Mick Hartley

The news of civilian deaths in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, is tragic. Yet somehow there's an obsession with child deaths caused by Israeli bombing. Is this a resurfacing of old antisemitic tropes? Howard Jacabson had a piece in the Observer on Sunday:

It says something for the conscience of the Church of England that, in 1955, it put up a plaque alongside the former shrine of Little Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral, apologising for the harm it had done by falsely accusing Jews of the ritual slaughter of the boy in 1255.

That Jews habitually murdered gentile children for blood with which to make Passover matzoh, was a popular superstition throughout Britain and Europe in the middle ages. “These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives,” the plaque reads, “[and] do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”

That it took the Church of England 700 years to amend “what [it] had been” should not detract from the honesty of that amendment, particularly if we remember that the “blood libel”, as it has become known, was still alive and kicking in the modern era, with occurrences of it recorded in Russia and even America as recently as 1928….

Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.

Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.

Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you. Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation. Hate feeds off the superstitions that fed it last time round. The narrative of these events requires a heartless villainy and who more heartlessly villainous than those who severed the arteries of Little Hugh of Lincoln?

Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator today:

Children in Gaza are dying in this ghastly war Hamas started with its fascistic pogrom against the Jewish state on 7 October last year. Yet there’s something new and strange in the discussion of child suffering in Gaza. In this war, the agony of the guiltless ones is not seen as accidental, as an awful byproduct of the fierce fighting. No, it’s seen as intentional, calculated, an actual war aim of the Jewish nation. Israel, its legion haters cry, is an infanticidal regime.

This is the first war I can remember where there’s been such a feverish urge to prove that kids are not just dying but are being murdered. Israel is ‘targeting childhood’, its critics insist. Peruse the Israelophobic toilet of social media and you will be confronted by wild cries about Israel exterminating the next generation of Gazans. ‘Infanticide’ is ‘inherent in Israel’s genocide’, some say. Leftie podcasts bristle with dark chatter about Israel’s bloodlust for innocent life.

This view of the Jewish state as a child-killing machine has even leaked into the mainstream discourse. A high-ranking UNICEF official described Israel’s war as a ‘war on children’. ‘They shoot children, don’t they?’, said a headline in Ireland recently.

Even pre-7 October, Israel was talked about as a nation that positively relishes in child death. In July 2023, in an interview with the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, a BBC news anchor put it to him that ‘Israeli forces are happy to kill children’. Happy. These freaks get a kick from child suffering. The BBC later apologised, but it was too late – the ugly dinner-party belief that Israel loves to kill kids had seeped into public view….

Is it anti-semitic to point out that children have died in Gaza? Of course not. Is it anti-semitic to say the Jewish State, unique among the family of nations, hunts kids down so that it might spill their blood and exterminate their kind? It kind of is. Let’s put it another way. Is it anti-semitic to criticise Israel? No. Is it anti-semitic to feverishly obsess over Israel, to brand it as uniquely murderous, to judge it by a different standard to every other state, and to hint darkly that it is sacrificing Gazan children at the altar of its demented regional ambitions? Honestly – yes.