Nothing quite gets the blood pressure up than a full-throated discussion on the Israel-Gaza question. In these post 7/10 times, the blood pressure has gone through the ceiling.
Only this month, a Jewish passenger on a Jetstar flight had the temerity to take a photo of a Jetstar staff member sporting a pro-Palestinian badge. Then he complained, vigorously, it seems. Then he was threatened with exclusion from the flight. The passenger was. Not the staff member.
This story has been repeated hundreds of times in Australia and around the world. The American businessman Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and who has a Foundation [The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism] dedicated to fighting antisemitism, will ensure that the one hundred million or so viewers watching the Superbowl next month get the message.
According to FCAS research, 183 million posts on social media were related to antisemitism and Jewish culture in 2023 — a 330% increase from the prior year. The organization said Google searches for “Kill Jews” increased by 1,800% in the past three months.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/25/business/super-bowl-ad-stand-up-to-jewish-hate/index.html
The Jews have long been excoriated, pilloried, and killed. Often just for being Jews. Since the time of the Babylonians, at least. The Christians, not always being very Christian, indulged in pogroms aplenty, over the years. Post The Prophet’s strategic intervention, things kicked up a notch. Shakespeare had Shylock. Hitler, well … he had a real and, he hoped, final solution. Didn’t quite work out. But he gave it his best gas-oven shot.
It seems to me that those who preface their inevitable attacks on the Jews with the opening statement “of course, I strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself” are much like those accommodation places who declare they are “pet friendly”. Nope. One dog only. Under fifteen kilos. Must be on a leash outside at all times. Bond for cleaning. Stay off the furniture. Certain breeds only. Don’t leave them inside when you go out – take them with you! Israel-friendly has its limits, too.
The New Team Anti-Israel is actually a new version of a very old team.
Between Lord Balfour and the United Nations, the powers-that-be hoped to find the Jews a homeland. As “solutions” go, it has proven to be anything but.
Today, the Middle Eastern “troubles” have gifted a gazillion online pundits a new cause for, at best, analysis, but, far more typically, ideologically inspired, historically ignorant opinion. At its worst, it is a new form of holocaust denial.
The twenty-first century anti-Israel coalition has brought together a strange new Team Anti-Israel, united in its anti-Zionism:
· The Islamists, terrorists and terrorist enablers (like Iran);
· The intellectual (sic) left;
· The anti-neocon libertarians (like the American comedian Dave Smith, who has had a little to say about the Jewish question;
· The non-libertarian neocon opponents;
· The conspiracy theorists who see Jewish world domination a-coming;
· The “realists” (think John Mearsheimer) who generally allow for national self-interest but who have, seemingly, hit the wall with Israel;
· The languid teenagers who heard there as a new activism-opportunity, and, naturally, joined up;
· The social media rabble rousers;
· The colonial-settler studies and genocide studies academics embedded in all of our taxpayer funded universities;
· The United Nations, whose “education programs” – or was that pogroms? Perhaps it is a misprint - for Palestinian children teach them slogans like “School students call to murder Jews, “strike and burn Tel Aviv,” “blow up the Zionist’s head,” “The Zionist is Allah’s enemy!” Even Penny Wong is nervous;
· The peaceniks, who never saw a war they didn’t oppose;
· Related to the peaceniks, there are those who fear an escalation of the current Middle Eastern impasse into something either regional – perhaps, as the Israeli President, a man of the centre-left contends, it is already regional – or global, and who tend (for whatever reason) to blame Israel for this risk;
· The Chinese Communist Party and associated anti-Israel surrogates.
To these groups we should add the common or garden anti-Semites, who still (clearly) abound. It is quite the team. It has shown itself on the streets of Western cities in our day. From Sadiq Khan’s London to Daniel Andrews’ Melbourne, and everywhere in between. Its online presence is fierce and uncompromising. With all of these groups lined up against the Jews, no wonder they get a bad press.
