The scenes were chilling. Surrounded by well-fed and heavily armed Hamas gunmen, Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami cut frail, gaunt figures. Their 491 days in the captivity of that neo-fascist militia had clearly been hellish. On its Instagram page, Israel posted images of the men before and after their kidnapping. Three fit, tanned men had become haggard creatures. They’d clearly been deprived of both food and sunlight – the stuff of life – while chained in Hamas’s dank tunnels. The glee of their loved ones gave way to dread. ‘He [looks] like a skeleton’, said Ben Ami’s mother.
Hamas’s inhumanity continued even during the men’s release. There was a profoundly unsettling moment when Eli Sharabi, flanked by Hamas brutes, said into a mic that he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters. As Hamas knew very well, his wife and daughters are dead. They were murdered in the 7 October pogrom. They were shot to death by Hamas militants who invaded their home crying, ‘Die Israel!’. Their bodies were found ‘cuddled together’. For Hamas militants to watch as a man they starved expressed his hope of being reunited with his family that they butchered is a testament to their depthless moral depravity.
It is unimaginable cruelty. You would need to wade back decades to find equal acts of wanton savagery against a Jewish family. Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, was a British citizen. She was from Wales. Their daughters, aged just 13 and 16, will have been Welsh-Israeli. The silence of Britain’s ‘progressives’ on Hamas’s slaughter of these British women for nothing more than the fact that they were Jews in Israel is horrifying. Hamas’s calculated cruelty towards Eli Sharabi finds its echo in the pitiless indifference of Lianne Sharabi’s fellow Britons towards the barbarism inflicted on her and her girls on 7 October.
Or Levy, 34, also didn’t know his wife was dead: she was slain alongside 363 others at the Nova music festival. These men were robbed of their liberty for 16 months and then freed into unthinkable grief. Yet the virtuous of the West look the other way. Nothing from our self-styled anti-fascists on these fascistic horrors. A bourgeois left that says ‘Black Lives Matter’ has yet to tell us whether the lives of these Jewish men and their families matter, too. That the West’s liberal conscience seems unmoved by images of emaciated Jews being freed from the captivity of armed anti-Semities is alarming. It seems even crimes that echo the darkest moments of the 20th century are not enough to cut through the frivolity and narcissism of our times.
There was actually something worse than moral indifference following the release of these cadaverous men – there was moral deflection. Anti-Israel activists clogged up social media with images of released Palestinian prisoners. None looked anywhere near as sickly as the three Israelis, yet the message was as clear as it was sinister: ‘Never mind those Jews, look at these Palestinians.’ Like 21st-century Lord Haw-Haws, they endeavour to distract the world’s attention from the crimes of a fascistic army.
The BBC couldn’t resist implying a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Following the release of the three Israelis, it said there are ‘concerns about the condition of hostages on both sides’. Hostages? It is a scandal that our public broadcaster is referring to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, some of whom are guilty of acts of extreme violence, as ‘hostages’. It later walked back its comments, issuing an on-air correction. CNN, too, seemed incapable of focussing on the shocking condition of the three Israelis. Released Palestinians have also looked ‘emaciated’ and ‘weak’, it rushed to say. You can almost hear the thought process: ‘People are sympathising too much with Israel – quick, dig out an image of Palestinian pain.’
It’s like our opinion-forming classes have an instinctual aversion to empathy for Israelis. It makes them nervous. It threatens to unravel their morally infantile narrative about Israel being the most beastly of states and the Palestinians being the most oppressed of peoples. So they fiercely police public compassion, ensuring that even the dystopic image of Jews starved by sworn Jew-haters is countered by a reminder that Palestinians have a hard time, too. There is a ‘strange reluctance to see Jews as victims’, in the words of Hadley Freeman. Jews, alone among minority groups, are ruthlessly deprived of victim status, in this case to sustain the cultural elites’ self-flattering narrative about problematic Israel and benighted Palestine.
