A view from one of London’s wisest …
The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.
In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.
People who can analyse, on the basis of a few pictures of demonstrators, the ethnicity and cultural background of most of the people in them and draw sweeping conclusions, are in general to be feared. But the point here was the determination to pursue a domestic agenda by reference to a catastrophe overseas.
It isn’t that such commentators are great humanitarians appalled by suffering. One of the leading figures among the finger-pointers was Douglas Murray – the leader of the armed wing of the Roger Scruton Foundation – who wrote that first week in the Spectator that “maybe they [Israel] will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip.” I suppose that you can’t describe this as an actual call for “ethnic cleansing”, so much as a reassurance that Murray at least would be cool with it. At what point, I find myself asking, is it accurate to describe someone as having become a fascist?
Sticking it to the man
Over on the other side of the spectrum the folk at Novara Media, recovered from having one of their own – a Rivkah Brown – forced into an apology for having joyfully celebrated the Hamas attacks on October 7th (“I got a bit carried away” was the gist of her statement of regret) are now piling into their true enemy over the matter of Gaza.
This, of course, is Keir Starmer. If antisemitism had been a stick to beat Jeremy Corbyn then the plight of the Gazans looks like a handy club to knock Starmer around with. I recall at the time of the Batley and Spen by-election, when the principal adversary seemed to be George Galloway, some Corbynites then argued that Palestine was a potentially mobilising issue for the Left with younger Muslim voters. It is a dangerous game to play, but Douglas Murray for one will thank you for playing it.
Sometimes this impulse is too obviously mad to be simply opportunistic. After the explosion at the al Ahli hospital in Gaza Starmer tweeted (prematurely, as it turned out) that “the scenes of hundreds killed at the Al-Ahli Arabi Baptist hospital in Gaza are absolutely devastating and cannot be justified. International law must be upheld.”
In reply to Starmer Corbyn’s former Director of Strategic Communications, James Schneider tweeted that “you cheerled these crimes… You are stupid, a coward, a sadist or a combo of the three. Shame on you, you war crime cheerleader. All the perfume of Arabia will not sweeten you bloodsoaked hands”. Suggesting two things about Schneider: one obvious and the other that he probably did Macbeth for A level.
Actually cheerleading a war crime was Anglo-Palestinian “journalist” Latifa Abouchakra, who took to Instagram after the Hamas massacre to share the thought that “nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity”. And in a way she was right. Nothing ever will be able to take back that moment.
Abouchakra is a reporter for the Iranian state channel PRESS TV where one doubts that she expresses solidarity for the women victims of Iran’s oppressive moral codes. But someone on ITV – a harassed junior researcher probably – booked her on the ITN News to talk about the prejudice she had suffered as a Muslim woman in the wake of that moment of triumph. One moment you’re up, the next you’re down.
Naturally when her recent Instagram history was checked by one of that modern army of amateur background archaeologists (of whom I am one) the shit hit the fan. ITV apologised.
In London we have had the poster wars (as they also seem to have had in the US). Some British Jews, many of whom personally know people who were killed or abducted on October 7th, but powerless to do anything about it themselves, began to plaster public places with posters depicting the hostages. Occasionally – as when a team filmed themselves flyposting the outside of the BBC – this action seemed to be taken more in anger than solidarity.
And small groups of young people took to systematically ripping them down. I would guess, merely because the “other side” had put them up and a WhatsApp group of student activists decided it’d be a cool gesture. The lack of empathy was notable. And this being the era of the camera phone they were filmed doing it and the pictures went on social media.
This apparent callousness then itself can look like a threat of kinds to the Jewish community, which has also been terribly worried by the fact, as discussed here last week, that the BBC don’t routinely describe Hamas fighters as “terrorists”. But this was taken up by Conservative MPs as yet another way of bashing the BBC. It is not reassuring to good journalists when their boss is having well-publicised meetings with the Tory backbench 1922 committee – meetings which have the sole purpose of giving publicity to the politicians’ usually ignorant gripes about the Corporation.
You want to help the police? Maybe shut up
A relative of this prescriptive impulse has been the proscriptive idea that the police and the security services should in effect ban perfectly lawful demonstrations, arrest people for uttering perfectly legal slogans and spend a lot of time investigating demonstrators that they, the critics, particularly don’t like.
