It is one year since the Jews suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazi era, and what is the British left doing? Raging against the Jewish state. Hitting the streets in their thousands to fume against the nation that was the victim of that carnival of racist killing. They’re protesting not against the pogromists of Hamas who unleashed such horrors on 7 October 2023, but against the country and the people they did it to.
It’s a new low
It’s a new low. As Jews in Britain and around the world ready themselves for the painful commemoration of the slaughter of more than a thousand of their people, demonstrators have poured on to the streets of London and other cities to damn Israel as a ‘genocidal’ entity. You couldn’t wait? You couldn’t give it a rest for a couple of days? You couldn’t hold on till 8 October before engaging in yet another noisy display of turbo-smug contempt for the world’s only Jewish nation?
Saturday’s big march in London felt disrespectful in the extreme. In terms of both timing and content, it was a smack in the face to mourning Jews. It was called to ‘mark one year of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people’, said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Leaving aside that typically cruel and artless accusation of genocide, my question for the PSC is: ‘And what happened a year ago?’ What about the pogrom that started this war they hate? Hamas’s unprovoked barbarism? A thousand slain Jews? It’s memory holed.
It is a crazy omission, like talking about the US intervention in Afghanistan without once saying the words ‘Al-Qaeda’, ‘9/11’ or ‘3,000 dead Americans’. It’s a sinister omission, too. In turning 7 October into the date Israel started its ‘genocide’ against Palestinians, rather than the date the Jews suffered the genocidal violence of an army of anti-Semites, the Israel-haters are effectively hijacking this grimmest of historic days.
They’re turning it from an anniversary of Jewish pain into an anniversary of Israeli lunacy. They are brutally sidelining Jewish suffering in order that they might elevate, yet again, their own swirling, myopic dread of the Jewish nation. They are colonising 7 October – to use a word they love to bandy about – and supplanting Jewish grief with Israelophobia. One wonders at the mind that can holler about ‘One year of Israeli genocide’ one year after Israelis were raped, kidnapped and murdered by Hamas.
There were flashes of outright bigotry too on this ill-timed, callous gathering. There was praise for Hezbollah. ‘I love Hezbollah’, declared one placard. ‘Nasrallah is not a terrorist’, said another. Well, he’s not anything now – he’s dead.
And of course there were placards comparing Zionism to Nazism and the war in Gaza to the Holocaust. This taunting of Jews with their own historic grief, this defamatory accusation that they have become the evil that once stalked their own people, is bad at the best of times. But a couple of days before 7 October? Before the anniversary of the worst act of fascistic violence against the Jews in almost 80 years? That is unforgivable.
I fear we have got so used to shrill displays of fashionable disdain for Israel that we have become blind to how strange and even iniquitous they are. How odd it is to see such hatred for Israel on the anniversary of Israel’s invasion by an army of barbarous haters of Jews. How concerning it is that in Britain in 2024 there are young people on the streets expressing sympathy for groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. Is this really opposition to war or celebration of a pogrom?
Perhaps the most telling banner was the huge one that declared: ‘[We] don’t want no two-state, We want 1948!’ Take that in. This is a cry essentially for the removal from the Middle East of the modern state of Israel. It is a demand for a return to that year – 1948 – when Israel was fighting to exist. It is a dream of a world without the Jewish state. There’s a phrase for this: ethnic cleansing. That there are people in my home city who share in Hamas’s dream of erasing Israel leaves me cold.
Humza Yousaf, the former First Minsiter of Scotland, was at the front of the London demo. That doesn’t make him responsible for any of the vile chants and iffy placards, of course. But he surely needs to engage in some self-reflection, and perhaps make it clear that he has no truck with sympathy for terrorists or dreams of Israel’s death. Can we have a statement, Humza?
It is time the decent majority spoke up. What we will remember in the next day or two is the violent calamity that was visited on Israel by Hamas, and the surge in anti-Semitism it gave rise to across the West. Solidarity with Jews, not animus for the Jewish state, will be front and centre in every good person’s heart and mind.