by Daniel Ben-Ami, spiked
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’.