RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s official: loathing Israel has become the ultimate luxury belief. You can’t swing a Daunt Books tote bag in polite society without hitting an Israel hater. This week we’ve seen artist Jasleen Kaur use her Turner Prize victory speech to damn Israel’s ‘genocide of the Palestinian people’ as the assembled dignitaries in the hallowed halls of the Tate rattled their jewellery in agreement. We watched as Juliet Stevenson, the luvvie’s luvvie, titillated a gathering of affluent socialists with her mellifluous censure of Israel for its ‘massacre of the Palestinian people’. She was wearing a keffiyeh. Of course she was. The radical middle class rarely leaves the house without first pulling on that sartorial signifier of virtue.

And now, to top it off, the cunning stunts of Led By Donkeys have got hearts racing in posh coffee houses everywhere by accusing Israel of genocide. Yesterday, the beardy bros of this most grating of campaign groups took a break from berating the oiks for voting Brexit to berate Israel for fighting back against the army of anti-Semites that attacked it on 7 October. They rolled out a giant banner in Parliament Square saying: ‘YES IT’S A GENOCIDE.’ If I had their time, money and insatiable urge to make a media spectacle of my moral rectitude, I’d roll out a banner saying: ‘No it isn’t, you twats.’

Nothing better confirms that Israel-bashing has become a status-conferring belief among the upper middle classes than its showy embrace by Led By Donkeys. For this outfit, founded by four craft-beer tossers in Stoke Newington, is the very physical embodiment of the depressive doctrines of the metropolitan elite. They’ve spent years bewailing Brexit and slamming the Tories and deriding the idiot ‘gammon’ who vote for such things. They call themselves a ‘guerilla operation’ but really they’re the activist wing of a bewildered establishment that can’t believe the great unwashed keep defying its moral instructions. And now they’ve added Israelophobia to their charter of correct-think.

It’s a desperate stab at staying relevant. With the Tories out of power and Brexit a done deal, life’s hard for these turbo-smug Remoaners. What are they meant to do now? Criticise the Labour government? Come off it. They need a new mission. A new target for their bottomless reserves of self-righteousness. And clearly they’ve taken a look around to see what their fellow inhabitants of the rarefied plane of fashionable opinion are obsessing over now. And there really is only one thing: Israel’s ‘genocide’.

Defaming the Jewish State as ‘genocidal’ is all the rage in influential circles. Visit an Ivy League campus and you’ll be swarmed by the keffiyeh classes hollering ‘GENOCIDE!’. Organs of liberal opinion say Israel is in the grip of ‘genocidal mania’. Amnesty International, like a kangaroo court of the conceited, haughtily accuses Israel of ‘genocide’. Though perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that an organisation that doesn’t know what a woman is also doesn’t know what war is. Literary darlings clink their Proseccos in giddy agreement with the likes of Sally Rooney when she says Israel is genocidal. And of course the International Criminal Court gives succour to all this bourgeois anti-Israel hysteria by issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.

It can be ‘frightening’ and ‘dangerous’ to speak up about Israel’s ‘massacre of the Palestinian people’, said Juliet Stevenson in that speech. Bollocks. Nothing is more likely to earn you a pat on the back from the guardians of right-think than a spot of Israel-bashing. Branding Israel ‘genocidal’ has become the lazy cry of every status-seeker in the cultural establishment. And it’s precisely the cavalier and self-serving nature of this accusation that makes it so dangerous.

Let us be frank: it is a lie. It is a vile calumny wherein the judgemental finger of Western opinion accuses the world’s only Jewish nation of doing the very thing that was once done to the Jews. None of the figures from the war in Gaza that Hamas started with its pogrom of 7 October stacks up the fevered talk of genocide. Even the highest purported death tolls – which tend to come from the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, let’s not forget – do not speak to ‘genocide’.

Let us take the claim that 44,000 people have died in the conflict in Gaza. This is queried by many, but let’s just take it for now. Israel estimates that it has killed 17,000 Hamas militants. This would mean that around 38 per cent of the fatalities in Gaza have been combatants. Naturally, people have challenged Israel’s numbers – everything Israel says is subjected to the most ferocious contestation by puffed-up ‘fact-checkers’. Some say that, actually, ‘only’ 8,500 Hamas terrorists have been killed. This would mean that around 19.3 per cent of the purported 44,000 deaths were of combatants.

Here’s the thing: even that would be in keeping with the combatant-civilian death ratio for most modern conflicts. Some studies claim that, from the 1980s onwards, around 75 per cent of deaths in war have been among civilians. Whether the proportion of civilian deaths in Gaza is 60 per cent, as some in Israel claim, or 80 per cent, as Israel’s critics claim, it is normal. Awful, yes. Truly awful. But there is no proof that Israel is carrying out anything other than war. And, what’s more, a war it has every right to fight. It was Israel that was attacked, by an army of Jew-haters, and its decision to crush that army of Jew-haters is understandable and just.

Accusing Israel of genocide is factually wrong and morally repulsive. It is a gross moral inversion. It was Israel that was subjected to a genocidal attack when the death cult of Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered more than a thousand of its people, and yet it is Israel that is called ‘genocidal’. It was Israel that was targeted by the worst act of racist violence of the 21st century so far – and the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – and yet it is Israel that is hysterically accused of pursuing the racial extermination of the Palestinians. The West’s activist class that seeks to prove its moral worth by noisily accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ ends up proving nothing more than its own unmooring from truth, reason and decency.

‘Genocide’ is a wildly overused term in the 21st century. Various wars are rebranded as genocides. We hear insane talk of a ‘trans genocide’, which is basically when you fail to use a person’s preferred pronouns. Horrendously, even the mistreatment of animals can be called genocidal these days – who can forget when the moral void that is PETA described your meat dinner as ‘the Holocaust on your plate’?

All this depthless relativism has the effect of minimising the importance of the crime of genocide. But the accusation of genocide against the Jewish nation is even worse. For here, the descendants of history’s worst genocide find themselves reimagined as genocidaires, as the very evil that once stalked them. This is a projection of the sins of Europe on to the victims of that sinning. It is a cynical effort by the European elite to morally absolve itself of the crimes of its ancestors by finding the Jews themselves guilty of the same crimes today. And so are they unburdened of historic guilt, even if the price of that unburdening is truth itself.

Howard Jacobson once asked why Israel, of all nations, is so often called genocidal. It’s because, he said, the aim of such hotheaded activism is not to oppose war but to ‘wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’. That’s what I saw in that Led By Donkeys stunt: the further wounding of a historically wronged people by Western activists who value their own continued access to polite society more than they do the security of the Jewish State. The accusation against Israel of ‘genocide’ is not only wrong – it is reckless, cruel, self-serving and deserving of the firmest moral pushback we can muster.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy