Mick Hartley

Jake Wallis Simons in the Telegraph on the Gazans protesting against Hamas:

Over the last 48 hours, there have been more protests against Hamas inside Gaza than we have seen over the past 17 months in London. The marches first emerged in the north of the Strip, with beleaguered Gazans bravely calling for the release of Israeli hostages, facing down reprisals from their jihadi overlords. When did you last hear such demands at the rallies endured by our capital on Saturdays?

The uprisings are ongoing. They have spread south, even erupting in the Hamas stronghold of Jabalia in Gaza City, where a protest in 2019 was viciously repressed by the jihadis.

It is impossible to know whether they will be snuffed out by hastily recruited 16-year-olds with Kalashnikovs or if this is the start of something bigger. But the episode has already neatly revealed the deplorable hypocrisy at the heart of Gaza activism in Britain, seemingly more concerned with feeding a lust for the denigration of Israel than the welfare of the Palestinians.

Yet the media are not that excited. 

From one point of view, you’d have thought that the story would be widely covered. After all, aren’t many progressives normally keen to make a distinction between the fanatics of Hamas and the innocent civilians of Gaza as soon as an Israeli bomb lands? The problem, however, is that what serves the narrative in one context can have the opposite effect in another.

The unpalatable truth is this: in the back of every liberal mind there lurks a guilty sympathy for Hamas. They have learnt not to say it out loud, but in a brain addled by decolonisation dogma and critical race theory, it is hard to resist the siren call to embrace the most savage jihadism simply because it fits.

The white man is the enemy. The imperialists are to blame. Colonialism is the worst evil ever to befall mankind and the underdog deserves solidarity, ergo resistance is justified. This is how they think.

Yasser Arafat’s alignment with the decolonisation movement in the Sixties, in particular the Algerian defeat of the French, was a stroke of genius which won unquestioning solidarity from the Left. The delusion persists today.

The reality, of course, is that most Jews are not white. Israel is not a colonial power. The Palestinians have been offered a state on several occasions – including the 2008 Olmert proposal, which satisfied 100 per cent of their supposed demands – but turned down every one in favour of bloodshed.

Hamas is no different from Islamic State. “Resistance” is simply code for the wanton rape, butchery and mutilation of families in their beds, motivated by fanatical religion (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, for God’s sake). But when you’re wearing your anti-Israel goggles, such subtle distinctions as these become cloudy. Pretty soon, you end up thinking Yahya Sinwar is Che Guevara.

Shamefully, this dogma continues to dominate on the Left today. You just can’t shake them out of it. So we see activists in London, in their keffiyehs and crop-tops, tearing down hostage posters just as the weary people of Gaza take to the streets in defiance of their jihadi oppressors.