The condemnation game

Over the past three weeks since the Hamas assault on southern Israel, the death toll of which is assumed to be 1,400, all caused by Hamas, both claims very heavily disputed, the Israeli armed forces have been destroying Palestinian neighbourhoods and infrastructure supposedly in preparation for a ground assault which they say will allow them to root out Hamas once and for all, while politicians abroad pontificate about Israel’s “right to defend itself” which seems to mean take revenge however they wish. Attempts have been made to secure a ceasefire, and a non-binding UN General Assembly resolution passed Friday night; Security Council resolutions have all been vetoed by the US and/or UK, often on the basis that they fail to condemn Hamas. The Guardian reported that a group of Israeli left-wing intellectuals, foremost among them Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame), whose aunt and uncle lived in one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, had criticised a letter by various western left-wing intellectuals which blamed Israel entirely and did not condemn Hamas; he compared them to previous generations of left-wing intellectuals who had sided with “some very brutal movements and regimes”.

My Threads algorithm feed in particular has been full of posts from supporters of Israel, praising the Israeli response, continually bemoaning the antisemitism which they claim is ubiquitous, demanding that we just take their word for it about what is and isn’t antisemitic. The first such post I really noticed, the day after reading about Yuval Hariri’s open letter, was from a rabbi in the US who said he had worked with the Black Lives Matter campaign, but when Jews were being massacred, the people he had been helping turned round and said “all lives matter”, a common derailing tactic by whites who want to avoid facing up to racial injustice. These posts have continued unabated through the three-week Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza. They would have been understandable immediately after the Hamas attack or immediately after the facts (or claims) about the attack were reported, but not two to three weeks later when the Palestinian victims of Israeli bombardment exceed the original Israeli victims by six or seven to one. The conveyor belt of postings professing Jewish victimhood on that site is nauseating.

Of course, the sense of victimhood is echoed in the corridors of power and in the mass media. Politicians bend over backwards to assure Jews that they are safe, as social and mass media shows pictures of demonstrators against the ongoing Israeli massacre holding signs, some of them offensive but most not, just saying things like “free Palestine”, “stop the genocide” and increasingly calling for a ceasefire, and politicians threaten demonstrators with arrest if they chant about “from the river to the sea”, because again, Jews are telling politicians the chant gives them the vapours. There are actual Jews on the protests, often with signs announcing the fact, but real Jews according to the political consensus are those who follow the chief rabbi who are cowering in their homes right now, much as they were when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour party and some people would not take their accusations of antisemitism at face value, which is enough for them to claim antisemitism. Earlier in the week Paul Brand of ITV interviewed the Chief Rabbi at a synagogue in Leeds, who claimed that “seeing so many thousands of people on the streets openly supporting the Khamas (sic) terrorists certainly has caused a lot of anxiety within our community”. He then said that the community had not known such fear since 1945, but acknowledged the “full support” of the government and police.

Why is the Hamas attack different from American police violence? Simply because there has not been a reprisal against the police, or white people generally, in response to any of it. There has been a campaign to defund or disband police forces that abuse their power or spend public money on things like unnecessary military equipment, but the nearest thing America has seen to a politically motivated massacre of white people by Black people was the Washington sniper saga in 2001, and that was a man (since executed) and a teenage boy (now in prison). Black Americans have not oppressed White Americans at any time in their history; the opposite has been true. But as I stated in previous entries: when you know a terrorist act will result in devastating reprisals because the victims have powerful friends who are willing and able to commit mass murder, and indeed some of them would have been the willing murderers had they been in Tel Aviv rather than at that kibbutz at that moment in time, your sympathy for them will be muted somewhat. Mine certainly is, and was after 9/11, whose victims were far more innocent than most of those Israeli victims were. We may not think it was right, but our thoughts are with those who will suffer in the immediate future. And days later, when the terrorists have shot their bolt and the other side are still shooting theirs, and people are dying in their thousands, is not the time to still be condemning the terrorists as if the victims of the reprisals are less human.

We Muslims are always been asked if we condemn terrorist acts we are told are committed in our name, and usually when our community is under attack, whether here or abroad. A few years ago I recall an interview in Red Pepper with the Jewish novelist Marge Piercy, best known for the feminist novel Woman on the Edge of Time, who was asked about the Palestine situation and she responded that she would answer questions on any issue but that, that she confined her activism on the Palestine situation to the Jewish community and did not trust ‘lefties’ on Israel, as they held Israel to different standards to every other country. There are a lot of Jews who are uncomfortable with Netanyahu, but are unwilling to openly condemn what he does, as this would be interpreted as opposition to Israel itself. By the same token, most of us don’t agree with a lot of what Hamas does, but are we going to stand up and condemn them to people who side with the oppressors of Palestinians, who always have an excuse when Israel oversteps the mark, and who would either dismiss our condemnation as insincere or unrepresentative or would use it to justify reprisals against innocent Palestinians? No, we should not.

The demand is always for unequivocal condemnations from us, while they refuse to condemn the excesses of their own side. Right now, we have people talking as if the 7th October attack was the very beginning of the Palestinian conflict, rather than (if the Israeli army’s story is true, which is disputed) a response to decades of oppression. Unless we know someone is campaigning for peace and is against their country’s aggression, especially if they lost family in the original incident, we should not play the condemnation game. When western politicians of left and right fall over themselves to “stand with Israel”, knowing full well that the extremist tail has been wagging the dog there for many years and gets more powerful year by year, as that country turns more racist, more aggressive and less democratic, we should not be confirming them in their delusions about a sole democracy in the region or an “outpost of civilisation” by offering denunciations of Muslims when they will not condemn the oppression that leads to terrorism nor the atrocities for which it is used an excuse.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Seething with anger
• “Never such depravity”
• Genocide shouldn’t be divisive
• Ask a loaded question …
• Thanks Wes, but take a stand on Gaza!