Opinion
The truth of the Palestinian cause
As Jews are targeted, thousands in the West are parroting falsehoods about Israel
December 31, 2024 21:00
3 min read
As Jews are targeted, thousands in the West are parroting falsehoods about Israel
December 31, 2024 21:00The tsunami of Jew-hatred that we’re living through has left many in a state of stunned disbelief.
It seems incredible that thousands of people in Britain and the West are parroting falsehoods about Israel that aren’t only outright lies and wilful distortions — such as accusing the IDF of killing journalists and hospital patients when these are actually terrorists — but are also demonstrably ridiculous, such as the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Jews are being unambiguously targeted. Many Jewish authors can’t get published. Artists, writers and performers have said they’re being frozen out of British cultural life because they refuse to describe Israeli actions in Gaza as genocidal.
It’s as if Britain and the West have gone through the looking glass into a nightmarish, Orwellian world where the meaning of language has been reversed and lies have become unchallengeable truths.
Of course, antisemitism is always with us. But how can so many subscribe to the same insane obsessions and blood libels which, under both Nazism and medieval Christianity, presented the Jews as driven by a lust for money and power to form a murderous and demonic conspiracy against the rest of the world? How can so many in the west have simply lost their minds like this?
To anyone who’s been paying attention to the Middle East over the decades, the answer is obvious. For these claims are all too familiar. They are tropes relentlessly voiced by the Palestinian Arabs — including the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority.
A few weeks ago a PA official said on PA TV that Jews controlled the media and so had convinced the world of the “lie” that atrocities were committed by Palestinians on October 7 2023.
In a June sermon on PA TV, a popular Muslim preacher declared that Palestinian Muslims didn’t want a state but wanted to kill all Jews for the sake of Allah. Jews, he ranted, “always conspire against humanity, not only against Muslims but against humanity as a whole,” and passed down their “malignant” and “cursed” genes from generation to generation.
In May, a columnist wrote on the website of the official PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, that the war had seen a “stream of Israeli holocausts and massacres,” with “Israeli vampires” in the government “dancing the dances of death and crime, while they drink the blood of Palestinian children – and they have yet to satiate their thirst”.
Two months into the war, the top PA official Jibril Rajoub stated: “The Americans, Europeans, and others were deceived to think that the Jew is a victim. The truth is that he is a criminal, a terrorist, and a distorted form of the fascism and Nazism of the last century.”
These aren’t marginal statements from a few extremists. As anyone can see from the websites of MEMRI or Palestinian Media Watch, they pour out of Palestinian Arab society without remission.
Deranged fear and hatred of Jews and the aim of exterminating them define the Palestinian cause — which happens to be the signature cause of the west’s progressive classes.
Western liberals equate this cause with conscience and doing good in the world, even though it’s the precise opposite. Such progressives therefore regard these poisonous tropes of Nazi-style Jew-hatred as understandable and justifiable.
Why, then, is anyone surprised when western liberals seriously entertain the insane idea that Israeli Jews are Nazis and child-killing perpetrators of apartheid or genocide?
The only proper response is to call out these Palestinian lies. But instead of regarding them as a collective psychopathology, politicians and media stoke the flames of Jew-hatred by themselves parroting the propaganda about Israel behaving unconscionably.
Left-wing governments that ideologically support the Palestinian cause and also kowtow to Muslim constituencies in which Jew-hatred is rife, shockingly recycle the lies about Israel. The worst offenders have been the governments in Britain, Australia and Canada. No surprise, therefore, that Jew-hatred in those countries is now so brazen, pervasive and extreme.
Alas, too many Jews are also part of this madness. They support the Palestinian Arab cause out of a misplaced sense of fairness, a craving for fashionable approval or extreme ignorance about Jewish and Middle East history. So instead of calling out genocidal acts and fabricated claims of Palestinian Arabs, these so-called “moderate” Jews redouble support for a “two-state solution” as a response to exterminatory aggression.
Jew-hatred has not only been normalised. It’s been rebranded as social justice because support for Palestinianism, which seeks to write the Jews out of their country, their history, and the world, is what now passes for a moral sense among swathes of the public, the entire intelligentsia and even — heaven help us — many Jews.
Let’s not hear any protests that you were once a member of Habonim or have a holiday home in Herzliya or have had to unfriend former chums on Facebook because they’ve callously ignored the Israeli hostages. If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred. Own it.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist.
Clarification: An earlier version of this article contained the line: ‘[In Gaza] where the population has increased by 2.02 per cent since the start of the war (according to the CIA factbook).’ However this was misleading as the CIA factbook figures are an estimate, and “does not reflect sudden population shifts due to conflicts, natural disasters, or other unexpected events.” We apologise for this error.