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Sympathise with Israel, but not the blockade

The situation in Gaza is a gift to apologists for extreme Islam

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 June 2010
  • Article history

Israel has become the main source of mystification for modern liberals. It twists them into ever-uglier contortions. It allows them to ignore secular tyranny and radical religious reaction and to revive with more relish than is seemly Europe's oldest antisemitic tropes while they are about it. Given the dark forces which surround and exploit Israel, the urge to defend the Jewish state is close to overwhelming.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the inability of a large section of leftwing opinion and, indeed, isolationist conservative opinion to consider any foreign policy question without reverting within minutes to denunciations of a tiny country on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. So prevalent are the evasive manoeuvres that we need an update of Godwin's Law to describe them. Mike Godwin held in 1990 that the longer a discussion continues on the web the greater the likelihood that some fool invoking the Nazis would reduce it to absurdity. Today, reduction to Zionism has replaced reductio ad Hitlerum. It is impossible for discussions of Middle Eastern dictatorship, the rise of psychopathic Islamism or the alienation of immigrant Muslim communities in the west to continue without participants maintaining that Jewish influence is "the root cause" of the evils to hand. From the far left to the Liberal Democrats, alleged progressives have Jews on the brain.

The point to make against them is not that there are worse countries than Israel, which receive nothing like the same level of opprobrium – even though there are and they most certainly do not – but that Israel's critics ignore the uses of racism and forget the lessons of the 20th century.

The leaders of Ba'athist Syria or theocratic Iran or monarchical Saudi Arabia do not faithfully reproduce the fantasies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion solely because they hate Jews. They need a conspiracy theory to divert the attention of their subject populations from the failures of their rule as badly as the tsars did in the 1900s and the Nazis in the 1930s. Then, as now, the ability to brand political opponents as Zionist fifth columnists and liberal principles as decadent Jewish ruses that divert the faithful from fulfilling their religious or racial destiny are essential aids to the maintenance of their power.

Hamas, around which the disputes about aid to Gaza rage, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which fused fascist and radical Islamist ideas during the German push into the Middle East during the Second World War. Large chunks of its constitution are lifted from European racism – Jewish money controls the world's "media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations"; the Jews were behind "the French revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about" and so on.

As with the European reactionaries of the 20th century, Islamists do not stop with Jew hatred. Advances for radical Islam are always disasters for women, homosexuals, democrats, socialists and free thinkers. Put like this, the behaviour of European liberals seems more reprehensible than ever. Instead of confronting or even arguing with the anti-liberal forces that are terrorising much of the Middle East and Asia, they appease them and offer them Israel as a placatory gesture, when Israel is not theirs to give away.

The refusal to understand what antisemitism is and what antisemites want to do to Jews and non-Jews alike makes sense as a general explanation for attitudes towards Israel. It is, however, a measure of the political failure of the Netanyahu government that it no longer suffices as a particular explanation for the bias of the Gaza debate. I have no wish to lay myself open to unwarranted accusations of even-handedness, but knowing where to begin with a defence of Israel or any other cause also involves knowing when to stop. The true measure of the disastrous consequences of the Gaza blockade for all sides is the unwillingness of Palestinians who have most to fear from Islamism to condemn Hamas.

I spoke to Mustafa Barghouti from the Palestinian National Initiative. He is secular, leftwing and a believer in the two-state solution and non-violent protest. In other words, he is everything a supporter of sane politics and sensible compromises could want him to be. Yet he could not bring himself to say a word against Hamas while more than one million of his fellow countrymen and women were confined in Gaza. His sole priority was national unity until the blockade was over. Everything else was a distraction.

He may be being a fool – the graveyards of the Middle East are filled with Arab and Iranian leftists who thought they could safely form alliances of convenience with clerical reaction – but he is not being disingenuous. "Whataboutery" is always a disreputable way of distracting attention. Those who look at Gaza and say: "But what about Syria, Iran or Kurdistan?" are as bad as those who looked at Saddam's Iraq and said: "But what about Burma, Congo or North Korea?" At least Barghouti concentrates on the issue at hand: the lack of basic humanitarian supplies, including foods and medicine, and the mass unemployment and restrictions on movement Gazans have suffered for five years, and will continue to suffer unless Israel or Hamas change course.

Israelis do not see why they should blink first. Their belief that they are on the receiving end of a hypocritical campaign sustains their siege mentality and nurtures the fear that if Israel pulls back from Gaza's borders, Hamas will grow in strength and arm itself with Iranian missiles.

Israelis are not being irrational. The same fears persuade the Egyptian government to blockade Gaza from the south, although we rarely hear about that. But the way to handle hypocrites is not to say as Israelis do that "the world will condemn us whatever policy we follow" but to call their bluff. If Israel were to relax the import restrictions and Hamas were to rearm, reasonable opinion, including reasonable Palestinian opinion, would see it for what it would be: a declaration of war.

As things stand, reasonable opinion, including reasonable Palestinian opinion, is merging with the opinions of every variety of conspiracy nut and Jew-baiter. Leaving all humanitarian arguments to one side, no Israeli government should tolerate that.