Mick Hartley

🧵Why do so many 'clever' people in the West hold Israel and only Israel accountable for everything ?(a thread)

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The Anti-Zionist Ideology has warped the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West. At its heart is an assumption about the very Being of…

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) December 26, 2024

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Full thread:

1/ The Anti-Zionist Ideology has warped the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West. At its heart is an assumption about the very Being of Israelis and Palestinians. It goes like this: Palestinians (and Arabs per se) do not have agency and choice, and so cannot be held accountable and responsible for their actions. Israelis do; always, and exclusively. More: Palestinians are a driven people, dominated by circumstance and emotion, lacking choice, below the age of responsibility, really, so never to be held accountable. Israelis are the opposite; masters of all circumstances, rational and calculating, the root cause of everything, responsible for everything.

2/ The assumption is pushed by the public intellectuals who have shaped much of the debate about the conflict in Britain. Here are five illustrative examples. First, When the Israeli novelist (and Peace Now founder) Amos Oz complained that incitement by extremist Palestinian intellectuals has led some Palestinians to be “suffocated and poisoned by blind hate,” the anti-Zionist writer Yitzhak Laor was outraged, accusing Oz of “incitement” against the Palestinians! Just the act of seeking to hold some Palestinians to account for their actions was enough to condemn as Oz as beyond the pale.

3/ Second, the writer Jacqueline Rose argued that Israel is “the agent” that is responsible for Palestinian suicide terrorism, and for “plac[ing] Jews in Israel … at risk.” She uncritically passes on to her readers a defence of the suicide bomber given by Hamas leader Abdul Aziz al-Ratansi (“If he wants to sacrifice his soul in order to defeat the enemy and for God’s sake – well, then he’s a martyr”).

4/ Third, Shlomo Sand – whose many books are found in every Waterstones store in the UK – once expressed his deep disgust at those Jewish Israeli intellectuals who opposed Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. As Saddam was firing scud missiles at Israeli civilians, this was very odd indeed. Why was Sand so angry? Because the Palestinians felt “joy” at an ““Arab” show of force” and that should have been decisive.

5/ Fourth, Ilan Pappe’s book The Idea of Israel (Summary: it was a Very Bad Idea and should now be Corrected) includes an apologia for the violently pro-Nazi Palestinian leader Al-Husseini. The Ideology dictates that Arab anti-Semitism be rendered invisible or treated as purely a reaction to Zionism, but the facts are awkward: so keen was Al-Husseini on Adolf that he formed a Muslim SS Unit. No matter. Pappe reduces all this to “an episode” in the “complex” life of a nationalist; a “foolish flirtation” that should only be of interest to the reader because it has been exploited by Zionists to “demonise” the Palestinians. Pappe argues that Al-Husseini was – here comes the ideology – “forced” into the alliance with Hitler.

6/ Fifth, the leading Italian philosopher Giamo Vattimo tells us to listen less to “the Zionists” and more to the former Iranian President Ahmadinejad who has had the courage to “question the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence.” Passing in silence over Ahmadinejad”s threats to erase Israel from the page of time and his Holocaust denial, Vattimo praises the former Iranian leader in terms that should give us pause: “When Ahmadinejad invokes the end of the State of Israel, he merely expresses a demand that should be more explicitly shared by the democratic countries that instead consider him an enemy.”

7/ What explains this weird mental reflex to *always* exculpate Palestinians? One factor is the crude mind-set that became dominant on much of the Left after the 1960s. Let’s call it “reactionary anti-imperialism” or “campism”. It divided the world, and everything in it, into two opposed “camps”: Imperialism versus Anti-Imperialism. Anyone shooting at Imperialism now became part of the anti-imperialist “resistance” to imperialism and thereby progressive. As a result, parts of the left redefined themselves as (not very) critical supporters of, or at least apologists for, whatever reactionary forces were doing the shooting, including radical Islamists. (“Rejoice!” said Socialist Worker in response to 7 October.)

8/ The reactionary anti-imperialist mind-set was expressed with admirable candour by Judith Butler – a Professor at Berkeley and one of the most influential academics on the planet. She defined the antisemites of Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

9 / These ‘antizionist’ assumptions about the very Being of Palestinians and Israelis then reshaped international media coverage of the conflict. One example: the reactions to the killing of four Jews at prayer in Jerusalem in 2014. The Guardian altered a Reuters dispatch about the massacre to remove any reference to Palestinians. The Reuters headline was 'Palestinians kill four in Jerusalem synagogue attack' and the wire began ''Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed four people in a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday before being shot dead by police…." The Guardian also changed their headline to "Four worshippers killed in attack on Jerusalem synagogue." And cut any reference to Palestinians until it read "Two men armed with axes, knives and a pistol have killed four Israelis and wounded several others in a Jerusalem synagogue.”

10/ In the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the writer Amira Hass wrote about "the despair and anger that pushed the Abu Jamals to attack Jews in a synagogue (emphasis added)." (Yes, the anti-Zionist Ideology is widely held on the Israeli Left.) The Jerusalem Post reported that “CNN ran a ticker that read, ‘4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead in Jerusalem,’ failing to note that the two Palestinians were the terrorists.” (CNN later apologised.)

11/ And so we arrived at 7 October 2023 after *decades* of the Anti-Zionist Ideology being spread throughout the West, mis-framing the conflict in terms of its demonising / exculpatory assumptions about Palestinians and Israelis. These assumptions long ago seeped out from the cloisters of academia into the western public square. It’s been going on for decades. And our side didn’t put resources into those platforms and institutions that could have challenged it. For a long time our side didn’t even take the Ideology seriously. It stupidly thought it could get by with bullet points and talking points. (At a seminar at INSS in Israel I was once asked – they were genuinely puzzled – why I was bothering to critique Ilan Pappe. They thought him irrelevant. In fact, he has shaped thinking in the UK about Israel possibly more than any other single writer. Only Robert Wistrich understood.) And so now we are where we are.