The sick reality is that there are people out there who will have seen those three stricken Jews not as brutalised human beings deserving of our solidarity, but as an unwelcome intrusion into the childish morality tale about Israel-Palestine. As a vexing reminder that things are more complicated than we are told. As stark, gaunt proof of the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas, which were the source of this war that our cultural elites shamelessly blame on Israel. This is how intense Israelophobia has become in influential circles – they are now willing to sacrifice Jews to ideology, to discourage solidarity with wronged, ravaged Israelis in order that their moral narrative might be protected against the impertinence of nuance. In the past, people looked the other way when Jews were dehumanised because they wanted to save their skins – now they do it to save their fake virtue.
We live in an era of the most rank moral inversion. No one doubts that Palestinians in Gaza have suffered enormously as a result of the war started by Hamas. This will include malnutrition, a scourge that has attended every war in history. But time and again, Israel is accused of the very crimes committed against it by Hamas. It is called fascistic, when in truth it was attacked by a neo-fascist army. It is called genocidal, yet it’s Hamas that was founded with the genocidal intention of destroying the world’s only Jewish nation. It is accused of intentionally starving Palestinians by a terror group that intentionally starved Jews. Tell us what you accuse the Jewish State of, and we’ll tell you what you are guilty of.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Hamas’s inhumanity continued even during the men’s release. There was a profoundly unsettling moment when Eli Sharabi, flanked by Hamas brutes, said into a mic that he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters. As Hamas knew very well, his wife and daughters are dead. They were murdered in the 7 October pogrom. They were shot to death by Hamas militants who invaded their home crying, ‘Die Israel!’. Their bodies were found ‘cuddled together’. For Hamas militants to watch as a man they starved expressed his hope of being reunited with his family that they butchered is a testament to their depthless moral depravity.
It is unimaginable cruelty. You would need to wade back decades to find equal acts of wanton savagery against a Jewish family. Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, was a British citizen. She was from Wales. Their daughters, aged just 13 and 16, will have been Welsh-Israeli. The silence of Britain’s ‘progressives’ on Hamas’s slaughter of these British women for nothing more than the fact that they were Jews in Israel is horrifying. Hamas’s calculated cruelty towards Eli Sharabi finds its echo in the pitiless indifference of Lianne Sharabi’s fellow Britons towards the barbarism inflicted on her and her girls on 7 October.
Or Levy, 34, also didn’t know his wife was dead: she was slain alongside 363 others at the Nova music festival. These men were robbed of their liberty for 16 months and then freed into unthinkable grief. Yet the virtuous of the West look the other way. Nothing from our self-styled anti-fascists on these fascistic horrors. A bourgeois left that says ‘Black Lives Matter’ has yet to tell us whether the lives of these Jewish men and their families matter, too. That the West’s liberal conscience seems unmoved by images of emaciated Jews being freed from the captivity of armed anti-Semities is alarming. It seems even crimes that echo the darkest moments of the 20th century are not enough to cut through the frivolity and narcissism of our times.
There was actually something worse than moral indifference following the release of these cadaverous men – there was moral deflection. Anti-Israel activists clogged up social media with images of released Palestinian prisoners. None looked anywhere near as sickly as the three Israelis, yet the message was as clear as it was sinister: ‘Never mind those Jews, look at these Palestinians.’ Like 21st-century Lord Haw-Haws, they endeavour to distract the world’s attention from the crimes of a fascistic army.
The BBC couldn’t resist implying a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Following the release of the three Israelis, it said there are ‘concerns about the condition of hostages on both sides’. Hostages? It is a scandal that our public broadcaster is referring to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, some of whom are guilty of acts of extreme violence, as ‘hostages’. It later walked back its comments, issuing an on-air correction. CNN, too, seemed incapable of focussing on the shocking condition of the three Israelis. Released Palestinians have also looked ‘emaciated’ and ‘weak’, it rushed to say. You can almost hear the thought process: ‘People are sympathising too much with Israel – quick, dig out an image of Palestinian pain.’
It’s like our opinion-forming classes have an instinctual aversion to empathy for Israelis. It makes them nervous. It threatens to unravel their morally infantile narrative about Israel being the most beastly of states and the Palestinians being the most oppressed of peoples. So they fiercely police public compassion, ensuring that even the dystopic image of Jews starved by sworn Jew-haters is countered by a reminder that Palestinians have a hard time, too. There is a ‘strange reluctance to see Jews as victims’, in the words of Hadley Freeman. Jews, alone among minority groups, are ruthlessly deprived of victim status, in this case to sustain the cultural elites’ self-flattering narrative about problematic Israel and benighted Palestine.
