Just after October 7 I saw an old friend of mine. He is Jewish. He was obviously upset and angry. He lives in a liberal chatterati part of North London, but he told me that he knew that if he were to put an Israeli flag in the window of his house, that window would be smashed.
Was he overreacting? At that point, I don’t think we had heard all the details of children being tortured in front of their parents (I won’t go into them here. I have since read and seen too many things I wish I hadn’t). We just knew there had been a massacre of Jews, mostly the ‘good’ kinda Jews who still believed in the kibbutzim dream, and young kids raving for peace.
The ‘bad’ Jews, the far-right loons of the Netanyahu Government, were not the target. News agencies still keep translating ‘Jew’ as ‘Israeli’, which is wrong: Hamas do not want to kill only Israelis. For Hamas, a Jew is a Jew and they wish all of them dead. Do I have to spell it out? Apparently yes, I do.
Because many on the so-called left, who go on about non-binary this and non-binary that, are remarkably binary on this issue. Not to be pro-Palestine is to support a genocide. “Ceasefire now!” they cry, when there was already a ceasefire. And Hamas… well, you know they don’t have a great track record on this stuff.
Do I want the Israelis to stop killing the population of Gaza? Obviously I do – and, again, do I really have to say that?
How do we get to this point? By releasing mice in McDonalds or sitting on the floor of train stations with yet more performative protest? I think these actions matter not a jot to the Israeli Government. Most of these activists are seemingly ignorant of the area. Show them a map from the turn of the 20th century and ask them to point out Israel or Palestine. They couldn’t, no one could: neither of these places existed under the Ottoman Empire.
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