Mick Hartley

Howard Jacobson at the JC on the aniiversary of Oct. 7th – ‘Politics stepped in where pity alone, at least for a while, should have spoken’:

In its own way, the aftermath was, and remains, a second atrocity. To say this is to take nothing from the horror of the massacre itself. Finding language adequate to describe the barbarity bedevilled and continues to bedevil discussion of it. Those not looking for a fight shook their heads and called it “appalling”. But “appalling” is a hand-me-down word that costs the user nothing. It is like saying that “our hearts go out” to the relatives of a disaster victim. Those looking for equivocation, like the UN secretary-general António Guterres, were quick off the mark to remind us that the attack, though undoubtedly appalling, “did not happen in a vacuum”. If only Desdemona hadn’t dropped that handkerchief.

Others among us searched for expression adequate to the shock of the massacre having happened where it happened, where we thought we had found safety from such murderousness at last, and language equal to the brute malevolence of it, the naked, face-to-face cruelty of the rampage, the indifference to the age or gender of those shot, raped, degraded and dismembered, the seeming joy taken in the ravening and the kidnapping of the innocent. Did we have the words to describe the deep damnation of the savagery or did we have to make up new ones? I am not convinced I have found them yet.

Had the killers come from some other world? Did they not have wives and mothers and children of their own, no knowledge of the affections to stay their hands, no imagination for others’ agony and grief, and no anticipation of their own remorse, supposing they would ever feel it? …

If the robotic “appalled” was the best expression of abhorrence so many people could find, it was because they didn’t feel much in the way of abhorrence at all. Experience teaches that those who say they are appalled, as often as not aren’t. The Jews got what was coming, that was all. History was having its way. Politics – the politics of Jew-aversion with its new academic-kindergarten name of anti-colonialism – stepped in where, for a brief hour at least, pity alone should have spoken.

A professor of some subject that was no subject at some university that was no university mocked our sorrow for the young mown down at a music festival. “Don’t have music festivals on someone else’s land in that case,” he jeered before a tear could dry. We can say, at least, that his subject had never been history, geography or humanity.

The inhumanity of each new responder gathered strength and even glee from what had been said before. This was the pyramid-selling of Jew-hatred. “Where’s the Jews?” someone shouted from the steps of the Sydney Opera House. I recall wondering if the wrong news had got out. Did people think it was the Jews who had gone on a murder spree? If not, how to understand the carnival of Jew-revulsion that was unloosed in hours? The blood of Jews had been lavishly spilt, which only made the most educated in our society bay for more? By what logic of morality or compassion could this be? When we find a victim of a road accident lying in the road, we don’t rush over and kick him.

It was as though permission had finally been given to say whatever one liked about Jews. And that included abandoning the pretence that anti-Zionism wasn’t anti-Jewish. Israeli, Zionist, Jew; in the rush to condemn, the terms became openly interchangeable. The barricades of truth and decency had come down and those who felt they’d been confined for too long behind them could now pour through and abuse to their hearts’ contents. I remember the first time I swore. Once one filthy word came out there was no stopping the rest of them. Of such exhilaration are all mob acts of racism made, but this was different in that the mob had PhDs….