Broken Reeds

Alisdare Hickson: Creative Commons Attribution.

Last week 36 members of the Jewish Board of Deputies wrote a powerful open letter (paywalled) to the Financial Times, which condemned Israel’s ‘heartbreaking war’ in Gaza. The letter was significant for various reasons. The BoD is the UK’s largest Jewish advocacy group, and it is an unwavering supporter of the state of Israel. Yet here were 36 deputies criticizing Israel’s ongoing ‘Itamar offensive’ in the following terms:

Hundreds and hundreds more Palestinians have been killed; food, fuel and medical supplies have once again been blocked from entering Gaza; and we are back in a brutal war where the killing of 15 paramedics and their burial in a mass grave is again possible and risks being normal. Such incidents are too shocking and painful to take in, but we know in our hearts we cannot turn a blind eye or remain silent at this renewed loss of life and livelihoods, with hopes dwindling for a peaceful reconciliation and the return of the hostages.

The signatories attributed these developments to ‘this most extremist of Israeli governments [which] is openly encouraging violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, strangling the Palestinian economy and building more new settlements than ever.’ They also warned that:

This extremism also targets Israeli democracy, with the independence of the judicial system again under fierce attack, the police increasingly resembling a militia and repressive laws are being advanced as provocative partisan populism is bitterly dividing Israeli society. Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we, members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, fear for the future of the Israel we love and have such close ties to.

The letter was not an official position; the BoD’s president immediately criticized the signatories for ‘barely’ mentioning Hamas, and for laying blame for the ongoing slaughter ‘squarely on the Israeli government.’ Yet the signatories had made their point. After eighteen months, Israeli barbarism in Gaza may have finally reached the point when even Israel’s most loyal supporters are no longer able to stomach it.

For some of Israel’s more extremist supporters, that point will never arrive. But the BoD is a liberal organization, committed to a ‘just and sustainable future in the UK and abroad’, opposed to anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism and hate crime directed against Muslims and Roma people. With regards to the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, the BodD favours ‘peace, prosperity, security and equality for Israel, Palestinians and the Middle East’ and calls on ‘countries like the UK to end the wanton slaughter of civilians and deliver humanitarian relief for suffering populations.’

It is not always easy to reconcile such positions with the actions of a Jewish state that does not recognize political, legal or moral limits to the violence and oppression it is prepared to heap on the Palestinians, and the same can be said of the liberal governments that have supported and armed Israel throughout the last eighteen months.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has become accustomed to the ritual presentation by Western governments of the victims-who-must-be-saved, and the atrocity-that-the-world-cannot-turn-its-back on. Kuwaiti babies, Kosovar villagers, Afghan women, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Ukrainians - again and again, moral horror and disgust at real or fabricated atrocities has become the lubricant through which liberal states justify wars, ‘interventions’ and regime changes which may have very little to do with morality.

In these moments, governments, media commentators and politicians will form a chorus of moral indignation, as Gladstone once attempted to do in response to the ‘Bulgarian horrors’ perpetrated by the Ottomans against the Bulgarians and southern Slavs in 1876. Our contemporary Gladstonians will stand up in Congress or Parliament to deliver heartfelt speeches calling for invasions or missile strikes. They will warn the world of the new Hitler, or ‘our Munich’, and evoke the watershed moment that ‘historians of the future’ will use to judge us.

The Palestinians have never been this kind of victim, and Israel has never been this kind of perpetrator. It’s true that Tony Blair once included the ‘slums of Gaza’ in his ‘kaleidoscope’ speech to a besotted Labour Party Conference in 2001, but this reference, as his actions proved again and again either as Prime Minister or the Quartet’s ‘Peace Envoy’, was for rhetorical purposes only.

Israel’s supporters often argue that Israel is singled out for unfair criticism, but at the level of governments, the opposite is true. Even the most indiscriminate, extreme and bloodthirsty acts of Israeli violence tend to be ignored, rationalised as mistakes and aberrations, or presented as tragic events forced upon Israel by the cunning deviance and cruelty of Israel’s enemies.

The war in Gaza has required an exceptional collective effort to maintain this position. The 1948 Palestinian Nakba took place, to some extent, behind the fog of war, which made it possible for successive Israeli governments to deny that what Chaim Weissman called ‘the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task’ was intentional - and which also made it easier for Israel’s supporters to make the same argument.

