How Israel was turned into the fount of all evil

Since 7 October and the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas, Western ‘progressives’ have rounded on the Jewish State. On the streets and in the media, the volume and intensity of the loathing towards Israel, and invariably towards Jews, has often been overwhelming.

This has sometimes made it difficult to comprehend the nature of today’s Jew hatred. It is just so widespread and all-encompassing. Nevertheless, it is still possible to delineate the main elements of the ‘progressive’ attack on Israel – indeed, the main elements of what I elsewhere call ‘woke anti-Semitism’. 

At its core is the conviction that Israel is the epitome of evil. That it is a supremely malevolent state. You can see this in the way Israel’s opponents no longer criticise Israel by normal standards. They don’t just condemn Israel’s government, its policies or its operation in Gaza. They don’t criticise Israel as other states might be criticised. No, Israel’s critics also portray it as the fount of all evil in the world.

This can be seen in a diagram that was circulated last summer in anti-Israel circles. ‘Palestine is the issue’, reads the title, the issue that supposedly ‘connects it all’ – the ‘it’ being all that so-called progressives believe is wrong with the world. The diagram illustrates the point by putting Palestine at the centre of overlapping circles, each one representing various woke bêtes noires, from ‘environmental terrorism’ (ie, fossil-fuel companies), ‘misogyny’ and ‘patriarchy’ to ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘white supremacy’. 

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, is an arch exponent of this tendency to find Israel guilty of all the sins of the modern world. Speaking last September, Albanese accused Israel of committing ‘domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide’. That is, Israel is not waging a war, according to Albanese – it is engaged in the wanton destruction of homes, cities, education, medical infrastructure, culture and the environment. 

Portraying the Jewish State as fundamentally evil lies at the heart of contemporary anti-Israel activism. One of its most sinister products is Holocaust inversion. This is the attempt to portray Jews as perpetrators of a new holocaust, rather than the victims of the Holocaust. Holocaust inversion can be seen on the placards held aloft at nominally pro-Palestine protests, where the Jewish Star of David is depicted alongside or connected to the Nazi swastika.

To read the remainder of the article click HERE. The piece was first published today on spiked.