Do not be deceived. The murdered innocents of Gaza are not those who are really suffering. It is the liberal Jews like Hadley Freeman, victims of the new anti-Semitism.
Israel is a state openly founded on racist and theocratic grounds, in which Jews have an absolute right to live in Israel, wherever in the world they were born and their families have been for centuries, and nobody else does. The unfortunate pre-1946 occupants of the land have been mostly driven out into refugee camps, including in Gaza, while religiously motivated settlers continue apace to grab the best Palestinian land and water. The state does this for them precisely and explicity because they are Jewish. Those non-Jews who remained in Israel proper are subject to a whole raft of apartheid style legislation, even governing whom they may marry, and the quantity of this legislation is increasing. 140 Israeli laws specify treatment by race.
Israel is as a state entirely based and run on a racist premise. Its very foundation is racist. But while the Israeli state may steal land specifically for Jews, make provision for Jews, and make life difficult for non-Jews, anybody else who mentions Jews in the context of Israeli behaviour is a vicious racist and anti-Semite. This warped and ludicrous logic is enforced by political orthodoxy and the mainstream media.
It is as though, in opposing apartheid, it was taboo to mention it had been invented for the benefit of white people.
Reading Freeman’s long self-pitying self-centred whinge I was waiting to find out what had actually happened to her to occasion some distress. Had she had a brick through her window? Had she been assaulted in the street? Has somebody hurled racial abuse at her?
Apparently none of the above. It appears that she feels under unfair pressure to denounce the actions of Israel. And- horror of horrors – the Tricycle Theatre has cancelled a Jewish Film Festival in Kilburn because it was financed by the Israeli Embassy. Oh no, the agony! How can a poor girl survive in a North London which is so rife with anti-Semitism! It reminded me forcefully of the very first diplomatic social engagement of my professional career, in 1985 when our Afrikaaner hostess held forth on how she thought people looked down on her in Harrods.
I deplore racism with every part of my being, all racism. Freeman makes what is intended to be a smart observation that the Tricycle’s act “reminds me how very far I am from the States”. It is very plain that she regrets that and believes that the US attitude to Israel is better than the British one.
This then morphs into the meme that the reaction to the Gaza massacre is part of a wave of the “new anti-Semitism”. There have indeed been several deplorable anti-Semitic incidents in Europe in the last few months. But they have killed absolutely nobody in the last two years, while Israel has killed 1,500 people. There have been three terrible examples of racial murders of Jews in the past eight years, and there needs to be continued and unremitting vigilance against all hate crime. The disruption of Hadley’s cinema treats and the daubing of paint on a synagogue are in themselves bad things. But do they really compare to the massive disproportionate force being used to destroy over 1,000 women and children in a month in Gaza, and the context of the entire seventy year programme of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people?
You are right, Hadley. Just because you are Jewish does not mean you should be under special pressure to condemn Israel’s actions. But if you take it upon yourself to write a long article on the subject, we are entitled to expect you – as a human being – to condemn the massacre. And as in the article you write about nothing but your own angst and the evils of anti-Semitism, and manage not a single word of sympathy or regret for the victims of the terrible massacre in Gaza, we are entitled to form our own opinion.
And my opinion is that you are a wholly self-centred and self-regarding little person with an abject lack of moral perspective, who seems to think the murder of 1500 people is about the impact on your feelings.
Hadley, you are not disgusting because you are Jewish: you are just a disgusting human being.