Brendan O'Neill, How the West’s Israelophobia has made life hell for Palestinians

The human catastrophe in Gaza is a product of the delirious moralism of our anti-Israel elites.

A question haunts me: why are there still women and children in Gaza? This is a strip of land 25 miles long and seven miles wide. It’s a quarter the size of London. And for nearly two years it has been engulfed by war. An army of anti-Semites is fighting one of the dirtiest wars humanity has ever witnessed, hiding in civilian infrastructure to plot its murder of Jews. Israel is dropping bombs. There are gunfights. And there are all the horrors that attend war: death, hunger, sickness. And yet there they are, the women and children, fleeing the fighting and scrabbling for food alongside men.

Have we got so used to the sight of women and children in this hottest of warzones that we have become blind to what a grotesque and preposterous situation this is? Women and children leave warzones. That’s the one nod to civilisation man makes even in the hell of war. Almost eight million souls have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, most of them women and children. Around seven million Syrians fled fighting over the past decade, some seeking refuge in safer parts of Syria, others in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. They were mostly women and children. And yet in that bloody limbo of Gaza, women and children stay.

The truth – the jarring truth – is that they are there because the moral institutions of the West have all but forbidden their fleeing. This is the first war of my lifetime where not only have women and children not left the warzone but their leaving has been actively discouraged by the West’s opinion-setters. The instruction comes from the top. We would normally support the ‘universal right to seek asylum’ as a ‘matter of principle’, said the UN High Commission for Refugees last year. ‘But in this case, there is also… the international legal obligation of an occupying power not to force the civilian population to flee.’ Any ‘exodus of Palestinians’ from Gaza would only create another ‘intractable problem’, the UN said.

It doubled down. A mass flow of Gazans to neighbouring nations would create an ‘atrocious dilemma’ for Palestinians, said the UN’s refugee chief. So ‘we must fervently do everything [we can]’ to avoid such an ‘outflow’. Have you ever read anything like this? In most wars, humankind ‘fervently’ does everything it can to facilitate the fleeing of the innocent. We recognise that flows of refugees are tragic but necessary, displacement being infinitely preferable to death. In this war, uniquely, the opposite calculation has been made: that death, or the risk of it, is less ‘atrocious’ for Gazans than displacement.

The UN’s moral stricture against an ‘exodus of Palestinians’ – or what is referred to in every other war as the ‘provision of refuge’ – has become a twisted article of faith among governments, NGOs and the opinion-making classes. When Israeli officials propose the temporary displacement of civilians from Gaza as the war rages, they are instantly condemned for ‘genocidal’ thinking, for lusting after ‘ethnic cleansing’. Why is it ‘seeking refuge’ when Ukrainians are forced to flee their homeland by Russia, but ‘ethnic cleansing’ if Gazans were to flee as a consequence of this infernal war Hamas started?

Fatally, Egypt has embraced the West’s opposition to ‘outflows’ of Gazans. It says it refuses to open its border to Gaza’s women and children because it does not want to facilitate ‘ethnic cleansing’. It borrows from the faux-virtuous language of the Israelophobes of the Western establishment to justify its barbarous decision to close its country to Palestinians. It is doublespeak of sickening proportions for Egypt to pose as a great moral opponent of ‘ethnic cleansing’ when in truth it is opposing asylum for women and children and in turn condemning them to hunger, injury and death.

The grim, inhuman irony is that as a result of the West’s neo-religious opposition to foreign refuge for Gazans, Gaza now really does resemble an ‘open-air prison’. No one can leave, except the wealthy who can afford the thousands of dollars it costs to cross the Egyptian border. What motors this delirious, even murderous hostility to ‘outflows’ of Gazans? It’s simple: hatred for Israel. It is the Western elites’ bigoted view of Israel as a uniquely devious nation that makes them think Gazans should stay put – because they do not trust Israel to let them back post-war. Their feverish conviction that the Jewish State is a lying state underpins their opposition to Palestinian asylum in Egypt or anywhere else.

