionist" demands of the Jews
Oh, my goodness! “Famine-like conditions” prevail in Gaza! Mass starvation is ravaging the population of that “open-air prison”! And to maximize the horror, the genocidal criminals of the Israeli Defense Force are trucking food aid into Gaza—just so they can shoot up the wretched Palestinian civilians who queue to receive it!
It’s curious how this narrative of starvation crops up whenever those dauntless freedom fighters of Hamas need a boost. I call it a narrative because it’s unsupported by much of anything in the way of evidence. Famine, mass starvation, would be easy to document, would it not? But those oh-so-reliable sources, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, the United Nations, and assorted NGOs, supply no such documentary proof of mass starvation in Gaza. Instead, they generate narratives based on dubious sources that are eagerly lapped up by the media in Europe and America, the better to libel the Jewish state.
I do not doubt that a real humanitarian crisis is brewing in Gaza. But it isn’t brewing because Israel is committing genocide. The chief culprit is Hamas, for whom the misery of the Gazan Palestinian population is a priceless tool of propaganda. The secondary culprits are the aforementioned entities whose concern for the suffering of the Palestinians is far, far outweighed by their hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. Their promotion of the famine narrative is, in fact, evidence of the antisemitism that runs rampant among them.
That the bloody Hamas program of October 7, 2023, triggered a worldwide upsurge of antisemitic hate is a searing indictment of the so-called international community. All too obviously, its tearful and indignant handwringing over the plight of the Palestinian people is merely a pretext, an excuse to let slip the dogs of hatred. In Europe, in Canada, in the United States, in Australia—so-called liberal democracies—Jews are being reviled, harassed and assaulted, not because they bear responsibility for what’s happening in Gaza, but because they are who and what they are.
At the conclusion of the Second World War, when the horrors of the Holocaust stood revealed, blatant antisemitism became disreputable. But antisemitism as such did not disappear. Ever the keen-eyed observer, George Orwell noted this phenomenon and documented it in his essay, “Antisemitism in Britain” (1945). In Britain, he wrote:
[T]here is widespread awareness of the prevalence of antisemitic feeling, and unwillingness to admit sharing it. Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite different category from other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that they are not antisemitic.
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If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a sharp division between the politically conscious person who realizes that this is not a time to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native antisemitism is increased by the nervous strain of the war. One can assume, therefore, that many people who would perish rather than admit to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to them.
Orwell would not have been surprised to see that the founding of the State of Israel played a significant role in the rehabilitation of overt antisemitism. Those who disliked the Jews were supplied with a fresh justification for their Jew hatred: the plight of the Palestinian Arabs, some 700,000 of whom were driven into exile during the Israeli War of Independence (1948). Israel—and by extension the Jews as a whole—were made responsible for this disaster. The role of the Palestinians’ “Arab brothers,” who intervened in the war and encouraged them to flee, was studiously overlooked. As in all wars, atrocities were committed by both sides, but with the passage of time, so-called enlightened people came to view the Jews as colonialist oppressors and the Palestinian Arabs as their helpless and pitiful victims.
That this Palestinian diaspora was and remains useful for antisemites is attested to by the fact that today, seventy-seven years after the War of Independence, so many of the Palestinian Arabs remain stateless refugees. No Arab state has agreed to resettle them, and their leaders, supposedly the standard bearers of the Palestinian nationalist cause, have never really accepted that unicorn of diplomacy, the two-state solution. The river-to-sea nationalism of the PLO, Hamas, etc. has guaranteed that no independent Palestinian state could come into being. Those who affect to champion the cause of the stateless Palestinians obviously like them just as they are: convenient symbols of alleged Jewish malevolence and evil.
