Mick Hartley

You may have been aware that the fashion chain Zara has been the target of Palestinian protestors – in London, Glasgow, Toronto, Hanover, Melbourne, Toronto. "Zara, Zara, you can’t hide, stop supporting genocide", they chant. What's going on? Zara isn't Israel-owned (it's Spanish), has no particular Jewish connections, and has never expressed any official opinion on Zionism or Hamas or Gaza. 

It is, says Nick Cohen at the Spectator, "a paranoid fantasy: a QAnon conspiracy theory for the postcolonial left".

The Zara conspiracy is an entirely modern phenomenon. It has no original author. Anti-Semitic Russians sat down and wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 20th century. There was an actual ‘Q’ behind the QAnon conspiracy: a far-right activist who first appeared on 4chan message boards in 2017 to claim that a cabal of child abusers was conspiring against Donald Trump.

The Zara conspiracy was mass produced by social media users: an example of the madness of crowds rather than their supposed wisdom. The cause of the descent into hysteria was bizarre. In early December Zara launched an advertising campaign featuring the model Kristen McMenamy wearing its latest collection in a sculptor’s studio. It clearly was a studio, by the way, and not a war zone in southern Israel or Gaza. McMenamy carried a mannequin wrapped in white fabric. The cry went up that the Spanish company was exploiting the suffering of Palestinians and that the mannequin was meant to represent a victim of Israeli aggression wrapped in a shroud.

The accusation was insane. No one in the photo shoot resembled a soldier or a casualty of war. Anyone who thought for 30 seconds before resorting to social media would have known that global brands plan their advertising campaigns months in advance.

Zara said the campaign presented ‘a series of images of unfinished sculptures in a sculptor’s studio and was created with the sole purpose of showcasing craft-made garments in an artistic context’. The idea for the studio setting was conceived in July. The photo shoot was in September, weeks before the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October.

No one cared. Melanie Elturk, the CEO of fashion brand Haute Hijab, said of the campaign, ‘this is sick. What kind of sick, twisted, and sadistic images am I looking at?’ #BoycottZara trended on Twitter, as users said that Zara was ‘utterly shameful and disgraceful’.

To justify their condemnations, activists developed ever-weirder theories. A piece of cardboard in the photoshoot was meant to be a map of Israel/Palestine turned upside down. Because a Zara executive had once invited an extreme right-wing Israeli politician to a meeting, the whole company was damned.

Astonishingly, or maybe not so astonishingly to anyone who follows online manias, it worked.

So here we are. Another conspiracy theory in the grim history of antisemitic conspiracy theories.