Anti-Semitism has been used far too long by Israel and the USA to stifle criticism of the Israeli state and its policies in Gaza and the West Bank. If you defend or support the Palestinian people you are an anti-Semite, smeared and condemned. But it won’t do. Anti-Semitism exists for sure and Jewish people have been, and are, under threat from it, but the state of Israel is something else.
It is one of the ironies of modern history that Israel, under Netanyahu, has become a fascistic ethno-state employing techniques of persecution and oppression similar to those used by Nazi Germany against the Jewish people. 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023. At the time of writing, an estimated 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and Gaza itself has been so reduced to rubble that it has become a mirror image of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Hospitals are bombed, schools are bombed, always with the excuse that they are used as shields by Hamas, though evidence for this is never forthcoming. Torture is employed in Israeli prisons. Gazans are being starved deliberately, and when desperate people rush to the few food delivery points they are regularly gunned down by IDF soldiers. It is easy for them to do this because Arabs are considered subhumans by many Israelis—they ‘breed like rabbits’, as I was told when I was invited on a fact-finding visit to Israel in 2006.
In such a world, history is distorted, as happens wherever democracy is undermined by far-right populist governments. The Hamas raid of October 7 is seen by many as an unprovoked, savage attack on innocent people. It has no history behind it. But it does have a history that can be traced back to the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 and the Nakba when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee as their villages were destroyed and their lands appropriated. It was an ethnic cleansing which, from the Zionist point of view, left unfinished business, because the aim was, and is, the creation of Greater Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, as was made plain to me during my visit.
The Hamas raid in 2023 should be seen in this historical context, as part of a conflict between two peoples where terrible things have been done by each side across generations. It is a conflict that has never been resolved, and can never be resolved while Israel’s visionary aims remain unfulfilled. The only just solution would be the creation of a state of Palestine on the West Bank, but successive Israeli governments have only paid lip-service to this. Israeli settlements on the West Bank are now so extensive and ongoing that an independent Palestinian state is geopolitically almost impossible. Indeed, Netanyahu’s government has at last come into the open, declaring that a two-state solution is not an option.
At the same time, in America, Donald Trump threatens elite universities like Harvard and Columbia with massive cuts to their funding if they don’t root out ‘anti-Semitism’. Anti-Semitism may well exist on campus, but so does ‘anti-Semitism’, meaning that if you protest at the slaughter in Gaza, and increasingly on the West Bank, you are by definition an anti-Semite. Those who protest cannot win, and many are silenced for fear of the consequences. In this way, freedom of speech is stifled, but so too is academic independence and freedom of enquiry, because the subtext of Trump’s hostility to the universities is that many of them are liberal by tradition and so a part of the opposition to his hollowing-out of democracy.
Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza continues and we watch the horror night after night on our screens. The aim of Netanyahu’s government is to force the population of Gaza into permanent exile—a second Nakba—through utter material destruction and indiscriminate slaughter. The word ‘genocide’ is used too often and too easily, but as statistics for the dead and injured in Gaza continue to rise, while Western politicians stand aside wringing their hands, it has to be asked at what point ethnic cleansing segues into the intentional annihilation of a people.
Back in England, the Labour Government has added Palestine Action to its list of terrorist organisations. This is very convenient. Palestine Action is a non-violent group that targets arms industry factories supplying weapons to Israel. More recently, members breached the perimeter at RAF Brize Norton, spraying paint on an aircraft they claimed was used for refuelling US and Israeli jets over Gaza. Making them a terrorist group equates Palestine Action with ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Non-violent criminal damage can be dealt with through the courts in the normal way, but Starmer and the Labour Government have overridden this and members of Palestine Action can expect harsher treatment in the courts. It is part of the drift to the right, here as elsewhere, in which the law is used as a weapon to suppress opposition.
Even to express support, verbally, for Palestine Action is now a criminal offence.