When an Islamist attack on a synagogue in my home city of Manchester left two dead, I responded by writing about the failure of some parts of the pro-Palestine movement to distance themselves from Jew hate.
I switched on my phone and found that my X feed had gone haywire
It was a leftish argument, I thought. I condemned racist murders – in this case the racist murders of Jews. (And the left – indeed any sane person – is against that, aren’t they?). I pointed out that the anti-Israel demonstrators, who have filled the streets for two years did not cancel their protests as a mark of respect for the dead as the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, had asked. If they weren’t inciting violence, they would have had every right to ignore Mahmood. But listen to their chants: ‘Globalise the intifada’; surely a call to arms. ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’; a slogan that can only mean the expulsion of all Jews living between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
If the protestors were serious about abjuring racism, they would make a stand. But I went on to look at how the Palestine Solidarity Campaign would not even fully define antisemitism, and argued that, if it did not define it, it could not police it.
Nothing I wrote could be construed as justifying the disgraceful attempts by Israelis prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers to brand calls for a two-state solution as antisemitic. That is not antisemitism. ‘Nor is it in any way racist to deplore the reduction of Gaza to a charnel house of rubble and bones,’ I wrote.
In a decision I am sure I will regret, I even praised the Green party because it, at least, warns its members about the dangers of Europe’s oldest hatred.
I filed my copy and took my son for a long walk in the Essex countryside. As chance would have it, we ended up in Epping, where the sectarianism that envelops this unhappy nation was made flesh by beery geezers with union flags looking for a confrontation with asylum seekers.
I switched on my phone and found that my X feed had gone haywire. JK Rowling had tweeted a quote from the piece:
‘Pro-Palestinian demonstrators couldn’t give it a rest – not even for 24 hours. They were chanting all the old slogans and ducking all the hard questions. ‘Globalise the intifada,’ they cried – does that mean killing Jews in Manchester @NickCohen4’
What followed was a mass denial of incitement to racial violence. The last time I looked, the tweet had 16 million views, so I must be careful about generalising. Because she refuses to cut her conscience to fit this year’s fashions and will not deny the reality of biological sex, Rowling attracts extraordinary levels of hatred.
But that said, the reaction to her tweet showed the dangers Jews face. On and on the abuse went through thousands of replies. I think my patience with her critics snapped when the former porn star Mia Khalifa screamed at Rowling to ‘Shut up you f*cking c*nt.’
Honestly, I thought, is that your best shot?
Remember the piece was about the failure of parts of the left to confront, or even acknowledge, the existence of anti-Jewish racism. The failure meant that they were ignorant of the dangers of inciting thoughts of terrorist violence in the minds of fanatics.
What does it say about our times that these concerns are viewed as wholly reprehensible by people who think of themselves as utterly respectable?
The broadcaster Richard Bacon beat his chest and asked Rowling: ‘Did you read the UN report into conditions for women and children in Gaza?’ as if deaths in Gaza excused deaths in Manchester.
Others claimed that Rowling’s tweet showed she ‘wasn’t on the side of the Palestinians’. Chris Williamson, once a Labour MP, now a comrade of George Galloway’s, declared: ‘What an utterly deplorable post from @jk_rowling. Israel is committing a genocide, but JK Rowling wants people calling on the UK to stop Israel killing babies to ‘give it a rest.’ You are one sick woman.’
Of course, her trans stance was thrown back in her face repeatedly, as if it had anything to do with the matter at hand. For tactical as much as moral reasons, Israel’s opponents ought to be able to dismiss the claim that they are inciting anti-Jewish hate as a grotesque smear. It is the charge that Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies constantly throw at them. Surely, they should want to squash it?
But instead of acknowledging the dangers and covering their backs, they called Rowling ‘sick’ or worse – or, in the case of Bacon and others, they pretend that caring about dying babies in Gaza and dying Jews in Manchester is an either/or choice.
Rowling is British and like everyone else in the UK has a right to worry about terrorist violence in her own country. Of course, the death toll here will be as nothing when set against deaths in Israel and Gaza. But ‘here’ is where we live, and parochial though our concerns may be, ‘here’ is where we must preserve the peace.
Tens of millions have cheered on a doomed extremist project that has brought nothing but misery to Jews and Arabs alike
The men and women who propel the anti-Israel demonstrations can’t do it because they cannot break from the authentically antisemitic movements of Islamist fanatics, from Hamas to the Iranian regime. Nor can they accept that the failure to face up to the extremists they so unthinkingly mimic has been a disaster for the Palestinian cause.
As it is, tens of millions around the world have cheered on a doomed extremist project that has brought nothing but misery to Jews and Arabs alike. That sound you hear from the streets is not a triumphant battle cry but a howl of impotent despair.
Imagine that, instead of calling for a globalisation of the intifada and the purging of Jews ‘from the river to the sea’, the global left had rejected Hamas’s all-or-nothing agenda and concentrated on the moderate demand that Israel uproot its settlements on the West Bank and grant a Palestinian state.
True, they would have denied themselves the pleasurable thrill the prospect of violence and revolution brings. But there should be no pleasure in condemning others to do your fighting and dying for you.
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