The sick reality is that there are people out there who will have seen those three stricken Jews not as brutalised human beings deserving of our solidarity, but as an unwelcome intrusion into the childish morality tale about Israel-Palestine. As a vexing reminder that things are more complicated than we are told. As stark, gaunt proof of the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas, which were the source of this war that our cultural elites shamelessly blame on Israel. This is how intense Israelophobia has become in influential circles – they are now willing to sacrifice Jews to ideology, to discourage solidarity with wronged, ravaged Israelis in order that their moral narrative might be protected against the impertinence of nuance. In the past, people looked the other way when Jews were dehumanised because they wanted to save their skins – now they do it to save their fake virtue.
We live in an era of the most rank moral inversion. No one doubts that Palestinians in Gaza have suffered enormously as a result of the war started by Hamas. This will include malnutrition, a scourge that has attended every war in history. But time and again, Israel is accused of the very crimes committed against it by Hamas. It is called fascistic, when in truth it was attacked by a neo-fascist army. It is called genocidal, yet it’s Hamas that was founded with the genocidal intention of destroying the world’s only Jewish nation. It is accused of intentionally starving Palestinians by a terror group that intentionally starved Jews. Tell us what you accuse the Jewish State of, and we’ll tell you what you are guilty of.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
"Israelophobia"? This from a man who spends much time in his columns correctly pointing out that the Muslim equivalent "Islamophobia" is just a word used to prevent and discourage legitimate criticism of Muslim behavior. Now Brendan has coined an equivalent phrase as a non-argument against Jewish behavior, because it's becoming very difficult to rationally defend what Israel have been up to since 2023.
So Brendan thinks we should be outraged about a relatively small number of Jewish hostages? So we should. But we should also be far more outraged by Israel's recent brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, not to mention the (at least) preceding 20 years of treating Gazans like caged animals and controlling nearly every aspect of life in Gaza.
Implicit in Israel's and Israel's cheerleaders' argument is not that ethnic cleansing, ill-treatment and mass killing are bad in themselves (after all, that is precisely what they are doing and supporting), but rather, the very particular moral standard that these things are bad when, and only when, they are done to Jews.
It's not even a double-standard really, it is more a result of an unspoken but deeply-held belief, common in the Jewish community and easily discerned by anyone paying attention, that the lives of Jews are infinitely more valuable than gentiles.
I have just read Melanie Philip' s 'What Israel is really up Against' to get a perspective completely missing in MSM and the similar views of Eschelon.
In short , Palestinian society is entirely constructed around a poisonous and murderous hatred of Jews and the desire to remove them from the face of the earth. Another expression of the Holocaust .
The entire Gaza strip was turned into a launching pad for genocide -underground infrastructure composed of 100s of miles of tunnels to create a parallel world dedicated entirely to the mass murder of Jews.
It has been discovered that virtually every house in Gaza had a terrorist tunnel beneath it. Virtually every house had a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Practically every hospital , school and clinic was used as a weapon store or terrorist hub.
The proposal to displace the people of Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with ethnic cleansing . It is because they are the enemy population trying to destroy another country.
Many Gazan's have been desperate to live elsewhere but have been effectively imprisoned by an Arab world determined to keep them there as far as possible to enrage the opinion against Jews and they are also known as trouble personified.
The Palestinian cause has destroyed the moral compass of the west. It needs to be rescued out of the moral abyss into which it has fallen.
Evidence other than your penchant for guzzling Israel koolaid. Also known as propaganda.What unhinged unsubstantiated drivel!!
Melanie Philips is a semi-prominent Jewish zealot and a Zionist. Like so many others with these characteristics, her moral standard is if it's good for Jews, it's good, if it's bad for Jews, its bad. This is why they can spout all kinds of BS telling us all how moral the Jews are and anyone who gets in their way is immoral. Objective and universal morality doesn't enter into the equation.
Yes, Israel's neighbours tend to be hostile to them (except the one's the US has bribed or regime-changed), but they are hostile precisely because of the Jewish supremacist attitude exemplified by someone like Melanie Philips. They'll always tell you how much they are hated, but they'll never consider or concede why that is.
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