‘Politics stepped in where pity alone, at least for a while, should have spoken’ - The Jewish Chronicle

It doesn’t seem like a year. Atrocities carve out their own space in time and smaller events dissolve around them. It’s impossible to believe, for example, that 23 years have gone by since 9/11. I was accused of being Osama Bin Laden on a train to Manchester two days after the towers came down and I would still be able to identify the football hooligans who made the claim. The strange thing was that although they genuinely believed I was Bin Laden, they didn’t immediately contact the police. Twenty-three years on, I continue to expect a knock on my door. And now it’s a year since the October 7 massacre, 12 months that seem a mere blink of the eye ago.

That we are all still blinking has as much to do with the aftermath as the event itself. In its own way, the aftermath was, and remains, a second atrocity. To say this is to take nothing from the horror of the massacre itself. Finding language adequate to describe the barbarity bedevilled and continues to bedevil discussion of it. Those not looking for a fight shook their heads and called it “appalling”. But “appalling” is a hand-me-down word that costs the user nothing. It is like saying that “our hearts go out” to the relatives of a disaster victim. Those looking for equivocation, like the UN secretary-general António Guterres, were quick off the mark to remind us that the attack, though undoubtedly appalling, “did not happen in a vacuum”. If only Desdemona hadn’t dropped that handkerchief.

Others among us searched for expression adequate to the shock of the massacre having happened where it happened, where we thought we had found safety from such murderousness at last, and language equal to the brute malevolence of it, the naked, face-to-face cruelty of the rampage, the indifference to the age or gender of those shot, raped, degraded and dismembered, the seeming joy taken in the ravening and the kidnapping of the innocent. Did we have the words to describe the deep damnation of the savagery or did we have to make up new ones? I am not convinced I have found them yet.

Had the killers come from some other world? Did they not have wives and mothers and children of their own, no knowledge of the affections to stay their hands, no imagination for others’ agony and grief, and no anticipation of their own remorse, supposing they would ever feel it?

Soon, too soon, the answer came that the murderers and rapists were indeed made of the same flesh as we were, and acted as they did only because they, in their turn, believed they had been wronged. Despair can indeed make us do cruel things. But no despair could explain, let alone allow us to forgive, what was done on October 7. Something else had to account for it, as something else had to account for the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, years before there was an occupation to justify its ferocity. Let’s not run to antisemitism. Let’s just say Jews. Jews explained it. The very presence of them. The expendability of them. October 7 was what happened to the Jew-invader. October 7 was justice.

So now we knew. If the robotic “appalled” was the best expression of abhorrence so many people could find, it was because they didn’t feel much in the way of abhorrence at all. Experience teaches that those who say they are appalled, as often as not aren’t. The Jews got what was coming, that was all. History was having its way. Politics – the politics of Jew-aversion with its new academic-kindergarten name of anti-colonialism – stepped in where, for a brief hour at least, pity alone should have spoken.

A professor of some subject that was no subject at some university that was no university mocked our sorrow for the young mown down at a music festival. “Don’t have music festivals on someone else’s land in that case,” he jeered before a tear could dry. We can say, at least, that his subject had never been history, geography or humanity.

The inhumanity of each new responder gathered strength and even glee from what had been said before. This was the pyramid-selling of Jew-hatred. “Where’s the Jews?” someone shouted from the steps of the Sydney Opera House. I recall wondering if the wrong news had got out. Did people think it was the Jews who had gone on a murder spree? If not, how to understand the carnival of Jew-revulsion that was unloosed in hours? The blood of Jews had been lavishly spilt, which only made the most educated in our society bay for more? By what logic of morality or compassion could this be? When we find a victim of a road accident lying in the road, we don’t rush over and kick him.

