Brendan O'Neill: Why Western ‘solidarity’ is a death sentence for Palestinians
There is a question we must ask, ugly and unsettling though it is: who benefits from Palestinian death? It is my belief that Israel does not. On the contrary, given that the influential of the West hold up every civilian death in Gaza as hard proof of the unique evils of Zionism, it is always damaging for Israel when Palestinians die, even when the IDF does its utmost to avoid the loss of innocent life. The staggering double standard by which the woke judge the world’s only Jewish nation – we fight wars, it commits war crimes – means Israel is indicted more ferociously than any other state on Earth for that terrible thing that attends all wars: civilian casualties.Anti-Semitism? What anti-Semitism?
Hamas, on the other hand, clearly spies political advantage in Palestinian suffering. It knows every dead Palestinian will be marshalled by the West’s cultural elites as part of their zealous crusade to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish State. It knows the fires of Israel-hate that burn so fiercely in our opinion-forming circles are further stoked by every tragedy in Gaza. It believes there is moral benefit in the ‘martyrdom’ of civilians. And here’s the awful thing: there is. The swirling global culture of Israelophobia acts as an open invitation to Hamas to permit, and even puppeteer, ever greater levels of Palestinian pain, in the knowledge that this will land yet another blow on Israel’s prestige. Let us speak frankly: Hamas wants people to stay in northern Gaza because it wants them to die.
This is why the Battle of Northern Gaza matters. First, because it is proving to be one of the most intense confrontations yet between the Jewish State and the terror army that wishes to destroy it. And second, because it speaks to a truth too often obscured by the bigotries and bullshit of our Israel-obsessed elites. Namely, that this war they falsely depict as a genocide by Jews, as fascism rehabilitated by fascism’s one-time victims, is in reality a fight between a democratic state and a death cult. Between a civilised nation that regrets death and a barbarous outfit that relishes in it. Between a country that just wants to exist and terrorists dreaming of that ultimate state of non-existence: ‘martyrdom’.
Consider Hamas’s flagrant lie that it is discouraging people from leaving northern Gaza because it is ‘too risky’ elsewhere. You wouldn’t know it from the emotionalist coverage of the mainstream media, which depicts the clash in the north as a deranged one-sided assault by Israel, but Hamas militants are fighting furiously. There are around 5,000 of them in the north, many concentrated in the Jabalia camp Israel has been targeting. They have been shooting guns, firing anti-tank missiles and using high explosives to target IDF soldiers. Hamas is not telling people to stay in the north to avoid the risk of death elsewhere – it is telling them to stay to subject them to the risk of death. To the gross, inescapable dangers of life on a patch of land where a terrorist army fires deadly weapons in heavily populated areas.
Incapable of beating Israel on the physical battlefield of Gaza, Hamas seeks to wound it in the global battlefield of ideas, of images, of viral Palestinian suffering that the self-styled virtuous of the West lap up, retweet and weaponise against that state they hate above all others. Hamas is open about the moral boon it believes it can get from Palestinian death. Yahya Sinwar, its military leader in Gaza, has described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’. He believes, in CNN’s words, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Western influencers’ frantic, giddy sharing of Palestinian pain to try to dent Israeli prestige directly inspires Hamas’s grotesquely cavalier attitude towards Palestinian life.
As I argue in my new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, ‘Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue’. It is your ‘commodification of Palestinian pain’ that incites Hamas to offer up yet more of it – such as by beating people with sticks to make them stay in a warzone where they might very well die. The gravest threat to Gaza right now is the death cult that rules it – and the Western apologists for that death cult. Free Palestine? Yes. Please. From the death-mongering of Hamas and the lethal pity of faraway elites who have no idea of the harm they are doing.
There’s certainly been no shortage of the latter of late. In February, the Community Security Trust (CST) reported a 96 per cent rise in anti-Semitic assaults following 7 October. Bricks and bottles have been thrown at British Jews. One man, on his way home from a synagogue, was kicked by ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters and told, ‘We are going to rape your mother, you dirty Jew’. No doubt, this was just misplaced anger about the goings on in Gaza, because racially menacing British Jews is a totally normal response to a war raging in the Middle East.
Sarcasm aside, those still trying to pretend that this is anything other than pure anti-Semitism would do well to read that CST report from February. The peak in anti-Semitic incidents, it found, came just a few days after Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel – weeks before Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza began. It represented a grotesque kind of ‘celebration’ of the pogrom, it concluded. Holding British Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is disgusting enough. But even that doesn’t capture what has been going on.
Anti-Semitism has been metastasising for years now, yet the ‘anti-racists’ have been determined not to notice. Even before 7 October, British Jews were suffering a quarter of all religiously motivated hate crimes while making up just 0.5 per cent of the population. Stories of elderly Jewish men being sucker-punched on the street or Jewish sites being desecrated came and went without much comment. There’s a synagogue in Kent that has been smashed up eight times in 10 years, yet that story has struggled to break out of the local and Jewish press.
My mind often drifts back to those racist scumbags who drove around Finchley Road, another Jewish area of north-west London, in 2021. They chanted ‘Fuck the Jews… Fuck their mothers… Rape their daughters’ out of megaphones, in cars decked out with Palestinian flags. There they were, calling for precisely the kind of violence and sadism we saw meted out on the innocent Jews of southern Israel a few Octobers later. This was a call for barbarism dressed up as national liberation, in the middle of our capital city. And yet it provoked little more than perfunctory tweets from the great and good.
If they were willing to let that slide, they were willing to let anything slide. The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ since 7 October won’t have surprised anyone who has been paying attention. But it must deprive the woke set of the moral high ground for good. After years of raging against cultural appropriation, microaggressions and inanimate objects, they clammed up when genocidal terrorists achieved the most deadly assault against Jews since the Holocaust, and anti-Semitic marches became part and parcel of British city life. They showed once and for all that they don’t care about racism, particularly when it’s levelled against Jews. Never let them forget it.