The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
Every so often, when an appalling atrocity of the Israeli occupation force against a Palestinian child is exposed in western mainstream or social media, there will be a Zionist loudly condemning the report as a “modern-day blood libel”. In today’s Observer, there’s a piece by Howard Jacobson, a long-established columnist with the standard Zionist views of mainstream British Jewry, likening the coverage of the Gaza genocide to the mediaeval myth in which Jews were accused of killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, or unleavened bread, for Passover. This myth originated in England, after a young boy was found murdered in the Jewish quarter in Lincoln; the boy was buried in a tomb in the city’s cathedral and the myth spread far and wide, being used as a pretext for pogroms against Jews in eastern Europe as recently as the end of World War II. Jacobson claims there is an ‘echo’ of the blood libel in media coverage of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, and now also Lebanon:
Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.
Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.
I first learned about the blood libel, as well as about a number of other antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories (notably the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), in a Jewish history module while at university in Aberystwyth in the mid-1990s. Of course, I knew about Jews before that; there had been a few at my school, and I had heard ‘Jew’ used as an insult and stereotypes about Jews being stingy, or involvement in money-lending (this stereotype was mentioned in Jane Eyre, a set text for A-level at the time, and may still be). I had learned about the Holocaust, but nothing about the persecution of Jews in Russia, which lasted a lot longer than Nazi Germany itself did. I was vaguely aware that there were still Nazis who hated Jews (alongside other ethnic minorities that were still perceived as ‘immigrant’ back then) but nothing about the historical involvement of the church in fostering Jew-hatred. I went to three Catholic schools and did not hear anything negative said about Jews until I was in boarding school, which was not church-run or affiliated.
As we saw with Jewish complaints about so-called antisemitism in the Labour party in the 2010s, many Jews think that non-Jews’ attitudes to them and to Israel are motivated by age-old antisemitic beliefs that bubble up through our unconscious, when in fact most British people do not know about a lot of these things unless they decide to study them in depth, as I did, while Jews learn about them from their families or schools. When we hear reports from doctors about treating children in Gaza who had been shot by snipers in the streets, or left to die in a car surrounded by their dead family, waiting for an ambulance that will never come because its crew have been murdered, or hear about the sheer numbers of children suffering the loss of limbs or eyes and undergoing amputations without anaesthetic, we don’t think about Jews back in mediaeval Lincoln murdering children to use their blood as a food ingredient because most of us have never heard of that myth. What we see is a nation using the methods of modern warfare to annihilate a native population that will not stop resisting the seizure of their country, given a free hand and an unlimited supply of munitions by the brainwashed leaders of western countries.
Image source: Martyrs of Gaza, via X (Twitter).
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