Many grim things are happening in northern Gaza right now, as Israel puts the screws on Hamas. But there’s one thing in particular that leapt out at me from this bloody showdown between the Israel Defence Forces and the army of anti-Semites that started this infernal war with its pogrom of a year ago. It’s a thing that isn’t being widely reported. A fact you will need to dig deep to find. You certainly won’t spy any mention of it in the toilet of Israelophobia known as social media. It’s this: the IDF is pleading with Palestinian civilians to leave northern Gaza, while Hamas is instructing them to stay.
Even the BBC – so hostile to Israel that it refuses to refer to its fascistic persecutors as ‘terrorists’ – felt compelled to chronicle this most telling of stories from the benighted north of Gaza. In a typically breathless piece alleging that Israel is pursuing the military strategy of ‘surrender or starve’, the Beeb reports that where the IDF has warned Gazans that it will be ‘operating with great force’ in the north, and thus they should ‘evacuate immediately’, Hamas has told them to stay. In fact, Hamas has warned the 400,000 souls still left in the north to not even think about moving. It has used falsehoods and fear to cajole women and children into staying put, telling them the south is ‘just as dangerous’ (not true) and that if they leave ‘they will not be allowed back’ (bastards).
Reuters has likewise clocked these disturbing accounts from the ground. ‘The Israeli military [is] calling on Palestinians to evacuate south’, it reports, while Hamas is ‘telling them not to leave because it [is] too risky’. The IDF has gone to great lengths to convince civilians to flee, posting messages online in Arabic clearly stipulating that even ‘shelters’ in certain parts of the north would shortly become ‘dangerous combat zone[s]’. It has distributed maps with a ‘large yellow arrow’ showing civilians where to go. Hamas, meanwhile, has all but forbidden an exodus. There are even reports that it is using physical force to make people stay. One Gazan has claimed that their Islamist rulers are ‘beating them with sticks’ if they try to access the IDF’s mapped-out ‘humanitarian corridor’.
How do we make sense of this? According to the intellectuals and activists of the Western world, Israel is a demented genocidal state, hell-bent on slaughtering Palestinians and especially keen on killing children (blood libel, much?). Hamas, meanwhile, is a ‘resistance’ movement, if an iffy one, whose strikes against Israel are an understandable stab at protecting Gazans from the violent bloodlust of psycho Zionists. And yet here we have the ‘genocidaires’ pleading with Gazans to move out of harm’s way, and ‘the resistance’ ordering them to stay in it. Providing civilians with maps to safety? Israel is surely the most rubbish genocidal entity in history.
Few developments in the year-long war between the Islamist extremists of Hamas and the army of the Jewish State have shattered the lies and lunacy of our Israelophobic elites as much as this one. Maybe that’s why the battle of information in northern Gaza, the clash between Israel’s pleas to leave and Hamas’s commandment to stay, has received relatively little coverage. Because it utterly upends the activist class’s feverish, fact-lite depiction of Israel as a nation in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’. The truth in Gaza right now is that the IDF is trying to prevent Palestinian death, while Hamas is taking steps to make it inevitable. This isn’t an Israeli genocide – it’s more like a murder-suicide, inflicted on the wretched of Gaza by an Islamist tyranny so drunk on anti-Semitic hatred that it has come to prize hurting Israel more highly than saving Palestinians.
There is a question we must ask, ugly and unsettling though it is: who benefits from Palestinian death? It is my belief that Israel does not. On the contrary, given that the influential of the West hold up every civilian death in Gaza as hard proof of the unique evils of Zionism, it is always damaging for Israel when Palestinians die, even when the IDF does its utmost to avoid the loss of innocent life. The staggering double standard by which the woke judge the world’s only Jewish nation – we fight wars, it commits war crimes – means Israel is indicted more ferociously than any other state on Earth for that terrible thing that attends all wars: civilian casualties.
Hamas, on the other hand, clearly spies political advantage in Palestinian suffering. It knows every dead Palestinian will be marshalled by the West’s cultural elites as part of their zealous crusade to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish State. It knows the fires of Israel-hate that burn so fiercely in our opinion-forming circles are further stoked by every tragedy in Gaza. It believes there is moral benefit in the ‘martyrdom’ of civilians. And here’s the awful thing: there is. The swirling global culture of Israelophobia acts as an open invitation to Hamas to permit, and even puppeteer, ever greater levels of Palestinian pain, in the knowledge that this will land yet another blow on Israel’s prestige. Let us speak frankly: Hamas wants people to stay in northern Gaza because it wants them to die.
