Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips on good form in the Times this morning – Dangerous Palestinianism has gripped politics:

The local government elections this week will have a very odd aspect. In electing people to busy themselves with bin collections, planning applications and mending potholes, an apparently sizeable number of people, namely left-wingers and Muslims, will be voting on the issue of Gaza — shorthand for taking a position virulently hostile to Israel.

The Greens’ leader, Zack Polanski, has made this a key part of his extreme-left platform. Polling suggests the Greens will make huge gains, thanks in the main to young people. Supporters applaud the party’s obsessive hatred of Israel which they regard, as one explained, as “moral clarity”. That sentiment, shared far beyond Green voters, is key to understanding why British Jews are now under siege from attacks directed at them through their perceived support for Israel.

For many young people, being anti-Israel fits their profound yearning to be idealistic and moral. This is because Israel is widely perceived to be guilty of genocide, starvation and wantonly killing babies and children in its war against Hamas in Gaza. These obscene claims are implacably believed, while evidence produced by Israel rebutting them on grounds of facts and rationality is dismissed with contempt.

That’s because of the view, embedded in progressive circles over decades, that Israel is a fundamentally immoral project, responsible for the colonial oppression of Palestinians by the Jews who now illegally occupy even more of the land than when the state was founded in 1948.

But Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, centuries before Islam was even created. Their entitlement to re-establish that homeland was enshrined in international law by the precursor to the UN, the League of Nations, in 1922.

In the 1960s, unable to defeat Israel militarily, the Arabs fashioned a Palestinian identity to secure world support in opposing Israel. This has been acknowledged by a number of Arabs over the years. In 1977, for example, Zahir Muhsein, a senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation official, said: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people… to oppose Zionism.”

Thus was born Palestinianism, committed to the destruction of Israel and the theft of the Jews’ own history in the land but presented as a movement for justice and human rights. This strategy has worked to perfection. A war of extermination was reframed as resistance to colonial conquest. And the “anti-colonialist” young have lapped it up.

As a result, they have adopted the Palestinian mindset. The Palestinian Authority routinely uses the imagery of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred, representing Jews as vermin, octopuses controlling America or poisoners of the world. So it’s no surprise that some Green candidates have referred to “Jewish cockroaches”, termed Jeffrey Epstein’s island “Zionist HQ” and accused the Israelis of “using infectious diseases to help their genocidal onslaught”.

The Palestinians have also accused Israel for decades of committing genocide, causing a “holocaust” and being Nazis. So it’s predictable their British supporters are using precisely the same monstrous language.

Palestinianism, the signature cause of the western progressive, has also been adopted by the international human rights establishment. Since human rights is the nearest thing to a secular religion, the venomous defamation of Israelis and Jews has been reframed as virtue.

So when Polanski accuses Israel of genocide, his supporters cheer. But such claims inescapably create savage hatred of Israel and diaspora Jews, who with singular injustice are held responsible for what Israel does.

That mindset, which brings together Islamist extremists with other Israel-haters, not only leads unstable individuals to commit murderous attacks on Jews. It also diverts public outrage away from those committing them and towards their Jewish or Israeli victims.

The apparently Israel-hating Polanski, who has turned himself into a tool of this hideous movement, uses his Jewishness as a shield. Unfortunately, history records a long line of Jews — including Marx, who wrote that the ideal society would be free of Jews altogether — who turn into enemies of the Jewish people.

Polanski is riding a wider wave which has substituted propaganda for knowledge and sapped the ability to think, particularly among the young. It’s a culture in which objective truth has been replaced by the primacy of feelings and the ideologies of moral relativism, anti-colonialism and multiculturalism.

This has entailed a bar against calling out Islamism and its use of the Palestinian cause. By swallowing Palestinianism wholesale, many British supporters have unintentionally bought into an agenda that views the destruction of the Jews as a vital step towards the destruction of the West. For Palestinianism is a Trojan Horse for both antisemitism and Islamisation.

Many decent people believe that by supporting the Palestinians they are supporting peace, justice and the cause of the oppressed. This is a trap. The terrible truth is that the supporters of Palestinian ideology are unwittingly laundering the unconscionable as conscience itself.

And yes, we do have a problem:

The war in Gaza ranks above the economy in determining how Muslim voters will cast their ballots at this week’s local elections, according to polling.

Polanski kinows this. He’s pandering to it.