Team Anti-Israel has displayed some core characteristics, tendencies and attitudes:
· Far more should be expected of Israel in its behaviour than of its many enemies;
· Far more should be expected of Israel-at-war than of any previous combatants (the tactics of the Prussians in the Franco Prussian War of 1870-71 make for interesting reading, as Jurgen Tampke’s arresting 2017 book, A Perfidious Distortion of History, makes clear; then there was the Brits’ bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and so on, not to mention the Americans with the Big One over Japan, all deliberately designed to kills civilians and so advance military goals; the list is pretty well as long as wars are old);
· It is okay to attack Israel and Israelis verbally and in print in ways that would be considered unacceptable by twenty-first century man when applied to any other group;
· Much opposition to Israel is ahistorical and non-analytical;
· There is embedded moral equivalence of the kind seen during the Cold War, when America was often equated with the USSR, for example, Israel is a colonial power, terrorists are simply freedom-fighters by another name, Israel=Hamas;
· There is abundant belief in Israeli exceptionalism, but not in a good way;
· There is much denial that antisemitism exists, and that it drives much of the opposition to Israel;
· Behaviours of other nations that are taken by many to be evil (like colonialism) are attributed to Israel;
· Pleas are made for cease-fires that will benefit only one side;
· There is a shrillness out there and a tendency to ad hominem attacks on those taken to be pro-Israel or pro-Jew – supporting Israel or hating Hamas terrorists is seen as evidence you have lost the plot or abandoned normal common sense;
· Associated with the last, there is an erroneous and often utterly ignorant assumption that opponents of Hamas/supporters of Israel “haven’t done their homework”, as if Israel’s evil is simply uncontestable;
· Opponents of Israel really have their hearts in it, unlike with Ukraine where many picked a side without having any real sympathy for them;
· There is a quickness to compare Israel’s war strategies unfavourably with past perceived military atrocities, eg Dresden’s bombing during World War Two, while ignoring Palestinian acts of terrorism;
· There is a new obsession with the alleged treatment of civilians by those with scant expertise in military matters;
· There is a reflexive move to assume the worst motives on the part of Israel by those attacking it – think of the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” – while refusing to accept the implications of the open, indeed, the bald and often repeated statements of Israel’s enemies, viz. that it is their intention to kill every last Jew (or have we all missed something here?);
· There is a certain reductionism in assuming all Israeli statements as lies and propaganda (sometimes by those for whom every decision by any government is taken to be false, for example, 7/10 didn’t happen, or if it did, the detail of what occurred there has been simply made up or grossly exaggerated by Israeli interests (atrocity denial);
· There is an assumption that America’s support for Israel rest merely on powerful domestic lobbying stateside, and not on the merits of that support;
· Ignorance is bliss.
As Brendan Craig notes, there is also a belief that:
There are no innocent Israelis: And here we are. In the face of barbaric attacks on innocent young music-lovers, children and elderly, which one would think any reasonable, any empathetic human being would find abhorrent, there are groups, organisations, nations declaiming their support and approval of Hamas. The attacks are “justified”, we are asked to believe, because of years of Israeli oppression. There are no innocent Israelis.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/crossing-the-line-justifications-for-terror/
Let this sink in. Calls for justice for Palestinians mean, automatically and without exception, support for terrorism and violence. For direct action ethnic cleansing (of an entire race). There is no middle ground in a fight where one side wants to obliterate the other, and will not brook anything less. Certainly not negotiation. Just so long as everyone understands this.
Craig concludes:
I distrust dramatic, emotive rhetoric in difficult times. There are complex issues which deserve and insist on nuanced and deeply archaeological debate. But we are getting close to a line. Politicians have changed their game to keep up with social media echo-chambers and ideologically driven educational and mainstream media systems. We are living in a time where emotion stifles reason.
Yes, we are.
Not all of the positions and tendencies stated above are shared by all of Israel’s opponents and critics, but many are. And even pro-Israelis can and should concede that, for example, there is a great risk of escalation from the current war. And that this is a problem for many people of good will. (And for the whole world). The trick, whose path to execution is far from clear, is to get Palestinians to give Hamas the shove and to accept that Israel is a permanent thing, and then for the two conflicting parties to figure out how it is all going to work.