This is not helpful. In fact it gets in the way of preventing terrorism. But it feels good. “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” is a bad slogan in that it imagines no state of Israel – but in a free country people are allowed to imagine that. However it is also a stupid one, because it is never going to happen. It is, to use that overworked word, purely performative. Its use demonstrates nothing so much as the lack of seriousness of the user.
This week the website of the National, a UAE English-language newspaper tweeted to its 1.1 million followers the news that at the Celtic v Atletico Madrid European match “Palestinian flags were waved from the stands despite an appeal from the club.” The impression given was that this represented an act of popular solidarity. People who know something about the way that tribal affiliation to one of the two big Glasgow clubs is expressed will realise that this was just another form of it, like flying Irish flags, shouting “up the Ra!” and singing rebel songs. Rangers fans for their part fly the Union flag, sing God Save the King and will display the Israeli flag. How many on either side could point to Gaza on a map is a matter of conjecture.
What’s the word for a phobia of open letters?
I loathe the term “virtue signalling” in the same way I dislike “do-gooder” used as a term of disparagement. Both get deployed by the amoral and the ungenerous as covers for their own deficiencies. If it’s bad to do good, then not doing good can’t be that bad.
But sometimes that cap fits all too snugly, and its second most egregious form after “cancelling” – it seems to me – is the mass open letter. And on no single subject in the Western world are more open letters composed, signed and printed than on Israel and the Palestinians. They call for cultural boycotts, academic boycotts, economic boycotts, disinvestment, for specific acts not to tour Israel, and even (my favourite) for the government to apologise for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised the establishment of a Jewish state in part of what had been Ottoman ruled Palestine.
This last one was clearly drafted for the centenary by the Palestine Solidarity campaign and was signed by old Trots like Tariq Ali, old Worker’s Revolutionary Party members and sympathisers like Ken Loach and Kika Markham, old Stalinists like CND’s Kate Hudson, Stop the War luminaries like Lindsey German, far left trades unionists (who will not have consulted their members about their signatures) such as Mick Cash of the RMT, Christine Blower formerly of the NUT, Dave Ward of the CWU and Mark Serwotka of the PCS and a small handful of celebrities and theatricals. Then you add the inevitables, the people who sign every single one of these open letters: Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle, Michael Rosen and Lowkey.
Bear in mind here that a signature on this open letter is a statement of regret that Israel was ever formed and consequently a repudiation of what a large majority of British and diaspora Jews fervently believe. It also effectively disqualifies the signatory from any kind of hearing in the Jewish community.
And to what possible purpose, other than to see oneself reflected back to oneself? A few of the signatories to the 2017 letter popped up again in an open letter in the London Review of Books last week. A job lot of British authors and performers wanted to express their view to somebody that Israel was “committing grave crimes against humanity. (And) Its allies, our own governments, are complicit in these crimes.”
This letter began “nothing can retrieve what has already been lost”, and having made that judgment the lead authors obviously felt it was best not to actually mention what had been lost on October 7th, presumably in case it confused the LRB’s readers. And moved swiftly on to “the unprecedented and indiscriminate violence that is still escalating against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, with the financial and political support of Western powers, can and must be brought to an end”. Whatever you do, don’t mention the Hamas Einsatzgruppe.
I was depressed to see Sally Rooney and Anne Enright sign such a dismissal of the worst massacre of Jews since 1945, though momentarily intrigued to find it was also signed by Baudelaire. Unfortunately this turned out to be an Eric Baudelaire. And this illustrates my point. In what world will Israel, following this massacre, be dissuaded from trying to destroy the killers by a letter in the LRB signed by Sally Rooney? In what universe will Israel’s allies use condemnation – recommended by a gaggle of conceited artistes – as a way of getting Israel to adopt a humane policy towards the inhabitants of Gaza?
Clear-sighted in Gaza
It is no more important that I feel such frustration at this British “it’s really about me” narcissism, than that it exists. Social media is full of ignoramuses simultaneously proclaiming their Ladybird Book of Post-war Middle Eastern History understanding of how we got here and their demands as to who should now do what.
