Melanie Phillips: The worldwide frenzy against Israel

An obsession with the Jewish state has replaced rationality by lethal propaganda.

Over the past few days, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling has been ratcheted up into an absolute frenzy. Every few hours seems to bring a fresh outrage.

In London, a prominent Jewish broadcaster was chased down the street by a man screaming “fascist Zionist scum”. A woman dining at a Jewish restaurant in the city was asked if she was a Jew and then had food thrown over her.

On the Greek island of Rhodes, a mob armed with knives attacked a group of Jewish teenagers. About 50 French Jewish children, returning from a summer camp in Spain, were thrown off a flight at Valencia airport after the children sang Hebrew songs, and their tour leader was arrested and thrown to the ground.

The BBC’s obsession with demonising and delegitimising Israel has reached pathological proportions. This week, it gave pride of place on its flagship radio show Today to ever-more twisted accusations and blood libels casting Israel as an evil and murderous state, including the claim by a British surgeon working in Gaza that the Israel Defence Forces were playing a game in shooting Gazan boys in the food queues by targeting a different part of their body every day.

The broadcasting behemoth could scarcely contain its excitement as reporters and interviewees joined in chorusing that “a reckoning was coming” with the imminent end of the war in Gaza, after which Israel’s “war crimes” would be revealed, and that the case for declaring a Palestine state was therefore now overwhelming.

This propaganda onslaught consists of three major libels: that the IDF is deliberately killing Gazans queueing for food, that Israel is starving Gazans to death, and that “settler violence” against Arabs is increasing in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

All three claims seek to turn Israel from being the target and victim of genocidal attack into a murderous criminal entity that doesn’t deserve to survive. It’s a propaganda onslaught mounted by Hamas acting in concert with its allies in the United Nations and the entire global humanitarian establishment, pumped out through a media megaphone and parroted by politicians who are either malevolent or clueless.

A moment’s thought suggests that to accuse the IDF of deliberately killing Gazans queuing for food is absurd. Since the Israelis helped set up and are policing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in order to deliver food safely to these civilians, why should the IDF want to kill them?

Where they have killed some Gazans near the aid points, this has clearly been an unintended result of the soldiers firing into the air to warn off these possibly Hamas-infiltrated crowds if they look like they’re about to rush the Israeli troops.

It is Hamas that has been deliberately killing hundreds of Gazans to prevent them from gaining food from the American-Israeli-run aid points, because it’s been through stealing this aid for its own use that Hamas has remained in power.

In order to survive, it needs to have the aid distributed instead by its UN ally. That’s why, as part of ceasefire negotiations, Hamas is insisting that aid must be distributed by the world body and the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

This week, the media published distressing pictures of skeletal children as evidence of starvation in Gaza. But the adults in these pictures were all conspicuously well-fed. Is it likely that it’s only Gaza’s children who are being starved while the adults are not?

The Israelis say that these pictures, which have been regularly trotted out over the years with the false claim that they represent Israeli brutality, are actually of children suffering from wasting diseases or inherited medical conditions.

There may be increasing hunger in Gaza, but to blame Israel for this is grotesque. The World Health Organisation’s director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has accused the Israelis of an aid blockade. This is totally untrue.

The IDF’s aid division, COGAT, says that recently nearly 4,500 trucks entered the Strip with supplies, including flour for bakeries and 2,500 tons of baby food and high-calorie special food for children.

The key point, however, is that 950 trucks have been stuck inside Gaza because the United Nations and its agencies are refusing to distribute the food and other aid they are carrying. The GHF has implored the global agency to help distribute these supplies around the Strip, but the UN has refused.

That’s because it’s working hand-in-glove with Hamas, which is determined to cause deaths from starvation as a weapon of war just as it’s used Gaza’s civilians as human shields and cannon fodder.

This hideous strategy rests on the infernal calculation that the more Gazans who die, the more the West will blame Israel. So the West’s baseless virtue-signalling against Israeli “starvation” will, in fact, become the Gazans’ death warrant.

Now the Israel delegitimisation machine has created another potent weapon in its arsenal: “settler violence”. This demonises Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria with the charge that they attack and terrorise their Arab neighbours.

As ever, the opposite is mostly the case. True, a minority of “hilltop” Jewish youth have acted in revenge and committed unprovoked attacks against local Arabs — and they should be dealt with. But the vast majority of the violence in these territories is by local Arabs against Jewish residents, who suffer from such murderous attacks almost every day.

According to a report by the NGO Regavim, 90 per cent of incidents that the UN has classified as “settler violence” were nothing of the kind. These cases included clashes between Arabs and the IDF; where Jews acted in self-defence against Arab attacks; or even peaceful activities by these Jews, such as supervised visits to Temple Mount in Jerusalem and to historic sites by hikers and tourists.

This week, it was revealed that the claim that “settlers” had torched the Byzantine church of St. George in Taybeh, near Ramallah, was a lie. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who had toured the church and said “desecrating a church, mosque or synagogue is a crime against humanity and God,” walked that back and acknowledged that the church was undamaged—as was always entirely obvious from its intact stone walls. Yet this false claim, made by priests and activists, had ricocheted around the world.

Instead of setting the record straight to help Israel defeat these Islamist enemies of humanity and to protect diaspora Jews from the hatred incited by this media onslaught, political leaders in Britain and Europe have been pouring more fuel onto the flames.

A statement by Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the foreign ministers of 27 other countries accused Israel of “the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food,” denying “essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population” and soaring rates of “settler violence”.

How can we explain this astounding descent from rationality into the sewers of lethal propaganda? How can it be that in Britain, factual evidence about the Gaza war is met with incredulity, “Zionist” has become a term of abuse, and antisemitism is now regarded as little more than a device for Jews to sanitise the “crimes” of Israel?

There are many reasons, including ideology, ignorance and wishful thinking. There is also the widespread belief that the UN and humanitarian-rights establishment, which have the status of a secular religion, act with perfect integrity and are incapable of lying or doing evil.

But there are far darker impulses at work — the deep desire to prove that the Jews are bad, that they have a unique and destructive power over world events, that they can never be victims.

That’s why the acute threats to the world posed by Russia, China or Iran, the terrible atrocities against the Druze in Syria or the Christians in Africa, the famine and starvation in Sudan — all are dwarfed in the West by its overwhelming, unhinged, vicious obsession with tiny Israel, the focus of a civilisational disorder that is dragging down not the Jewish state but the West itself.

Jewish News Syndicate

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE.