Normal people are cheering the prospect of peace in Gaza. Some might even raise a glass to Donald Trump for his valiant efforts to end this horrible war Hamas started. But there are others who will be feeling forlorn. The anti-Israel mob, to be specific. Won’t you spare a thought for this tragic community that built its entire personality around hating Israel – what are they going to do now?
There is an eerie silence in anti-Israel circles
There is an eerie silence in anti-Israel circles this morning. The people who spent the past two years hollering ‘Ceasefire now!’ seem strangely downbeat about the prospect of a ceasefire. No doubt that’s partly because they would rather eat hot coal than credit Trump with a geopolitical win. But it’s also because they feel the rug of relevance being pulled from under their feet. The brutal truth: peace will rob them of purpose.
It’s been clear for some time now that the fashionable animus for Israel is more than a political position – it’s a religious crusade. These people see Israel not only as a nation fighting a war they don’t like, but as a demonic entity, uniquely barbarous, the poison in the well of humanity. Israel has become a Satan substitute for a godless activist class, the devil against which they measure their own decency. If this war ends, so might their false religion.
They wear the holy garments of Israelophobia so that others will know the depth of their devotion to the cause: the keffiyeh around the necks, the Palestine flag draped like a pashmina over their shoulders. They repeat Israelophobia’s mantras, with little thought but great bombast. Witness how ‘From the river to the sea’ usurped ‘Trans women are women’ as the mating call of woke’s true believers.
They have their ritualistic ceremonies. A solemn march every weekend, the purpose of which is less to shape events in the Middle East – as if – than to make a spectacle of their own ethical rectitude. There is a millenarian feel to these depressing weekly trudges. At some they’ve even held up baby dolls wrapped in bloodstained shrouds to let the world know Israel is a baby-killing machine. It’s a grimly medieval ceremony masquerading as political activism.
Perhaps the most dangerous thing for the genuflectors to Israelophobia is that Trump’s peace deal shatters the founding lie of their fake faith – namely that Israel is hell-bent on genociding the Palestinian people. In truth, Israel has signed up for a deal that envisions a ceasefire soon and which expressly says that not one Palestinian will be forcibly expelled from Gaza. And so their church crumbles under the weight of its own calumnies.
If the deal works, if Trump and Israel bring peace and banish the anti-Semites of Hamas from public life in Gaza, what will these people do? How will they get their moral kicks? By what means will they advertise to the world their implacable virtue? What will occupy their every waking thought and inform their every political utterance if not that dastardly Jewish State and its ‘genocide’?
Think of poor Sally Rooney – will she now have to pontificate on some other global calamity? Sudan, perhaps? Or, indeed, the Irish government, which is maniacally obsessed with Israel – will it now have to worry its empty head about more trifling matters, like Ireland’s housing crisis and migrant crisis? And the keffiyeh classes, those turbo-smug appropriators of Arab headgear who you see in every coffee shop and art gallery – which garment will they don now to let onlookers know how amazing they are?
And poor Greta! She’ll have to go back to talking about climate change, won’t she? Having failed to ‘Save Gaza’, she’ll have to content herself with that oh-so-Nineties mission of saving the planet. Boring! One thinks, too, of the YouTubers who have monetised their hatred for Israel, spending every hour of every day slamming the Jewish State for clicks and bucks. Blessed be the peacemakers, sure, but won’t someone think of the videomakers?
I, personally, am looking forward to the looming crisis of meaning among a left that foolishly and feverishly devoted itself to hating Israel. In the absence of this infernal war, these people will be forced to peer into the cavernous depths of their own souls. They will have to shake themselves back to reality, leave behind their half-formed faith, and re-engage with the world anew. It will be tough, but it will be good for them. And for the rest of us too, who might finally be spared their anti-Israel caterwauling.
Of course, there’s another possibility – that they will double down. That they will carry on traipsing against Israel, zombie-style, even when peace descends. Indeed, Your Party, the Zarah Sultana/ Jeremy Corbyn freakshow, is advertising a march in London this weekend. ‘We march on’, the flyer says, ‘until apartheid falls’. For two years, they screamed ‘Ceasefire now!’ – so why are they still marching? I’m tempted to go and laugh from the sidelines. Who’s with me?
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