There’s a genocide going on

Last Saturday in the British media I saw two articles, one on the BBC News site by a writer whose name I didn’t notice (on a second look, it’s their North America correspondent, Anthony Zurcher) and the other by Jonathan Freedland which was, as usual on a Saturday, top billing on the Guardian’s ‘Journal’ section, both asking how Donald Trump could have staged a comeback from the “electoral abyss” of early 2021 to be the Republican nominee for the presidency and to stand a chance of winning. Trump, as Zurcher points out, will be the only person who returned to the White House having previously lost a presidential election; his fightback started when he retained the support of a number of Republicans following his retreat to Florida at Biden’s inauguration, which he failed to attend, and escaped conviction following his impeachment. He then benefited from things like the rise in the price of gas in 2022, which dented Biden’s poll ratings despite being not his fault but the result of the invasion of Ukraine. What they both fail to mention is the impact of Biden’s support for Israel in Gaza: Freedland mentions it once, in the penultimate paragraph, and Zurcher never.

In my experience, the genocide in Gaza has affected a lot of people beyond the usual people who concern themselves with Palestine, namely the Muslim community and the small number of left-wing pro-Palestinian activists, and I see some of the same footage being shared on non-Muslim social media feeds as on those of the Muslims I follow. It’s the first genocide that has been broadcast over both social and conventional media by both its victims and its perpetrators. I have heard it said that the Gaza genocide has exhibited a depravity that goes beyond the definition of genocide; I am not convinced, as orgies of cruelty have been a feature of previous genocides including the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide. The people responsible for this, however, have broadcast their ‘exploits’ on social media, uploading clips of soldiers (and visiting ‘celebrities’) signing missiles that were going to be used on civilian targets and posing in the lingerie of the Palestinian women whose homes they had ransacked. Both ordinary soldiers and the official Israeli military social media channels have broadcast footage of gratuitous destruction which could in no way have been justified as attacking or removing terrorist infrastructure, as at the university they destroyed with planted explosives that must have been installed when they controlled the site. We hear of children being shot in the head by snipers, and huge numbers of children losing limbs or enduring amputations without anaesthetic. The brutality of both male and female SS guards was noted at post-war trials; such things as shooting random prisoners from a balcony and beating female prisoners to death with a whip made of braided cellophane. 

Some of those guards were hanged following the Belsen trials; today’s mass murderers, when discharged from or on leave from the Israeli military, are free men, and are free to enter the western countries where some of them enjoy citizenship, and people who protest their presence (or protest when they walk back into chaplain’s jobs for Jewish student communities) are accused of being antisemitic. Both British and American politicians stubbornly refuse to entertain the idea that this is a genocide, proclaiming that “this is war” as if wars were no longer fought between soldiers but by competitively massacring civilians, endlessly repeating the mantra that Israel “has a right to defend itself” while occasionally asking Israel to abide by “international humanitarian law”, though not having any intention of putting any meaningful pressure on them to do so, and throwing accusations of antisemitism not only at anyone who protests through demonstrations on the street and on campus, but also at UN officials who are doing their jobs by reporting on Israel’s relentless atrocities.

It didn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to condemn a terrorist atrocity without also condoning a revenge massacre; they would understand this perfectly if a murder on the streets of London were to be answered by the murder of several members of the killer’s family. Two wrongs, let alone two atrocities, do not make a right: most people understand this. Our political class does not. Over the last 20 years or so, Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank has been getting worse and worse with settler encroachments and gratuitous violence increasing with impunity, making normal life impossible, while Jewish community bodies police more and more aggressively how we talk about Israel with the collusion of the mainstream media and the leadership of political parties, with the result that merely acknowledging that Palestinians exist exposes one to threats and people have lost jobs as a result of smear or cry-bully campaigns.

There is a collection of letters in today’s (Thursday’s) paper dissecting the result. Again, there is no mention of Gaza in any of them. But it’s not only Gaza that escapes mention, it’s the miserable turnout. Trump won nearly 1.5 million fewer votes this year than in 2020; Harris lost more than 13 million compared to Biden’s tally in 2020. A party does not lose this many votes because its candidate is a woman. One puts it down to the “woke left” insulting their opponents by calling them names such as ‘deplorables’ and ‘garbage’, but the “woke left” were around in 2020 as well. Biden had immense goodwill when he was elected; people made enormous efforts to ensure that Trump did not win the previous election (and it was as much anti-Trump as pro-Biden). Besides Gaza, there was another factor rarely discussed, which was the economy, which as in the UK has been hit by inflation linked to the war in Ukraine and the resulting shock to the oil industry. During the last year of Trump’s last presidency, people were getting stimulus cheques to help them through a time in which work was scarce, but the same was not true for the rise in the cost of living that struck during Biden’s time. Trump, of course, would not have done the same in response to hardship caused by inflation rather than a pandemic, or even a forthcoming major flu epidemic, but people — at least people who did not suffer the losses of close friends or family, or who were not severely ill from it themselves — will still remember that time as an easier one than Biden’s.

But the ‘populist’ Right are keen for everyone to learn the same lesson: we’re right. Matthew Goodwin, on his Twitter (X) account, proclaimed “Two things clear. Leftists need to ditch woke and move back to the centre. Conservatives need to actually be conservative”. As Aditya Chakrabortty commented in today’s Guardian (in a column that did mention Gaza), explanations based around populism “almost always wind up with well-lunched commentators ventriloquising the opinions of people they’ve never talked to and in whose worlds they’ve never set foot”. As with Brexit, material explanations for these political upsets are things populist writers always shy away from, as it would mean addressing the economic orthodoxies that caused the hardships that brought them about. But for a repeat of 2020, it would have required the same enthusiasm and the same effort to get voters out who normally do not vote, young people in particular, and there will never be much enthusiasm from voters concerned about social justice for a candidate who has spent the past year supporting a genocidal foreign state with limitless supplies of weapons and denying acts of cruelty and depravity that everyone can see with their own eyes. I could tell from a year ago that persuading many people to vote for Biden (who was still the candidate then) was going to be an uphill battle; it is one that they could have avoided the need to fight, which only one side could lose, and which they have lost.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The benefits of learning Jewish history
• The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
• Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
• The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
• They weren’t protests