HOWARD EPSTEIN: EVEN WORDS CAN HURT US
Who was your politician of the year 2023? For me, the answer is Suella Braverman, who was forced out of office as Home Secretary five days after she wrote an opinion piece in The Times in which she said that there was “a perception that senior police officers” play favourites when it comes to protesters” and they were tougher on right-wing extremists than pro-Palestinian “mobs”. Earlier, she had attracted criticism for saying that pro-Palestine marches since the outbreak of the Israel–Gaza war were “hate marches …. chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map”.
Braverman might have drawn cold comfort last weekend when thousands marching through London in a pro-Palestinian rally heard a call for the massacres our people suffered on Shabbat Simchat Torah 5784 to be regarded as the New Normal. The rabble-rouser, who suffered no reported interruption by the Metropolitan Police, was Mohammed el-Kurd, a prominent Palestinian activist since the 2021 clashes in his Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. He went further in crying: “Zionism is the root cause of all that is happening in Palestine,” adding, “Zionism is apartheid, it’s genocide, it’s murder. It’s a racist ideology, rooted in settler expansion and racist domination.”
Note the coupling of “apartheid” and “genocide” the day after the International Court of Justice in the Hague rose after hearing from South African lawyers, who should know better than anyone else what true apartheid looks like, that Israel was committing genocide in its on-going war in Gaza, against Hamas, whose charter calls for the elimination of the Jews in Israel – first – and then the world over. (Note, their policy of elimination extends to all non-Muslims, but that is for our Christian neighbours to appreciate before the hatred overwhelms them also.)
The venomous icing on the poisonous cake was el-Kurd’s: “We must dezionise. Zionism is a death cult…. We must root [Zionism] out of the world.”
We thought we saw fake news during the Trump election campaigns. (There is a greater exposé of it in the excellent Sky documentary: “Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse”.) The inversion of the truth of 7 October last to the fake news that Zionism, the most constructive and successful experiment in human progress in the last hundred years, is something that ought not to have been allowed to be heard on the streets of London. Hamas, a true death cult, as confirmed by its charter and its misdeeds, in which hundreds of innocent Israelis were murdered in their beds, their homes, their villages, and at a music festival, in the cruelest and gruesome actions imaginable, ought not to be celebrated a few hundred metres from the Mother of Parliaments.
Ms. Braverman’s cautionary words ought now to be haunting those politicians who savoured her downfall for speaking trenchantly. Compared to the hate speech of el-Kurd, she was merely reciting nursery rhymes. Yet, the discomfort about Israel, which prefers to win its wars in six days (as in 1967) or 19 days (as in 1973), having to battle for months against the Hamas death cult – that starves its own people of food, electricity, and hope, and spent their money preparing for years an underground redoubt – has led to a perverse reaction.
David Cameron, recently elevated to the House of Lords, from where he can strut the world stage as British foreign secretary, faced the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week, was asked whether Israel had breached international humanitarian law in its war in Gaza. According to the 9 January 2024 Guardian, “after being pressed by the committee’s Tory chair, Alicia Kearns, Cameron initially said he did not want to answer that question before saying he was ‘worried’ that Israel may have taken actions that were in breach of international law.”
Now the more interesting question that arises is not whether Cameron should have expressed that worry (poor thing) but when that committee last asked a foreign secretary such a question. After all, there have been plenty of opportunities. For example, “Foreign Secretary, has Russia been in breach of international humanitarian law in its attacks on town centres in Ukraine causing some 10,000 civilian deaths?” No. I do not recall that one. The one about Turkey in its attacks on the Kurds, most recently hitting 71 targets on 23 December 2023. That one neither – and Turkey’s bombing campaign has been going on for many years. How many times has the foreign secretary been asked about the human rights record of the military government of Myanmar? Nothing springs to mind.
One wonders when Lord Cameron became steeped in the Laws of War, like, for example, Michael Walzer, author of “Just and Unjust Wars: A Revitalization of just war theory” (1977). Walzer, on the podcast “Unholy” last week, said, “Hamas has designed a war which Israel can only fight by killing civilians, and Hamas has to be held responsible for that.” Possibly, just possibly, Cameron is behind on his reading and research for his new post.
Then again, the good lord, Cameron, the rosy-cheeked cherub, whose incompetence as prime minister caused the UK to crash out of the EU, might have caught the odd interview of Colonel Richard Kemp (ret.) who has said, until he is blue in the face, that the IDF is the most moral army ever – anywhere.
No matter. Israel’s hasbarah (PR), and those of Anglo and American Jewry, are never going to be vociferous enough to drown out the hatred spewed by those millions who pretend they want a Two State solution but have spurned it so many times since it was first offered in 1937 that we have all lost count.
As the old Jewish joke about the Shoah goes: They tried to kill us all. Noo? Let’s go eat. They will keep trying and they will keep failing; but, in the meantime, the decorousness of the West End of London will be forever sullied by Mohammed el-Kurd. And our politicians thought Braverman’s words were harsh?
© Howard Epstein, January 2024 – www.howard-epstein.com
