So now we know what a ‘globalised intifada’ might look like. That’s what people chanted for on the streets of London on Saturday. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada’, they yelled. And now it’s happening, in Dagestan, where last night there was a violent hounding of Israelis arriving in the country by mobs shouting ‘Free Palestine’.
What took place at the airport in Makhachkala was truly chilling. Huge numbers of people, some waving the Palestinian flag and holding anti-Israel placards, stormed the airport after hearing that a flight from Tel Aviv was on its way. They were hunting for Jews. It was a pogrom under the auspices of ‘Palestine solidarity’.
There is chilling footage of a man pleading with the mob, begging them to believe he is not a Jew. The pogromists later besieged a hotel after hearing rumours that there were Jews there. Watching the marauding men calling for Jews to come out, you had to remind yourself that it is 2023. That this is not footage from the 1940s but from right now.
We are witnessing one of the worst outbursts of anti-Semitism in decades
It is indisputable now that ‘Palestine solidarity’ is the cover some anti-Semites use as they act on their visceral loathing of the Jews. It goes without saying that not everyone who cares for Palestinians is anti-Semitic. But to borrow a phrase from the Brexit era: not all pro-Palestinian activists are anti-Semites, but all anti-Semites love to pose as pro-Palestinian activists. They hide their Jew hate behind a veil of ‘progressive’ politics.
We are seeing many condemnations of the Dagestan pogrom, including from movers and shakers in the Western left. I’m sorry, but no: you don’t get to wash your hands of despicable scenes like this. You don’t get to whip up a global frenzy of loathing against Israel and then act all coy and taken aback when mobs give brute expression to that loathing.
To paraphrase the UN Secretary-General, Dagestan did not happen in a vacuum. It happened following three weeks of the most intense Israelophobia we have seen in modern times. From New York to London and across Europe, huge crowds have damned Israel as a uniquely barbaric state. As a genocidal entity. As the moral equivalent of the Nazis. A nation consumed by a bloodlust for Palestinian life.
What did you think would be the consequence of such ceaseless defamation? That people would just tut-tut over Israel at their local coffee morning? Get real. The cultural elites’ singling out of Israel as an unusually cruel nation, a nation motivated by colonial arrogance and Arabophobia, was always going to unleash base emotions alongside political criticism; mob fury alongside anti-war sentiment; violence alongside discussion.
Indeed, the Dagestan pogrom looks to me like a larger, rougher version of things we’ve already seen in the West. In London on Saturday a small group of people gleefully chanted about the return of Muhammad’s army to teach Jews a lesson. A couple of weeks ago ‘pro-Palestine’ activists chased after a man who was waving the Israeli flag.
At an American university a Jewish student was beaten over the head when he tried to prevent people from burning the Israeli flag. Elsewhere Jewish students had to lock themselves in the university library to escape angry protesters. At New York University students chanted, ‘We don’t want no Jew state’. Jew state. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar language was used by those Dagestanis who hunted the airport and hotel for evil Israelis.
What’s more, hasn’t much of the radical left spent the past two decades trying to keep everything Israeli out of our countries? Their beloved BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) singles out Israel for severe forms of boycotting. Israeli musicians, actors and academics have all been made unwelcome in the UK and elsewhere by these pseudo-virtuous boycotters. I put it to you that the Dagestan pogrom was essentially BDS on steroids, an attempt to forcefield Dagestan from the malign influence of people and things from Israel.
We are witnessing one of the worst outbursts of anti-Semitism in decades. From the West to the East, Jew hatred is soaring. It is an emergency now. To my mind, to continue demonising the world’s only Jewish nation in a moment like this would be reckless in the extreme. An urgent change in direction is required among those who claim to be pro-Palestinian.
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