That alibi is not possible in Gaza. The facts are too well-known and too horrendous to ignore. In response to the October 7 attacks which killed 1,200 people, Israel has killed at least 50,000 Palestinians, more than half of whom are women, children and the elderly. Tens of thousands more have been maimed or wounded. In other countries, images of maimed and screaming children might precede the latest cruise missile strike or ‘hard liberal’ intervention, when ‘we’ cannot stand idly by.

In this case, the bombs that have destroyed Gaza’s schools, hospitals, universities, homes, cafes, and refugee camps, that have burned Palestinians to death in hospital beds, are liberal bombs provided by the governments of the United States, the UK, and members of the European Union.

Of course, these governments have expressed regret at the loss of Palestinian lives. Before Trump came to power, these governments occasionally called on Israel to show restraint, even when it was made clear, over and over again, that Israel had no interest in restraint. Long before Netanyahu announced that Israel was committed to Trump’s ‘different Gaza’ plan based on the ‘voluntary departure’ of the Palestinian population, it was obvious to anyone who wanted to look that Israel had set out to make Gaza uninhabitable.

Knowing But Not Knowing

There were those advocated this outcome, and not only in Israel. Others entered entered a state of knowing-but-not-knowing, which enabled them to periodically lament Palestinian suffering without denouncing the state responsible for it, or pointing out the very real strategic purpose behind the mayhem.

Long before the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset called on the IDF in February, to ‘separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza’, it was clear that this was already happening, even if the IDF did not necessarily bother to separate the children and women.

From time to time, Western diplomats politely called for an investigation or an inquiry, none of which has had the slightest impact on the remorseless machinery of destruction and killing that Israel has brought to bear on an essentially defenceless population. On those rare occasions when criticisms of Israeli policy did make national news, just the invocation of words like ‘Hamas’, ‘terror target’, or ‘anti-Semitism’ was usually enough to silence them.

In the UK, a British public that has become accustomed to thinking of Gaza as a ‘terror enclave’ might have benefitted from the powerful and affecting BBC documentary, in which Gazan children describe living under bombs. The fact that one of the children in the film was the son of a Hamas official was enough for the BBC not just to pull the film, but to grovel in public at the corporation’s ‘mistake.’

In a powerful Oscar Award speech last year, Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest, described his film as a critique of ‘dehumanization’ in the past and the present, declaring:

Right now we stand here as men who refute our Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.

In response, more than 1,000 Jewish actors, directors and other creatives accused Glazer of fuelling a ‘growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world.’ The signatories criticized ‘The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years,’ as a ‘modern blood libel.’

If you refuse to accept that Palestinian people are not ‘indigenous’, and regard the very notion of a military occupation a ‘blood libel’, you will not have too much trouble accepting the destruction that is taking place in Gaza as just retribution against an utterly evil enemy, or as a tragic consequence of the horrors of war - even ‘wars’ that burn hospital patients alive in their beds.

In a powerful essay in the New York Review of Books, the Israeli historian Omer Bartov compares Gaza to the ‘extermination order’ issued by General Lothar von Trotta that destroyed the Herero and Nama people of South West Africa. As Bartov puts it:

Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack [on German settlers] 119 years before: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization.

The Liberal Genocide

As the response to Glazer’s speech shows, the dehumanization of the Gazan Palestinians is not limited to far-right politicians or troglodyte generals. Liberal politicians and journalists, novelists and humanist historians, B-list celebrities, movie stars, soap opera actresses and game show hosts - all these individuals are part of the consensus that has removed Palestinians ‘from the moral universe of civilization’ and contrived to make the destruction of Gaza a tragic inevitability, to be blamed on Hamas or the cruelty of war.

There are many problems with this position: the distortions and sheer ignorance of history that make it possible to imagine that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ began on October 23, 2023; the misappropriation of the Holocaust to obfuscate political and military realities that are not comparable to the Holocaust; the complete refusal to understand that two million Palestinians cannot be encompassed within the word ‘Hamas’.

In his excoriating and searingly eloquent attack on Western hypocrisy in Gaza, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the Egyptian author Omar el Akkad laments the gulf between his own idealistic expectations of Western liberalism and its collusion with the slaughter in Gaza, in which:

The narrative – as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other – demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the west is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.

Faced with ‘so many liberal American politicians [who] slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel,’ Akkad writes:

It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary.

This ‘face’ has now become the face of the Trump government, which is openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as a ‘humanitarian’ outcome, and encouraging Israel to do whatever is necessary to achieve it. But Trump is essentially proclaiming, with all the vulgarity and inhumanity to be expected of him, an expulsion that the British, American, and German governments had already tacitly accepted.

