Hatred of Israel and Jews Can't Be Separated

From Melanie Phillips, at the Times of London (via Mick Hartley):

Corbyn blamed for backing Jew-haters, but most lefties support Palestinians who teach their kids to murder Jews. https://t.co/I020DtbDgw

— Melanie Phillips (@MelanieLatest) May 3, 2016

The current uproar over antisemitism is truly a wonder to behold. For the past three decades and more, antisemitism was the prejudice that dared not speak its name. It was deemed to have been stamped out, other than among cranks on the far right.

Anyone rash enough to protest that the anti-Israel animus in progressive circles was a mutation of ancient Jew-hatred was told they were “waving the shroud of the Holocaust” to sanitise the crimes of Israel. There could be no connection. The left was institutionally anti-racist, wasn’t it?

On the contrary, the left is institutionally anti-Israel and the connection is irrefutable. For sure, many who loathe Israel may not be hostile to Jews as people. Nevertheless the narrative of Israel to which they subscribe is inescapably anti-Jew....

Among the educated classes, Israel, the target of decades of Arab exterminatory aggression, is almost universally presented as the villain and the Palestinians as its victims. Israel is held to be responsible for the absence of a Palestine state and thus the obstacle to solving the Middle East conflict.

The fact that the Arabs turned down proposals or offers of a Palestine state alongside Israel in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, responding instead with terrorism or war, is ignored. The repeated statements of the Palestinian leadership that its real aim is to capture all of Israel are also ignored. It is never reported how the Palestinian Authority-controlled media and educational materials routinely incite Palestinian children to hate Jews, murder Israelis and capture every Israeli city.

Instead, Britain is told that the Israelis are child-killers. During the 2014 war in Gaza, when Israel finally responded to years of rocket attacks by launching airstrikes against Hamas, broadcast and print media claimed Israel was recklessly or deliberately killing hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians.

In fact, as the High Level Military Group of western top brass told the UN last year, the lengths to which Israel went to try to protect Gaza’s civilians far exceeded the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, even at the cost of its own soldiers’ and civilians’ lives, and going further than any other nation’s army would ever do.

Yet the British public had been told, virtually without contradiction, that Israel had wantonly killed hundreds of children. Among those on the left now vowing to root out antisemitism, I didn’t notice any of them rushing to condemn that particular blood libel.

Last year, the Islamic adviser to Mahmoud Abbas taught on Palestinian Authority TV that Jews throughout history have represented “falsehood . . . evil . . . the devils and their supporters . . . the satans and their supporters”. The Palestinian Authority daily published an opinion article claiming that Jews “are thirsty for blood to please their god (against the gentiles), and crave pockets full of money”. Children were shown on TV reciting poems portraying Jews as “most evil among creations”, “barbaric monkeys” and “Satan with a tail”.

Progressive Britain never reports any of this. Instead, it amplifies the hate in its own intellectual, cultural and media echo-chamber.

Denying the legal and historical rights of the Israeli “settlers” to the land, it demonises and dehumanises them. When they are murdered by Palestinians, this is rarely reported on the grounds that they had it coming to them. Dehumanisation of the “settlers” leads inexorably to the dehumanisation of all Jews...

Hat Tip: EOZ.