This is why the Battle of Northern Gaza matters. First, because it is proving to be one of the most intense confrontations yet between the Jewish State and the terror army that wishes to destroy it. And second, because it speaks to a truth too often obscured by the bigotries and bullshit of our Israel-obsessed elites. Namely, that this war they falsely depict as a genocide by Jews, as fascism rehabilitated by fascism’s one-time victims, is in reality a fight between a democratic state and a death cult. Between a civilised nation that regrets death and a barbarous outfit that relishes in it. Between a country that just wants to exist and terrorists dreaming of that ultimate state of non-existence: ‘martyrdom’.
Consider Hamas’s flagrant lie that it is discouraging people from leaving northern Gaza because it is ‘too risky’ elsewhere. You wouldn’t know it from the emotionalist coverage of the mainstream media, which depicts the clash in the north as a deranged one-sided assault by Israel, but Hamas militants are fighting furiously. There are around 5,000 of them in the north, many concentrated in the Jabalia camp Israel has been targeting. They have been shooting guns, firing anti-tank missiles and using high explosives to target IDF soldiers. Hamas is not telling people to stay in the north to avoid the risk of death elsewhere – it is telling them to stay to subject them to the risk of death. To the gross, inescapable dangers of life on a patch of land where a terrorist army fires deadly weapons in heavily populated areas.
Incapable of beating Israel on the physical battlefield of Gaza, Hamas seeks to wound it in the global battlefield of ideas, of images, of viral Palestinian suffering that the self-styled virtuous of the West lap up, retweet and weaponise against that state they hate above all others. Hamas is open about the moral boon it believes it can get from Palestinian death. Yahya Sinwar, its military leader in Gaza, has described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’. He believes, in CNN’s words, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Western influencers’ frantic, giddy sharing of Palestinian pain to try to dent Israeli prestige directly inspires Hamas’s grotesquely cavalier attitude towards Palestinian life.
As I argue in my new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, ‘Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue’. It is your ‘commodification of Palestinian pain’ that incites Hamas to offer up yet more of it – such as by beating people with sticks to make them stay in a warzone where they might very well die. The gravest threat to Gaza right now is the death cult that rules it – and the Western apologists for that death cult. Free Palestine? Yes. Please. From the death-mongering of Hamas and the lethal pity of faraway elites who have no idea of the harm they are doing.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Reuters has likewise clocked these disturbing accounts from the ground. ‘The Israeli military [is] calling on Palestinians to evacuate south’, it reports, while Hamas is ‘telling them not to leave because it [is] too risky’. The IDF has gone to great lengths to convince civilians to flee, posting messages online in Arabic clearly stipulating that even ‘shelters’ in certain parts of the north would shortly become ‘dangerous combat zone[s]’. It has distributed maps with a ‘large yellow arrow’ showing civilians where to go. Hamas, meanwhile, has all but forbidden an exodus. There are even reports that it is using physical force to make people stay. One Gazan has claimed that their Islamist rulers are ‘beating them with sticks’ if they try to access the IDF’s mapped-out ‘humanitarian corridor’.
How do we make sense of this? According to the intellectuals and activists of the Western world, Israel is a demented genocidal state, hell-bent on slaughtering Palestinians and especially keen on killing children (blood libel, much?). Hamas, meanwhile, is a ‘resistance’ movement, if an iffy one, whose strikes against Israel are an understandable stab at protecting Gazans from the violent bloodlust of psycho Zionists. And yet here we have the ‘genocidaires’ pleading with Gazans to move out of harm’s way, and ‘the resistance’ ordering them to stay in it. Providing civilians with maps to safety? Israel is surely the most rubbish genocidal entity in history.
Few developments in the year-long war between the Islamist extremists of Hamas and the army of the Jewish State have shattered the lies and lunacy of our Israelophobic elites as much as this one. Maybe that’s why the battle of information in northern Gaza, the clash between Israel’s pleas to leave and Hamas’s commandment to stay, has received relatively little coverage. Because it utterly upends the activist class’s feverish, fact-lite depiction of Israel as a nation in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’. The truth in Gaza right now is that the IDF is trying to prevent Palestinian death, while Hamas is taking steps to make it inevitable. This isn’t an Israeli genocide – it’s more like a murder-suicide, inflicted on the wretched of Gaza by an Islamist tyranny so drunk on anti-Semitic hatred that it has come to prize hurting Israel more highly than saving Palestinians.
