Mick Hartley

Patrick West in the Spectator on the delusion of the pro-Palestinian campus protestors:

Just as some critics of radical trans ideology regard the rapidity in which that fashion took hold as an example of social contagion, what we are witnessing here could be seen as something similar: an example of low-level, mass hysteria.

The sheer level of fidelity to, and mimicry of, the protests in the US has been a glaring aspect of the encampments in Britain, and the discourse that has been accompanying the protests worldwide. There’s been the mandatory, identikit invectives against ‘Zionists’ and ‘White Supremacy’, and automatic, repetitious sloganeering concerning ‘the river to the sea’.

In America, protestors keen to immerse themselves in acts and displays of empathy have gone full Method – or full fantasy. Some have been pleading for food and space in their valiant protests on behalf of their ‘Vietnam’, demanding ‘basic humanitarian aid’ lest they ‘die of dehydration’.

Some of their number have been replicating what they believe to be the conditions in Gaza. Students at UCLA have been so consumed by this indecorous mood of play-acting worthy of Marie Antoinette that last week some took it upon themselves to pray en-masse to Allah – or at least simulate of an act of prayer. Whether or not all the pro-Palestinian protestors who took part were Muslim wasn’t clear.

Students here in Britain, and throughout the Western world, have not merely establishment copycat encampments, but they have entered into the same spirit of unreality. Activists of the Oxford Action for Palestine group declared a ‘liberated zone’ outside the Pitt Rivers Museum. Oxford protestors have asked for plywood, bags, tarpaulins, chairs and gazebos – notwithstanding the fact that the university city has both a branch of Homebase and B&Q….

This is quite consciously and openly a development imported from the United States. ‘The US movement set off a global chain of reaction. We are excited to part of that,’ admitted one Oxford protester to a Times reporter yesterday. ‘We have had a lot of support from them in terms of logistics, general comradeship, giving us tips and tricks.’

That seems to be quite a rational statement of intent. It is normal that those seeking to mobilise support for a cause should share logistics and tactics. What is decidedly far from normal is the inherent fantastical element to this now global movement, this empathetic impulse that has tipped over into the realm of make-believe and play-acting. 

It is an impulse that has evident universal appeal. That the keffiyeh has become a mandatory accessory among protestors is entirely in keeping with the detachment from reality afoot here. In other circumstances students would vehemently denounce anyone who to pretended to be an Arab, condemn him or her as guilty of ‘cultural appropriation’. But normal rules don’t apply when normality itself now seems in doubt.

The inauthenticity at the heart of much of the protests, is fitting, too, with the ignorance of many doing the protesting. Yes, this is about the people of Gaza. Yes, it is also about registering anti-Western, anti-authority and anti-Israeli sentiment. But it also appeals to a desperate desire to belong, to an otherwise atomised smartphone generation that sometimes can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. It is an otherworldly phenomenon for irrational times. No wonder the hysteria is spreading with such virulence.

At the root of it all, undeniably, is the old antisemitism, dressed up in new "progressive" anti-Israel anti-Zionist clothes.