Independent-minded people looking at the many one-sided anti-Israel demonstrations over the Gaza disaster must now conclude that the explanation for them is a widespread and deeply held anti-Semitism. The laws on legitimate military action are very simple. It is a violation of the Geneva convention to use occupied civilian buildings such as schools and hospitals as cover for military operations. It is another violation of the Geneva convention to fire munitions indiscriminately into civilian areas. Hamas has systematically done both. Any protests about these violations of international law in the Dail and elsewhere would have indicated some balance in the anger over the tragic loss of life in Israel and Gaza.
There has been none. Instead, all the anger has been directed at Israel. A small pro-Israel demonstration in London had to be protected from an angry anti-Israel mob and escorted to safety by the police. Just imagine the headlines if matters had been the other way round. In North London, men have been driving around a Jewish neighbourhood in cars chanting, “Fuck the Jews and rape their women.”
The attack on Israel was not, despite what you’ve been reading in the newspapers, the consequence of the civil court action in Jerusalem, which is fifty years old, has its roots in the property laws of the Ottoman Empire, and is not a case of ethnic cleansing. Nor was it inspired by the disturbances at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Al-Qassam rockets are not egg sandwiches and assembling and firing some 3,500 of them required massive logistical planning, with a pretext to be chosen or even invented as the day for the assault drew near.
Most importantly, Hamas was confident that western observers would take the side of the aggressors-victims, as they assuredly did. In Dail Eireann, Martin, Coveney, Varadkar, boosted by the whinnying infantile left, and with a quite woeful predictability, called the Israeli response to the Hamas bombardment “brutal” and “disproportionate”.
Neither word was used about the Hamas attacks totalling over 3,500 rocket launches. What is the proportionate response to 3,500 incoming rockets? Don’t say what is NOT proportionate: describe what is proportionate, especially since each rocket has a warhead of 10kg. The IRA bomb that killed 11 bandsmen in Deal and injured 21 was just 7kg, and a 10 kg warhead will bring down a building. Please, don’t go into history, 1948 and all that, please just tell me, when the volleys of these missiles started arriving in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, on Monday, May 10, what should the Israelis have done in response?
The only reason that a catastrophic slaughter did not result from these criminal terrorist acts is the presence of the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which the British/American TV commentator John Oliver thinks is not quite cricket.
“Israel has a so-called Iron Dome, so the point is, this isn’t tit-for-tat. There is a massive imbalance when it comes to the two sides’ weaponry and capabilities. While most of the rockets aimed toward Israeli citizens this week were intercepted, Israel’s airstrikes were not. They hit their targets, including a house in a refugee camp, a building housing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, and [a] 13-story office and apartment building. And while Israel insisted that there were military targets in that building and they destroyed it as humanely as possible, even warning people to evacuate it beforehand, destroying a civilian residence sure seems like a war crime, regardless of whether you send a courtesy heads-up text.”
A war-crime, even after Israel had sent text messages to make sure the building was empty? Just like Auschwitz.
As for the “imbalance”, that’s part of nature. It’s why I don’t walk up to Conor McGregor and punch him in the nose or poke Tyson Fury in the eye. It is why frogs don’t pick a fight with steamrollers and grasshoppers don’t go toe to toe with combine harvesters. Likewise, small societies don’t pick fights with big ones.
So it’s almost unprecedented in the history of species-survival for any entity that is far weaker than another to provoke the latter into taking lethal action against it. Why is this happening now?
Because the rules have changed. Hamas knows of the prevalence of widespread anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism (as in, if the Turks do something bad, that’s simply human nature, but if the Israelis do something bad, it’s because, basically, they’re just Jews). It also knows that the profound cultural shift in western values means that the huge numbers of self-hating westerners will identify more with the Dark Age opponents of western values (Hamas) rather than with their upholders (Israel), even when the latter group embodies some of the most modern and most cherished of the new ideals, such as LBGQT+.
That this makes no sense is not surprising, because “sense” in this sense is a “western”, “white”, “imperialistic” and “patriarchal” concept. “Sense” would demand that outsiders denounce Hamas for gratuitously bringing such misery, destruction and death both on Israel and on its own people. But of course, the opposite has been the case. Hamas went for an all-out bombardment that was intended to trigger a furious response. If after years of hostility Canada tried that kind of cross-border caper on New York City – the same distance from its border as that between Gaza and Jerusalem – the US’s response would have been infinitely more savage.
Only in the deranged world that has emerged in recent decades, intensifying in its utter lunacy since the George Floyd killing, would the aggressor be internationally acclaimed as the victim. This moral inversion has been completed by the outcome in Gaza: Israel’s fake invasion, causing the Hamas fighters to take to their underground shelters, which were then destroyed by bunker-busting bombs. This has probably led to military disaster for Hamas, with possibly huge numbers of casualties underground, and many men trapped and suffocating there.
Logically, this utterly unspeakable outcome should cause the people of Gaza to reject Hamas and its demented infatuation with martyrdom; but that of course would be a “sensible” reaction. Instead, the people of Gaza are probably in a death-trance, in which the more lives they lose, the more willing they are to make yet further sacrifices. This is a contract made in hell, with no escape clauses and no time-limit, and worse, it might well be emulated not merely on the West Bank but – I fear – amongst the more impressionable or unhinged amongst the Israeli Arabs. A comparable mental virus in Afghanistan has outlasted two decades of American willpower.
Of course, the Israelis can’t walk away from Gaza as the US can from Afghanistan. Israel is joined at the hip to a psychotic twin who regularly stops taking the pills, whereupon he thinks he’s a kamikaze pilot, and tries yet again to crash onto the carrier-deck he took off from. For the dependency of this psycho-sibling on Israel is almost total. Gaza gets its food, energy and medical assistance from Israel, while its more serious medical cases are routinely treated in Israeli hospitals.
Despite this easily ascertainable truth, preceding the missile bombardment came the wild allegations that Gaza has been a victim of Israeli epidemiological apartheid. But Gaza is a self-governing entity under the nihilistic rule of Hamas whose purpose is the destruction of Israel, not the betterment of its peoples. It’s certainly not Israel’s duty to inoculate Gazans against Covid, just as the Republic of Ireland is not injecting the people of South Armagh on its northern border.
The result of Hamas’ priorities: 1.9% of Gazans have been fully vaccinated compared to 56% of Israelis. And that could only have happened once the lunatics governing this tiny and therefore easily inoculable territory had put all their energies into fighting a losing war against Israel rather than a winning one against Covid.
Only 1.9% inoculated? Blame the effing Jews…..