But of course a lot of this is genuinely caused by anguish at the death and suffering of the innocent, and an inability to come to terms with one’s own helplessness. Those of us who have in one way or another been covering this, off and on, for years feel it more keenly than most. Because we were there when the opportunities to change this course were there, and when they were spurned. We saw how after Oslo in the mid 90s Hamas, once encouraged by Israeli governments as a rival to Fatah, helped destroy the Israeli peace movement by launching suicide bombing attacks on civilian targets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Their objective was to ensure that Yasser Arafat and the PLO did not come to a lasting accommodation with Israel, an “entity” which Hamas envisaged as eventually being completely destroyed. Hamas’s objectives meshed with those of the Israeli far right which also wanted Oslo to fail so that there would not be a Palestinian state.
In 2000 Arafat turned down what, in retrospect (and at the time) was a real chance for the two-state solution to become something approaching a reality. Instead Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, a riot ensued and we had the second Palestinian intifada and the oppressive Israeli reaction to it.
Two and a bit years later – 20 years ago last March – I visited Gaza briefly while making a film about Muslim antisemitism for Channel 4 called Blaming the Jews. I can’t find it on Youtube but perhaps readers will have more luck. While there I interviewed one of Hamas’s top leaders, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi (who apparently was nicknamed “the Lion of Palestine”) about the infamous Hamas charter and its invocation of that forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A year later Rantisi was dead, killed by an Israeli missile fired from a helicopter at his car.
I wrote about that visit for the Guardian. I concluded:
In Gaza, as in the other Palestinian territories, the space for moderation gets smaller with every minor humiliation and every death.
You don’t have to be a peace activist to understand that this is a kind of madness. If ordinary Israelis and their friends in other countries were to spend even a few hours in Gaza, or talking to people on the West Bank, then it is difficult to imagine them supporting the policies of the present Israeli government. They might instead see that the seeds of the present intifada were sown in the way the last intifada was handled. At random, I met several Palestinian men who had, as youngsters, been imprisoned and tortured in the 80s. It is hard to talk to them about peace. And tomorrow’s harvest will (if nothing stops it) become the killing of one group of the flawless young people I encountered last week by the other.
The harvest is in
That was two bloody decades ago, and that harvest is in. Two years after that trip Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and a year after that Hamas won the election and have never bothered since to seek another mandate. Those with keen ears will have noticed that Gazan residents asked by journalists for their opinions about Hamas and what it did on October 7th never give a direct answer. Whether this is out of fear or solidarity or both it is impossible to know. What you can be certain of is that those in the Hamas high command who planned the attack knew perfectly well what the consequences for Gazans were likely to be.
Meanwhile during those years many Israelis – except the belligerent and frequently racist settlers on the West Bank – tried to forget that there was a Palestinian issue. In that sense Hamas has indeed triumphed.
Over here we try to kid ourselves that we have the answer, or else, seeking some kind of proximity to the conflict, attempt to reinvent the conflict here in Britain. I understand some of the motivation. Some feel a sense of powerlessness and desperation and perhaps even a misplaced smidgen of a sense of responsibility – which I hope is the explanation for why all those Palestinian letters get signed and so few pro-Uighur, pro-Rohingya or anti-Assad ones ever do. Sally Rooney however is Irish. So what’s a Jew to think?
And there, in that last throwaway sentence lies the danger of this narcissism. At its best it’s just self-aggrandising or self-medicating bullshit; but at its worst it polarises communities and imperils relations between people here in Britain. If I were religious I’d simply pray for an end to all this, for a Hamas free Gaza and an Israeli government that genuinely seeks an accommodation with the Palestinians. Actually, thinking about it, maybe open letters ARE a form of prayer. Just not nearly silent enough.
My man from St James Square may well be back demonstrating today, along with tens of thousands of others demanding a ceasefire – most of whom (but not all) will be motivated not by a desire to save Hamas but by a desire to save lives. Perhaps a fringe will become violent. Some Jews won’t be wearing their kipahs in London today, or will tuck their mogen Davids under their shirts. We can’t change what happens over there – proximately that was set in train on October 7th the recent horrible events in the Middle East have been – but we can certainly make things worse over here.
Post-October 7, David Aaronovitch has made his Substack posts on the Middle East free to any reader of his Notes from the Underground.