It was as though permission had finally been given to say whatever one liked about Jews. And that included abandoning the pretence that anti-Zionism wasn’t anti-Jewish. Israeli, Zionist, Jew; in the rush to condemn, the terms became openly interchangeable. The barricades of truth and decency had come down and those who felt they’d been confined for too long behind them could now pour through and abuse to their hearts’ contents. I remember the first time I swore. Once one filthy word came out there was no stopping the rest of them. Of such exhilaration are all mob acts of racism made, but this was different in that the mob had PhDs.

The weaker-spirited apologists for terror attempted to extenuate the gore with denialism. There hadn’t been any. The Jews had lied. They’d made it up, or they’d made it happen, or they’d raped themselves. Any exaggeration or inconsistency that could be found – and of course there were some – proved the whole shebang to be a concoction. Not only was Hamas within its rights to do what it had done, it hadn’t done it.

But for the party to go on there had to be a palpable cause and Netanyahu clumsily and brutally provided one. We will never know if time to reflect would have made the double-thinkers think three times before blaming Jews for what had not been done to them. But Netanyahu, egged on by his fringed, fanatic supporters, went at once into King Lear mode – “I will do such things” – and soon the Jews really could be painted as the ones on a murder spree.

This time, with the smell of blood everywhere, the old superstitious slanders of the Jews could be repeated. Never mind settler-colonialists, we were back murdering babies, only this time our infanticide was caught on camera. Every night on the BBC a new baby dying and never mind the circumstances, the reasons, or the truth. And the pictures were indeed unbearable. Worse than “appalling”. Those children, too, deserved a vocabulary that registered the horror of their deaths. But cruelty has degrees and in case the death of Palestinian children didn’t, in vile intent, measure up to Hamas’s cold-blooded sadism, every Israeli soldier had to become a butcher and every pilot a deliberate child-killer. What possible advantage to Israel accrued by its picking out mothers and children to bomb, no one asked. This was just what Jews did.

“Could what the Israelis are doing in Gaza be the worst mass murder of the innocent in the history of the world?” a radio presenter asked recently. Unfortunately for him, he was talking to a military historian. No, it wasn’t. You could smell the presenter’s disappointment. Please let the Jews be guilty of the worst mass murder in the history of the world. Because then we could forget that they’d been the victims of the previous one.

It bothered the accusers not a jot that they were repeating libels centuries old. As it bothered them not a jot to wickedly conflate Zionists and Nazis. The concurrence of that Z is unfortunate. Or it is for us. For those who wanted it to, it worked like magic. Some uncanny malevolence was at work that more than justified the Hamas heroes’ massacre. And now the walls were down and it was possible to swear at Jews all one liked and call them by the name of those who killed them by the million – how thrillingly impious that was! – the topsy-turvy vocabulary of Jew-hate was off the leash. Genocide became the word of the hour, no matter that the International Court of Justice did not license use of it to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, while the true génocidaires were those who marched to a song calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land of Jews.

Do your genocidal (sometimes self-genocidal) sons and daughters at Oxford truly know what they’re chanting as they parade along Broad Street in their mortar boards and keffiyehs? Almost certainly not. Theirs is the politics of conceit and nonsense. Champions of Free Speech, they ban Zionists from speaking on their campuses, shout “shame on you” in order to silence anyone who thinks differently to them, and deny freedom to those they boycott. “Free speech” is fast becoming the favoured hiding place of scoundrels. In defending the free speech of protected groups only, our most elite universities and institutions are now havens of censorship, shielding the intolerant and encouraging the very thing they pretend to abhor.

Say this to your children: if you want your universities scoured of Zionist Jews, go ahead and scour them, but you cannot then complain of ethnic cleansing on the part of others.

We are not innocent of our children’s stupidity. We should have given them a better grounding in the history of who we are. They should know more about Zionism. They should not have been allowed to call a refugee a colonialist adventurer. True, Zionism is not at this moment what the first and best Zionists hoped it would be. Tragically, the religious fanaticism they had hoped to leave in the shtetls has found a way in.

But we’d be better equipped to speak purposefully against this unholy godliness, to know whereof we are accused, whereof we are guilty, and whereof we are innocent, if we knew what we were talking about.

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October 7