There is too much here to cover, let alone resolve, all the contested issues. And given the fact – beyond dispute, I would have thought - that this is a fight to the death, what would be the point, anyway? But a couple of points can and should be made, in the interests of informed, civilised debate.
One issue is the attempted shift in the public square from “having a position” to embedding the preferred position in all the key cultural institutions. Quadrant outlines one example:
Most sinister of all is the pro-Palestine open letter from 700 Victorian school teachers and staff, as reported today (December 18) in The Australian. The letter says that it is within teachers’ “professional and ethical duty to model an anti-violence position”. They are pressuring federal and state education ministers to advise principals that Palestinian advocacy is in line with the public sector code of conduct. (It isn’t). They claim this is required to “protect children’s and young people’s wellbeing” in regards to Palestine:
Our own students are also witnessing the catastrophic devastation unfold, which will have short and long-term effects on their social, emotional and cultural wellbeing, impeding their capacity to live and learn well,” it says. “In response to the indefensible actions causing catastrophic harm, it is essential for people and governments to take an ethical stand, including those who remain accountable to the responsibility of caring for children and young people.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-universities/2023/12/anti-semitisms-signature-moment/
Tony Thomas at Quadrant Online, concludes:
Never in our history have thousands of Australians – many of them smart enough to know better – thrown in their lot with a death cult.
Indeed. Another of the signs of the times is the urge to sign a petition. Like this one.
Australian pro-Hamas petitions are swelling to a torrent. For example, “Historians for Palestine” signed by 120 academics, on top of one from 720 academics nationally. That loopy one begins:
As scholars, academics and students in Australia, a settler colony built on the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation and against Israeli settler colonialism.
If this how history teachers think and what they believe to be true, then there shouldn’t be the remotest surprise that our youngsters now probably believe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden. Thomas calls one of the Pro-Hamas rants by staff at the Parkville Asylum (aka the University of Melbourne) a “diatribe”, and those behind it “feral academics”. They are, indeed, feral. There is less evidence they are academics, let alone scholars. They ain’t engaged in research. Rather, it is, as is patently obvious, advocacy. They speak of being “on the right side of history”. Of course they do. But their sense of both “right” and of “history” beggars belief. They are unhinged from reality. Every last piece of this would have been anticipated by Hamas pre 7/10. It would have been workshopped to within an inch of its life, down there in the tunnels under Gaza. Right under the hospitals that the evil Jews have been bombing. After all the leafletting and warning texts, and after People’s Republic of Hamas had exposed those hospitals to that bombing.
Then there are the actors, always the first in the rush to find the end of the virtue-signalling queue.
We’re here, unified in ‘Australia’, a colonised country built on the genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation from colonialism, apartheid & ethnic cleansing…
To wonder aloud from which solar system these people come is merely to state the obvious. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. They are yet further proof, were it needed, that being tethered to an ideology will allow you to say the darnedest things.
Another issue is ignorance of military strategy. This is, after all a war. Just like 1967 and 1973. On each occasion, Israel was attacked, just like 2023, and on hundreds of occasions during the times of “peace” in between the “wars”. In 1967 it was Egypt, and in 1973 it was Egypt and Syria. The doyen of military history and strategy, Victor Davis Hanson, laments the absence of military understanding in relation to the current war. He asks:
When has war even been ‘proportional?’
Proportionality in war is a synonym for lethal stalemate, if not defeat.
When two sides go at it with roughly equal forces, weapons and strategies, the result is often a horrific deadlock — like the four years of toxic trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I that resulted in 12 million fatalities.
The purpose of war is to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible with the least number of casualties — and thereby achieve political ends. So every side aims to find superior strategies, tactics, weapons and manpower to ensure as great a disproportionate advantage as possible.
Hamas is no exception. Its savage precivilizational strategy to defeat Israel hinged on doing disproportionate things Israel cannot or will not do.