Contemporary antisemitism in the West goes mostly by the name of “anti-Zionism”—the claim being that one can oppose the Jewish state without being prejudiced against Jews in general. But if this were true, the campus anti-Zionism that flared up in the wake of 10/7/2023 would not have targeted Jews and Jewish institutions for harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and assault. They were so targeted, however: clear proof that anti-Zionism = antisemitism. For the anti-Zionist confronts Jews with an impossible demand: You must renounce your heritage and your people for the sake of our good opinion. You must agree with us that the Jewish state is an illegitimate entity. There are no more pitiable figures than those few Jews who have bowed to that demand.
The ceaseless barrage of lies and calumnies directed at Israel and the Jews since the Hamas pogrom—the false accusations of carpet bombing, mass shootings, deliberate starvation, and other war crimes, the bogus charges of racism, apartheid, and genocide—is anti-Zionism in action. The Jewish state is held to be a criminal enterprise, and therefore it must be destroyed “by any means necessary.” Thus Hamas is valorized while its record of murderous butchery and rape is justified or overlooked. All blame for what has happened since the Hamas pogrom is heaped upon the Jews—who, after all, got what was coming, because they’re colonial oppressors of indigenous brown people.
These are the views and opinions, not merely of oafish bigots, but of people who are pleased to consider themselves civilized, enlightened and progressive. Most of them would blush to use the words that I’ve used here. But actions speak louder than words, and a journalist who happily parrots Hamas propaganda in his reportage is just that type of person. His purpose is to blacken the name of Israel while whitewashing the countless horrors committed by Hamas and other genocidal Islamofascist groups. He wouldn’t do such a thing if he didn’t hold the views and opinions described above.
Another manifestation of anti-Zionism/antisemitism is the absurdly high standard of conduct demanded of Israel—this in an effort to make it impossible for Israel to wage war at all. Civilians are not to be touched; civilian infrastructure is not to be damaged or destroyed, Israel must feed Gazan civilians. On the other hand, no demands are made of Hamas, which uses civilians and hostages as human shields, uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes, and steals the food aid that makes it into Gaza for itself or for resale. The anti-Zionists simply ignore those and other Hamas war crimes. Their one-eyed respect for “international law” betrays the malice and bad faith of Israel’s critics.
The narrative of the Gaza famine is therefore a lie, though not because no one in Gaza is hungry. Probably there is hunger—thanks to Hamas, which not only steals food intended for civilians but actively seeks to prevent them from obtaining food aid. It’s just one of the many ways in which the terrorist overlords of Gaza exploit the suffering of the people they purport to champion. And in that they have the full and enthusiastic support of those civilized, enlightened Western progressive anti-Zionists—who no doubt would tell you that some of their best friends are Jews.
Great post, thank you.
I should state a correction to your account of 1948. The Arab states did not intervene in a war; they started it. Israel declared its independence within the 1947 partition boundaries and was immediately invaded by the armies of five Arab countries. The wave of Arab refugees fleeing from one part of Palestine to another is a result of that moment and nothing else.
The eventually large wave of Jewish refugees that fled the Arab countries, starting in the late 1930s, was absorbed by the new state. UNRWA was founded to cope with both waves of refugees. But the Jewish wave was entirely taken care of by the 1960s.
Not so the Arabs who fled from one part of Palestine for another. No Arab country except Jordan accepted them. The Arab governments insisted that the UN support these refugees in perpetuity and tacitly accept their permanent status as tools in the conflict. The UN eventually did just that by the 1970s.
Meanwhile, the Arab governments that had started the war slowly lost interest. The Arab refugees were relabeled "Palestinians" and misrepresented as an ethnic group or pre-existing polity, although neither is true. The smallest knowledge of the pre-1945 or pre-1918 Middle East will quickly dispel those ideas.
Since thr 1970s, the Arab refugees have gone through three phases: tools of the Soviet Union and its allies, a ten-year period of "peace process," and finally 25 years as tools of Iran and its allies. The last phase has apparently ended. But two countries controlled by jihad-oriented rulers, Qatar and Turkey, continue to push the conflict, especially the former, which makes heavy use of online propaganda and front groups like CAIR and SJP and others.
Indeed. Nice piece, Thomas.