The consequences of this silence, cowardice and collusion are not limited to the Palestinians themselves. Today, the moral pretensions of the ‘hard liberal’ interventionism of the first two post-Cold War decades are null and void. After Gaza, it will be difficult for any liberal government - assuming there are any left in a few years - to make a moral case for military action anywhere in the world We are now firmly back in the ‘realist’ school of international relations, in which powerful states do what they can, and weaker states suffer what they must, and right and wrong has nothing to do with it.

Western complicity with Israeli violence has also begun to have implications for domestic politics in the countries where such complicity has been most notable. In Germany, police have prohibited the speaking of Arabic at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, banned pro-Palestinian speakers, and shut down a conference organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and other civil rights groups.

Last month, Felix Klein, the German government’s Commissioner for Jewish Life in German and the Fight against Antisemitism, praised Trump’s ‘Gaza plan’ as ‘fundamentally positive’.

Doxxing and Deportation

Let no one be surprised that a German government official should be supporting ethnic cleansing whilst his government cracks down on protesters opposing it. A similar process is unfolding in the United States, where an administration whose supporters include actual Nazis, led by a president who believes that Nazis ‘treated Jewish prisoners with love,’ has established a ‘Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism’, which is now subjecting American universities to McCarthyite purges of Israel’s critics.

These purges also include the arrest and physical removal of foreign students and foreign nationals, using the brutal deportation machinery unleashed by the Trump administration against migrant ‘criminals.’ Prominent American liberals have rightly denounced the illegality, immorality and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportations of undocumented migrants to El Salvador.

Galvanized by Trump’s promise to deport ‘homegrown’ American ‘criminals to Nayib Bukele’s rent-a-space gulag, some American politicians have come to see these deportations as part of a more general assault on the rule of law, which will ultimately affect Americans as well as foreign nationals.

Less fuss has been made of the arrests of Palestinians and foreign pro-Palestinian protesters from universities who have had their visas revoked or been deported for participating in campus protests. Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was accused of having ‘engaged in activities in support of Hamas’, because of an op-ed she wrote for a student newspaper, calling on Tufts to ‘acknowledge the Palestinian genocide…disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.’

The Syrian-born activist and graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in front of his pregnant wife, detained in Louisiana, and now faces the revocation of his green card because of his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests deemed to constitute ‘antisemitic support for Hamas.’ Badar Khan Suri is a visiting Indian scholar at Georgetown University, married to a Palestinian-American, accused of spreading ‘Hamas propaganda.’

These names are among the ‘lunatics’ accused by Secretary of State Mario Rubio of ‘destabilizing’ college campuses. Using a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Rubio has claimed the authority to deport any noncitizens whose presence he has ‘reasonable ground to believe’ ‘would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.’

Some of these names have been plucked from Canary Mission - a doxxing website supposedly documenting ‘people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses. The site publishes names, photographs , and cherry-picked quotations of critics of Israel and their whereabouts - all of whom it accuses of anti-Semitism.

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Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez are among the names included on a website that also publishes grovelling faceless ‘apologies’ from previously-targeted ‘anti-Semitic’ penitents who proclaim the folly of their youthful ways in exchange for anonymity.

The purging of the ‘radical left and its Islamist allies’ from American campuses has long been a longterm goal of paleoconservatives and Israel-first organizations such as the David Horwitz Freedom Center, and the fact that the US government is relying on a site like Canary Mission to terrorize universities is an indication of how far the Trump administration has folded this objective into its authoritarian reshaping of American society.

The result is a grotesque situation, in which an extremist authoritarian American government is effectively condoning ethnic cleansing by an extremist authoritarian Israeli government, while deporting students who criticize the devastation, on the basis of hearsay, gossip, and the unchallenged assertions of a pro-Israel website

Perhaps debates such as the one that is now unfolding in the Board of Deputies may break down the deadly consensus that effectively legitimised the slaughter in Gaza long before Trump’s election. Perhaps America’s liberals will come to see that the deportations of students, like the deportations of migrant ‘criminals’, are both expressions of the same lawless authoritarianism.

Perhaps they will come to see, as the 36 deputies have, that the slaughter in Gaza has no justification. And perhaps even the likes of Simon Schama may come to realize that, in helping to dig the graves of the Palestinians and removing any possibility of a just solution to the ‘conflict’ - they have also helped to dig the grave of liberalism itself.

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