So much for Team Anti-Israel and its various foundational beliefs and principles.
Why is all this anti-Israel activism and virtue-signalling occurring now, so suddenly and with such vigour? It is almost as if it was part of the plan, in the same way that CEPI (the Bill Gates funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) in late 2019 anticipated almost every last thing the Covid State and its acolytes did after the minor virus arrived a few months later. A hell of a lot of Islamist “Manchurian candidates” have suddenly appeared, post 7/10, shrieking and yelling, “globalise the intifada”. A call to violence from those who are currently calling for a cease fire. It means, kill Jews everywhere, not just in Israel. Many didn’t even bother waiting for the inevitable, forceful Israeli counter-attack.
Clearly, there is still anti-Semitism, but this is as old as the hills – since Noah was a boy, you might think – and, in any case, doesn’t explain every opponent of Israel, much as the supporters of Israel might think it does. No, it is more complex than pure anti-Semitism. If one thinks of the groups identified above, much of the current tendency is almost self-explanatory.
It would be helpful if those who simply take the pro-Palestinian “position”, “from the river to the sea” – itself unapologetically genocidal – as justified on its face, recognised their own biases when they are reflexively accusing their opponents of being blindsided by Israeli propaganda and ignorant of history, geopolitics and international relations. A little fact-checking wouldn’t go astray. Those who readily saw the propaganda associated with the Covid State as so many lies, especially, might usefully devote some time to a deep dive into the recent history of the Middle East and truth-telling capacities of terrorist organisations. But, in these low information days, I am not that hopeful.
Daryl McCann puts it well:
The “mission” Hamas performed on October 7 has been viewed mostly through the lens of one-man’s-freedom-fighter-is-another-man’s-terrorist. Thus, the Hamas operatives who bulldozed through or paraglided across the Gaza-Israeli border to cause carnage at the Nova Music Festival, the kibbutz of Kfar Azar and elsewhere were acting—however misguidedly or brutally—in the cause of national liberation. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if Hamas is not a patriotic undertaking?
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/the-meaning-of-october-7/
What if Hamas is not a patriotic undertaking? Indeed. The supporters of Palestinian causes need to ask the question and think seriously about their answer. They demand as much of their pro-Israeli opponents.
That truth is the first casualty of war is a cliché but there is a good reason for that. (The statement is often attributed to a US senator named Hiram Johnson, back in the early 1900s). That propaganda is used in all wars by all combatants is a truism. That includes Israel. And Hamas as well. Suffice it to say that believing a terrorist organisation as a matter of course while questioning a democracy, with all of its shortcomings but having at least some constraints on bad behaviour, just as quickly, is bound to end badly.
I recall vividly being in Paris at the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, when a bunch of Parisian cartoonists were gunned down by Muslim terrorists for depicting The Prophet. Almost spontaneously, signs proclaiming “Je Suis Charlie Hebdo”, appeared all over Paris.
This time around, the signs of the times proudly proclaim, “Je Suis Hamas”. This seems to me to indicate a highly warped view of the world. It suggests that, perhaps, you aren’t allowed to strike back against the perpetrators with proportionate force, or perhaps any force, but rather should confine yourself to joining weepy, candle-lit sit-ins, just like the Parisians.
Paul Collits
31 January 2024
🇮🇱 I stand with Israel, Am Yisrael Chai! 🇮🇱
The pogrom mentality is alive and thriving. Which is more than can be said of the victims.
The 20th century was the most appallingly disastrous and life consuming ever. Yet here we are, more than 20 years later, still making the same stupid and ignorant mistakes.
And it is not as if the the information is inaccessible or we don't have the ability to read and understand it.
Part of the problem lies in the education "industry". Instead of trying to give our young people the skills to think for themselves the activist teacher class endeavour to teach their victims what to think.
There may be a case for installing recording equipment in class rooms and lecture halls in order to see what goes on there. Parents and other interested parties might get one hell of a shock.