There is a question we must ask, ugly and unsettling though it is: who benefits from Palestinian death? It is my belief that Israel does not. On the contrary, given that the influential of the West hold up every civilian death in Gaza as hard proof of the unique evils of Zionism, it is always damaging for Israel when Palestinians die, even when the IDF does its utmost to avoid the loss of innocent life. The staggering double standard by which the woke judge the world’s only Jewish nation – we fight wars, it commits war crimes – means Israel is indicted more ferociously than any other state on Earth for that terrible thing that attends all wars: civilian casualties.
Hamas, on the other hand, clearly spies political advantage in Palestinian suffering. It knows every dead Palestinian will be marshalled by the West’s cultural elites as part of their zealous crusade to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish State. It knows the fires of Israel-hate that burn so fiercely in our opinion-forming circles are further stoked by every tragedy in Gaza. It believes there is moral benefit in the ‘martyrdom’ of civilians. And here’s the awful thing: there is. The swirling global culture of Israelophobia acts as an open invitation to Hamas to permit, and even puppeteer, ever greater levels of Palestinian pain, in the knowledge that this will land yet another blow on Israel’s prestige. Let us speak frankly: Hamas wants people to stay in northern Gaza because it wants them to die.
This is why the Battle of Northern Gaza matters. First, because it is proving to be one of the most intense confrontations yet between the Jewish State and the terror army that wishes to destroy it. And second, because it speaks to a truth too often obscured by the bigotries and bullshit of our Israel-obsessed elites. Namely, that this war they falsely depict as a genocide by Jews, as fascism rehabilitated by fascism’s one-time victims, is in reality a fight between a democratic state and a death cult. Between a civilised nation that regrets death and a barbarous outfit that relishes in it. Between a country that just wants to exist and terrorists dreaming of that ultimate state of non-existence: ‘martyrdom’.
Consider Hamas’s flagrant lie that it is discouraging people from leaving northern Gaza because it is ‘too risky’ elsewhere. You wouldn’t know it from the emotionalist coverage of the mainstream media, which depicts the clash in the north as a deranged one-sided assault by Israel, but Hamas militants are fighting furiously. There are around 5,000 of them in the north, many concentrated in the Jabalia camp Israel has been targeting. They have been shooting guns, firing anti-tank missiles and using high explosives to target IDF soldiers. Hamas is not telling people to stay in the north to avoid the risk of death elsewhere – it is telling them to stay to subject them to the risk of death. To the gross, inescapable dangers of life on a patch of land where a terrorist army fires deadly weapons in heavily populated areas.
Incapable of beating Israel on the physical battlefield of Gaza, Hamas seeks to wound it in the global battlefield of ideas, of images, of viral Palestinian suffering that the self-styled virtuous of the West lap up, retweet and weaponise against that state they hate above all others. Hamas is open about the moral boon it believes it can get from Palestinian death. Yahya Sinwar, its military leader in Gaza, has described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’. He believes, in CNN’s words, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Western influencers’ frantic, giddy sharing of Palestinian pain to try to dent Israeli prestige directly inspires Hamas’s grotesquely cavalier attitude towards Palestinian life.
As I argue in my new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, ‘Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue’. It is your ‘commodification of Palestinian pain’ that incites Hamas to offer up yet more of it – such as by beating people with sticks to make them stay in a warzone where they might very well die. The gravest threat to Gaza right now is the death cult that rules it – and the Western apologists for that death cult. Free Palestine? Yes. Please. From the death-mongering of Hamas and the lethal pity of faraway elites who have no idea of the harm they are doing.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
"Incapable of beating Israel on the physical battlefield of Gaza, Hamas seeks to wound it in the global battlefield of ideas, of images, of viral Palestinian suffering that the self-styled virtuous of the West lap up, retweet and weaponise against that state they hate above all others."
In other words, when the world can see for itself the horrific reality of what Israel is doing, it naturally leads to what Brendan calls "anti-semitism."
Look, when will Jews and Brendan O'Neil understand and admit that "anti-semitism" is derived from the dealings of non-Jews with Jews, and not an irrational reaction to the mere fact of Jewish genetics?
In other words, it's them, not us, that is the root cause.
