Here he comes, pandering Andy Burnham. The King of the North throwing out the red meat of Israelophobia to keep certain voters sweet. The incoming PM yapping piously about Israel’s possible ‘war crimes’ in a bid to win back restive Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes who’ve abandoned Labour for the crackpot Greens. That’s what I saw in Burnham’s staggeringly pompous digital sermon on Gaza – not an act of geopolitical conviction but a masterclass in demographic toadying.
It was in a video chat with the Guardian – where else? – that Burnham promised to get tough on Israel when he succeeds Keir Starmer as PM this month. In classic therapy-speak, he acknowledged that ‘Labour’s initial response to the treatment of Gaza caused huge hurt’. Hurt to who? Those mobs who swarmed our streets after 7 October hollering for further holy war against the Jewish State? Cry me a river. ‘We got it wrong and I am sorry for that’, he said in his clinical-feeling mea culpa.
He says he’ll make amends. He will ‘put pressure on the Israeli government’. He will demand ‘accountability’ for the ‘war crimes [that] appear to have been committed’. He will insist that Israel lets in more aid. He will ban all trade with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Gaza is a ‘scar on our collective conscience’, he said. It will be music to the ears of rich liberals whose every waking hour is consumed by thoughts of ‘Evil Israel’, though it’s unlikely to satisfy the mad Islamo-left that dreams of nothing less than the annihilation of the Jewish State.
Burnham’s sermon was riddled with an almost audacious dishonesty. Yes, he condemned Hamas’s ‘monstrous’ attack of 7 October, but it felt like throat-clearing before he chowed down on the true meat of his message: that Israel is an out-of-control state that has slaughtered ‘innocent Palestinians, including children’. This is how the entire moral clerisy, from the BBC to those plummy vicars who love Palestine Action, talk about Gaza. ‘7 October was bad, sure’, they say, ‘but then Israel went criminally insane’.
It is the most insidious myth in the moral armoury of Israelophobia. It completely disappears Hamas from the post-7 October battlefield. The truth is that Hamas didn’t only carry out rape, pillage and murder on 7 October 2023 – its merciless war against the Jews continued long after that. Hamas and its allies fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israel in the months after 7 October. They fought gun battles with IDF troops. They held 250 hostages in grim, dank tunnels. They forced emaciated Jews to dig their own graves. They summarily executed Jewish captives. They paraded the coffins of two Jewish children they murdered in front of a grotesque banner depicting the Jews as the vampiric suckers of human blood.
The bourgeois narrative that 7 October was horrible but the Israeli lunacy that followed it was even worse is one of the sickest lies of omission of our era. It memory-holes Hamas’s fascistic crusade against Israel with the twisted aim of depicting Israel as the true fascist entity. With a bureaucratic mendacity that would make Big Brother blush, these people falsely depict a war between two parties as a genocide by one party. For our next PM to flirt with such sinister truth-scrubbing, by namechecking 7 October but none of Hamas’s other warmongering, feels genuinely troubling.
My question for Burnham is the same one I’ve asked countless keffiyeh people these past three years: what should Israel have done in response to Hamas’s pogrom, and its missiles, and its ritualistic humiliation of half-starved Jews, and its threat to bring about the apocalyptic destruction of the Jewish nation? I know what the bigots of the Islamo-left would say: Nothing. Let yourselves be killed, Jews. It’s not a big deal. Presuming that isn’t Burnham’s position, perhaps he might deign to say what Israel is permitted to do against the army of anti-Semites that invaded its territory and slaughtered its people. Do tell, Andy.
That’s the point here: it’s one thing for time-rich activists in search of a moral mission to misrepresent the Israel-Hamas War so that Israel appears insane and they appear virtuous. But for our next PM to dabble in such thin, lethal moralism? That’s frightening. Where’s his geopolitical nous? Does he care more for retweets from plummy Gazaholics than he does about Britain’s relationship with Israel and the White House? Burnham says he will ensure that ‘no British bombs or bullets’ are used in Gaza. So it will be Britain’s official position to oppose the right of Jewish soldiers to dispense justice against the racist terrorists who carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust? Is that right? If so, we’re in even deeper moral shit than I feared.
Burnham condemned anti-Semitism in the UK. Yet he gave voice to the very Israelophobic misinformation that powers modern-day Jew hatred. The myth that Israel is depriving Gaza of aid, his mention of its killing of children, the suggestion it might be behaving criminally and that this scars the world’s ‘conscience’ – this is the foundation of myth and bigotry upon which feverish ‘anti-Zionism’ is built. Anyone serious about taming the irrational rage of this new species of Jew hate would do everything in their power to neuter the ugly, untrue claim that Israel is a uniquely barbarous nation that the world must condemn. Burnham has done the opposite.
