Will the Gaza marches ever return?

It’s a similar story at the universities. With students away for the summer holidays, the provocative Gaza encampments have either been dismantled or have become facsimiles of their former ignominy. As Tanya Gold observed in the Jewish Chronicle earlier this month, the Oxford Action For Palestine group has officially suspended its “resistance” for the duration of the silly season, with one student leader taking a well-earned break from anti-Israel subversion to bask in the summer sun of Ibiza. (Talk about “globalise the Intifada”.) The young crusties calculated that there will still be a war when the night start drawing in, I suppose. Even Frantz Fanon must have had a break sometimes, after all.

Speaking of Frantz Fanon – that notorious Fifties revolutionary who became the father of the anti-colonial movement – my gaze falls upon his seminal book, The Wretched of the Earth, which happens to sit in my eyeline on the shelf in my study.

In the very first chapter, entitled “Concerning Violence”, the fêted firebrand famously wrote: “National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it – relationships between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of national or private banks – decolonisation is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.” It is, in other words, the mirror-image of the ugliness of colonialism, likewise comporting itself down the barrel of a gun.

This potent vision of “decolonisation” represents the first moment at which Islamist fundamentalism and western progressives reach for their embrace. When your hard-left ideology hates capitalism and colonialism more than anything else, every enemy of those things becomes your friend, even if he happens to be sporting a beard and a suicide vest and has a taste for bullying women and gays. What greater enemy for both parties could there be than the Jew?

I have cited the British activist John Rees, a leading figure in both the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Workers Party, in these pages before. But his 1994 book contained an exemplar of the attitude of the “red-green alliance” (red progressives and green Islamists). “Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor,” he wrote, “even if [the oppressed] are undemocratic and persecute minorities, as Saddam Hussein persecutes Kurds and Castro persecutes gays.”

This is the radicalism that disgraces so much of our youth in Britain today, egged on by ranks of ideologues amongst the progressive elites. But the modern version is a digital caricature of it. In a reprehensible tweet on October 7, the hard-left Jewish journalist Rivkah Brown called the atrocities a “day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide”. She wrote: “Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.”

Four days later, however, she did apologise. “I’m sorry… I want to move forward differently,” she bleated. This episode was a neat display of every last narcissism, indulgence, petulance, cruelty and moral bankruptcy of the Israelophobic hard-left of 2024. Modern radicals want all the glamour of the depraved and discredited figures such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Malcolm X and the rest. But they see the world through screen-addled eyes and hold none of the real-world experience, intellectual hinterland or fanatical sticking power. At least Fanon lived at a time when colonialism and the race struggle were real. At least he had the guts to take up arms. In the egoscapes of Rivka Brown and her fellow travellers at Novara Media and beyond, their political posturing is simply an expression of the intoxication of their luxury beliefs.

No surprise, perhaps, that the Gaza marches have shrunk. On both sides of the Atlantic, the news cycle is moving on. Americans are preoccupied with the most consequential race for the White House in recent times, while in Britain we have gone through a general election and are now contending with pressing domestic concerns.

The rioting that ripped through the country last week saw the “antifascist” camp coopting the Palestine flag as a catch-all symbol for anti-establishment sentiment, which of course it has always been. But the doctrine of “intersectionality” – which instructs that those new radicals concerned with race or gender activism must also throw their weight behind their siblings who focus on Israel or the climate – has as much capacity to leech potency from the Palestinian course by universalising it as it does to pump it up. Sure, the red triangle and black, white and green stripes are more ubiquitous than they have ever been before. But when they provide a rallying focus for the looting of Crocs in Hull, this is of little benefit to Hamas.

This is no time to break open the champagne. With Israel standing on the brink of wider conflict with Hezbollah and Iran, we could find ourselves back in the heart of the maelstrom very soon. At the time of writing, however, there is a decent chance that such regional war may be averted. If that does turn out to be the case and there is a ceasefire in Gaza, it is not impossible to imagine the marches never recovering the disturbing scale that they enjoyed for so many months.

But there is a deeper reason why the bubbles won’t be coming out any time soon. The toxicity of these rallies is one important measurement of the strength of antisemitism in Britain, but it is far from the only one. The latest figures from the Community Security Trust (CST) show that after a spike in December and January, when antisemitic incidents spiralled to seven or even eight times their pre-October 7 levels, we have drifted into a disturbing new normal. Today, the floor is about two or three times higher than it used to be. It says something about the dark times in which we live that this feels like a win; but according to Dave Rich, head of policy at the CST, even these figures do not offer a complete picture of the threat.

“Our worry from the start was that because this conflict would be bigger and longer, it would have a much deeper and more enduring impact on community cohesion,” he told me.

“We hear constant accounts of Jewish people being squeezed out of social and professional networks or suffering silent discrimination. It’s going on in lots of places. The idea that Israel and Zionism is the modern Nazism, and they should be treated as such, has really embedded itself across the supposedly anti-racist left.”

His fear is that the corrosive effect of the recent carnival of antisemitism on society will not be easily reversed, even if hostilities in the Middle East die down.

“The conspiracy theory that Israel and Zionism were responsible for the riots in Britain was very widespread, even being repeated by semi-respectable people and outlets.” Rich said. “It may be that the visible signs of protest have lessened as fatigue sets in and people move on. But there is a longer-lasting impact. The more damaging attitudes are now more deeply embedded in society, rather than having receded.”

This article appeared on Jake Wallis Simons’s Substack