It is the typical behaviour of Jews and their attitude towards gentiles that principally causes anti-semitism, which is why antisemitism follows them around no matter the time of the place.
But, because of the victim narrative that Jews rely on so heavily, any admission of their own role in negative attitudes towards them would diminish and undermine their self-assigned victimhood.
It's plain to see, that the actions of the Hamas on the 7th of October was designed to unleash massive retaliation from Israel, ensuring many civilian deaths, as planned.
Martyrdom is important to this movement, death is seen as necessary and glorious, as long as it's someone else's.
Think of it as a mass suicide bombing.
Hammas, Hesbollah, ISIL along with all the other Muslim terror organizations have only ever been interested in ideology and outcomes. They have never had respect for human life.
So let me get this straight. According to I.C.Clairly the oppression directed at Israel and the Jews in general is all their own fault because they have an attitude problem towards non-Jews, or "gentiles" as s/he calls them. Ï notice s/he's very careful to avoid specifying which particular non-Jews are the problem, but history gives us a clue. Could it have something to do with the Koranic instruction to the faithful to subjugate all Jews to the will of Allah on pain of death. Or something to do with Iran's publicly announced intention to wipe Israel off the map in furtherance of that instruction. Or both. So is it surprising that Israel has an attitude problem towards this particular bunch of non-Jews who after all only threaten its very existence. If you are looking for a root cause for the conflict, that seems to be the obvious choice. But it's hardly new. It seems Islam has been threatening Jews since the seventh century and the war in Gaza is just the most recent iteration of that threat. HAMAS' charter, supported by their actions, shows they are prepared to fight to the last Gazan to confirm their faith. O'Neill sets this out quite succinctly. So, every death in Gaza can be traced directly to the actions of HAMAS and its sponsors, the mad mullahs in Iran. This war could be stopped tomorrow by HAMAS returning the hostages and acknowledging Israel's right to exist like every other sovereign nation on earth. In the absence of that commitment, Israel has no other option than to destroy HAMAS, because, like cancer, HAMAS will be back if not excised entirely. And never forget, the Jews have nowhere else to go, so they have nothing to lose by fighting, and everything to lose by making peace on Islam's terms.
Why blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state of Israel.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs.
"So let me get this straight. According to I.C.Clairly the oppression directed at Israel and the Jews in general is all their own fault because they have an attitude problem towards non-Jews, or "gentiles" as s/he calls them."
Yes. That is precisely what I'm saying. If Jews are "oppressed" (as you describe it), no matter where they are in space or when in time, and regardless of who they live amongst, I think the best explanation is that Jews are the constant and that their behaviour leads to negative attitudes. This is a reasonable proposition.
What's the alternative? That the whole of non-Jewish humanity has an in-built and irrational disposition to dislike Jews just because they are Jews, and all through no fault of the Jewish people? Sorry, but that is unreasonable and actually fanciful.
"And never forget, the Jews have nowhere else to go, so they have nothing to lose by fighting, and everything to lose by making peace on Islam's terms."
What are you talking about? Jews live all throughout the world, particularly the Western world. What did they do for a few thousand years before 1948 when they didn't have a Jewish ethnostate?
So which is it? Are Jews part of the "Judeo-Christian" West as they claim, or are they not part of the West and are in fact in so much danger from us Westerners that they require their own state, to the obvious detriment of the Arabs whole had to be displaced to make way for the Jewish ethnostate?
I,C, Clairly adds nothing new to the discussion except to confirm his/her stunning lack of understanding about the history of the Jewish diaspora, how it came about, and how the Jewish people were treated by virtually every host society they were obliged to find refuge with. Israel is a creation of international law designed by the United Nations to correct the thousand year persecution of the Jews, predominantly by the Christians and the Muslims. If I.C.Clairly finds the concept of a Jewish ethnostate distasteful, he should reflect on the toxic Islamic ethnostates whose brutal control of their own people blights the region. The States that have driven out their ancient Jewish communities and stand in stark contrast to Israel, a fully democratic society that gives its Arab residents full citizenship rights. Those Arabs have prospered from their elevation from being peasants in the Ottoman Empire to prosperous citizens of a sophisticated first world state. Millions of other Ottoman Arabs haven't been so lucky, including those who left voluntarily in 1949 and then found themselves on the wrong side of the Armistice line when the conflict was over. Such are the fortunes of war, particularly for the losers..
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