Let’s put it plainly: Palestinians are dying as a consequence of the anti-Israel bigotry of Western institutions. Courtesy of this borderline racist suspicion of the Jewish nation, Palestinians are being brutally deprived of the tragic but essential right to asylum that is enjoyed by all other people swept up in war. Women and children are locked into the hell of Gaza because the international community’s wariness of Israel carries more moral weight than their concern for Palestinians. They hate the Jewish State more than they cherish Palestinian life.

Time and again, the West’s Israelophobia has made life more hellish for Gazans. Consider the current food crisis. The images coming out of Gaza are grim. But the idea that Israel is to blame is simply unsustainable. A key problem has been the refusal of the UN to work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the Israeli-US initiative to feed Gazans. Last week, Israel invited armies of foreign journalists to see 800 truckloads of humanitarian aid that the UN is stubbornly refusing to distribute because it says the GHF is a ‘dangerous’ organisation. Aid has ‘piled [up] near the borders’ as a result of the UN’s wilful aversion to associating with the GHF, said the GHF’s interim director.

What’s more important to the UN – feeding Palestinians or shunning Israel? Getting food and medicine into Gazans’ hands or jealously restoring the monopoly on aid it once enjoyed in Gaza? Judging by its shameful behaviour these past two weeks, it’s the latter. The UN’s bigoted urge to sideline ‘untrustworthy’ Israel and repair its own tattered power over Palestine motivates it more than the human imperative of keeping Gazans alive.

Then there’s Hamas’s truly sick role. Hamas has killed Gazans who work for the GHF. It has fired rockets at GHF facilities. Why? Because it is experiencing a calamitous financial crisis and is desperate to return to the old system where it creamed profits off the UN-led aid system. Last week, in one of the vanishingly few informative pieces about the Gaza crisis, the Washington Post reported that Hamas’s coffers are almost entirely depleted, meaning it can ‘no longer adequately pay the salaries of its fighters’. The GHF, by monopolising the distribution of aid, has been a key cause of Hamas’s ‘revenue tumble’. So Hamas furiously targets the GHF, even where that means it becomes more difficult for the GHF to distribute food.

There’s an even more sinister motive to Hamas’s murderous interruption of food distribution in Gaza. It is ‘counting on the humanitarian crisis to bring the war to an end’, says the Washington Post. That is, it believes it can benefit from Gaza’s agony, because it knows the Western media will pin all the blame on Israel, thus heaping more global pressure on the Jewish State to down arms and back off. The claim that Israel is intentionally starving Gazans is a grotesque inversion of reality. In truth, Israel has handed out millions of meals while Hamas has used menaces and violence to try to thwart this mass feeding in the hope that the sight of emaciated Gazans will lead once more to Israel being damned by the West as ‘genocidal’.

And that’s exactly what has happened. The Israelophobes of the Western establishment have dutifully played their part in Hamas’s despicable morality play and pointed a collective finger of judgement at the Jewish nation. They have obediently marshalled the hungry of Gaza to the end of further criminalising Israel. They are recklessly incentivising Hamas’s barbarism. Hamas now knows that dystopic images of hunger work to its apocalyptic advantage. In using the nightmarish vision of Gazan hunger to further harry the Jewish State, the West’s media elites witlessly goad Hamas to further thwart Israel’s distribution of food. Once more, Israelophobia intensifies Palestinian suffering.

It is so clear now: the West’s anti-Israel derangement is bad not only for Israelis but for Palestinians, too. It has trapped women and children in Gaza. It has rewarded the murderous machinations of Hamas. It has incentivised the creation of yet more hunger to serve as a propagandistic weapon in the anti-Semitic war against Israel. Enough is enough. Those of us who support Israel’s right to exist and cherish Palestinian life should agitate for the opening of Gaza’s border with Egypt, for the UN to do that bare minimum of feeding people in Gaza, and for the media to tell the truth for a change.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.