And why? That’s the clearest part for me: he’s done it to try to win back the Islamist bloc and metropolitan luvvies who mistake hating Israel for having a personality. He has sacrificed our historic friendship with the Jewish nation to the low end of vote-farming. He seems to care more about preserving Labour’s post-working class alliance of minority groups and the middle classes than he does about preserving the Jewish State. Appeasing Britain’s regressive elements for fleeting political gain – it is suicidal folly.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
He says he’ll make amends. He will ‘put pressure on the Israeli government’. He will demand ‘accountability’ for the ‘war crimes [that] appear to have been committed’. He will insist that Israel lets in more aid. He will ban all trade with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Gaza is a ‘scar on our collective conscience’, he said. It will be music to the ears of rich liberals whose every waking hour is consumed by thoughts of ‘Evil Israel’, though it’s unlikely to satisfy the mad Islamo-left that dreams of nothing less than the annihilation of the Jewish State.
Burnham’s sermon was riddled with an almost audacious dishonesty. Yes, he condemned Hamas’s ‘monstrous’ attack of 7 October, but it felt like throat-clearing before he chowed down on the true meat of his message: that Israel is an out-of-control state that has slaughtered ‘innocent Palestinians, including children’. This is how the entire moral clerisy, from the BBC to those plummy vicars who love Palestine Action, talk about Gaza. ‘7 October was bad, sure’, they say, ‘but then Israel went criminally insane’.
It is the most insidious myth in the moral armoury of Israelophobia. It completely disappears Hamas from the post-7 October battlefield. The truth is that Hamas didn’t only carry out rape, pillage and murder on 7 October 2023 – its merciless war against the Jews continued long after that. Hamas and its allies fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israel in the months after 7 October. They fought gun battles with IDF troops. They held 250 hostages in grim, dank tunnels. They forced emaciated Jews to dig their own graves. They summarily executed Jewish captives. They paraded the coffins of two Jewish children they murdered in front of a grotesque banner depicting the Jews as the vampiric suckers of human blood.
The bourgeois narrative that 7 October was horrible but the Israeli lunacy that followed it was even worse is one of the sickest lies of omission of our era. It memory-holes Hamas’s fascistic crusade against Israel with the twisted aim of depicting Israel as the true fascist entity. With a bureaucratic mendacity that would make Big Brother blush, these people falsely depict a war between two parties as a genocide by one party. For our next PM to flirt with such sinister truth-scrubbing, by namechecking 7 October but none of Hamas’s other warmongering, feels genuinely troubling.
My question for Burnham is the same one I’ve asked countless keffiyeh people these past three years: what should Israel have done in response to Hamas’s pogrom, and its missiles, and its ritualistic humiliation of half-starved Jews, and its threat to bring about the apocalyptic destruction of the Jewish nation? I know what the bigots of the Islamo-left would say: Nothing. Let yourselves be killed, Jews. It’s not a big deal. Presuming that isn’t Burnham’s position, perhaps he might deign to say what Israel is permitted to do against the army of anti-Semites that invaded its territory and slaughtered its people. Do tell, Andy.
That’s the point here: it’s one thing for time-rich activists in search of a moral mission to misrepresent the Israel-Hamas War so that Israel appears insane and they appear virtuous. But for our next PM to dabble in such thin, lethal moralism? That’s frightening. Where’s his geopolitical nous? Does he care more for retweets from plummy Gazaholics than he does about Britain’s relationship with Israel and the White House? Burnham says he will ensure that ‘no British bombs or bullets’ are used in Gaza. So it will be Britain’s official position to oppose the right of Jewish soldiers to dispense justice against the racist terrorists who carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust? Is that right? If so, we’re in even deeper moral shit than I feared.
Burnham condemned anti-Semitism in the UK. Yet he gave voice to the very Israelophobic misinformation that powers modern-day Jew hatred. The myth that Israel is depriving Gaza of aid, his mention of its killing of children, the suggestion it might be behaving criminally and that this scars the world’s ‘conscience’ – this is the foundation of myth and bigotry upon which feverish ‘anti-Zionism’ is built. Anyone serious about taming the irrational rage of this new species of Jew hate would do everything in their power to neuter the ugly, untrue claim that Israel is a uniquely barbarous nation that the world must condemn. Burnham has done the opposite.
And why? That’s the clearest part for me: he’s done it to try to win back the Islamist bloc and metropolitan luvvies who mistake hating Israel for having a personality. He has sacrificed our historic friendship with the Jewish nation to the low end of vote-farming. He seems to care more about preserving Labour’s post-working class alliance of minority groups and the middle classes than he does about preserving the Jewish State. Appeasing Britain’s regressive elements for fleeting political gain – it is suicidal folly.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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