RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new definition of chutzpah just dropped. It’s people thinking they can spend 16 months crying ‘Crush the Zionist entity!’ and then wring their hands over the threat of ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s protesters thinking they can wail ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – shorter version: erase Israel – and then accuse others of wanting to ‘cleanse’ the Middle East of ‘problematic’ people. It’s an activist class that is consumed by a burning hatred for the very idea of a Jewish homeland thinking it can lecture its opponents on the importance of respecting other people’s homelands.

I can stomach some hypocrisy, but I draw the line at pontifications on ‘forced removal’ from a political set that dreams of removing the Jewish State from the family of nations. Behold the orgy of sanctimony that has greeted Donald Trump’s nutty proposals to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip so that he might turn it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. We’ll come back to Trump’s vision, if you can call it that. But first we need to take down the idea that he has unforgivably put ‘ethnic cleansing’ on to the agenda for the Middle East, for the truth is that the West’s influential Israel-loathers did that long ago.

The fury over Trump’s Gaza idea is intense. He proposed resettling its population so that the Americans might go in and remake the place. We will ‘rebuild’ this ‘demolition site’, he said. The right-thinking are horrified. He’s flouting all the ‘established laws’ of international relations, says the Guardian. One wonders where this white hot fury was during earlier crusades of ‘nation-building’. From Bosnia to Libya, Iraq to Afghanistan, Washington and its allies dispatched local leaders, caused mass exoduses of people, and assumed the godly right to remake said country in their own ‘democratic’ image. And the Guardian often supported it. Keep your wigs on, people – Trump is not the first US president to propose ‘rebuilding’ a nation.

Still the cries of ‘ethnic cleansing’ have come thick and fast. Trump’s proposal would amount to an ‘alarming escalation’ in the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinians’, says Human Rights Watch. The UN also says it is ‘ethnic cleansing’. The left has been Trump’s noisiest critic. We know Israel has been ‘plotting the violent removal of Gaza’s surviving population’, says one commentator, and now these ‘genocidal’ ambitions are being abetted by the American president. Student radicals at Columbia University in NYC are damning Trump for ‘advocating for ethnic cleansing’ – a ballsy position for a campus where just a few months ago Jewish students were being told to fuck off back to Poland.

What’s exasperating about all this is that we’ve just come through 16 months of shameless agitation for the end of the Jewish State. Modern anti-Israel activism, at root, is a dream of ethnic cleansing. Consider Columbia. Its woke students are fuming over Trump’s Gaza idea. Yet this is a campus where apocalyptic Israelophobia has run riot since Hamas’s pogrom 16 months ago. Campus activists referred to Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and fantasised about a future when it would die. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!’, they cried, referring to 1948, when the modern state of Israel did not yet exist. Plainly put, they want the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.

‘Crush Zionism!’, the West’s activists cry. ‘End Zionism!’, their banners demand. They want the very belief in a Jewish homeland – which is all that Zionism is – killed off and buried. You should be grateful we’re not ‘going out and murdering Zionists’, said a spokesman for Columbia’s Gaza encampment last year. Trump might want to put up some plush condos in Gaza but at least he hasn’t raised the prospect of murdering everyone who believes in Palestinian statehood. Hostility to Israel’s right to exist is entirely commonplace on demonstrations in the West. That’s what ‘From the river to the sea’ means – the complete excision of the Jewish nation and its replacement by Palestine.

Anti-Israel agitation is the first ‘peace movement’ in history where the aim is not just to stop a war but also to stop the existence of a country. People have even chanted in favour of the Houthis, whose flag literally says ‘Death to Israel’. In polite society too, at literary soirees, at dinner parties, the question goes out: ‘Should Israel exist?’ These dreams of cleansing are incredibly influential. Hence, headlines like ‘Most young people think Israel should not exist’, after a poll of youthful Brits found that 54 per cent of them thought Israel should be brought to an end. And its people? What happens to them? Fuck off back to Poland?

Imagine the gall it takes to accuse others of ‘ethnic cleansing’ after you’ve spent more than a year mingling with people who lust after the wholesale dismantling of Jewish nationhood. If I had attended protest after protest at which people waved placards saying ‘Keep the world clean’ alongside an image of the Jewish flag being put in the bin, I’d probably stay quiet about Trump’s dream of making a holiday resort in Gaza. At least his proposal has proven controversial. In contrast, hatred for Zionism, and even calls for its ideological annihilation, have been mainstreamed these past 16 months. That terrifies me far more than Trump’s Gaza bluster.

Not one Palestinian should be forcibly removed from Gaza. Gaza is not America’s plaything and its people are not America’s property. They have a right to live in the towns they built over the decades, many of them sadly now destroyed in the war Hamas started with its pogrom of 7 October. But the West’s opinion-formers can’t have it both ways. They can’t treat Gaza’s inhabitants as a fundamentally homeless people, as permanent refugees, as the generational victims of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and then reach for the smelling salts when Trump proposes rehousing them. Both the Israelophobic activist class and blundering Trump seem to think Gazans don’t truly belong in Gaza, and that is not conducive to the building of a free state there post-Hamas. For that’s what really needs to be wiped out: not Gaza, not Israel – Hamas.

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