Why did the world turn on Jews in the aftermath of October 7?
History has not only repeated itself after the Holocaust but morphed into a perverse incarnation through which the Left – including universities, arts, politics and media sectors – is united over a hatred of Zionism, twisting the facts as ‘resistance’.
Why did the world overwhelmingly fail to condemn the horrific Hamas massacre against innocent Israelis on October 7 and why did it turn on Jews in the aftermath? These are the core questions author and journalist Hadley Freeman tackles in her perspicacious essay, Blindness, October 7 and the Left.
Opening with the carnage, Freeman submits readers to the barbarism, threading it throughout: how Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel and slaughtered, raped, tortured and burnt 1200 Jews, kidnapping hundreds more, thus ending the Palestine-Israel ceasefire, the irony of which seems lost on activists demanding “Ceasefire Now’’.
The reaction to the massacre from many quarters was pretty much nil.
This sets the tone for Freeman’s dive into the reasons for a skewed narrative of Palestinian victimhood, the disregard for Israel’s right to defence and police silence on pro-Palestinian calls for jihad and Jewish genocide and rampant anti-Semitism.
The pogrom, she argues, has been hijacked by the progressive Left seeking to deny, dismiss and contort the atrocities as propaganda or inconsequential, especially compared to Palestinian suffering.
Freeman smoothly navigates the hypocrisies, lies and confected beliefs spouted by those who seek to advocate for the underdog and justice but are so ignorant of the historic complexities that the most basic Middle East history eludes them.
The Left’s reaction to October 7 lies behind the idea that Israel is an illegitimate, occupied country, she writes. Convinced they are on the right side of history – behind the oppressed – it justifies and minimises Hamas’s brutality.
“Minimising and even denying the extent of the carnage on October 7 is the new form of Holocaust denial, a specific kind of trauma inflicted specifically and sadistically on Jews. What other country would be attacked and then be derided and vilified?’’
How can the hate-fuelled protests against Israel rather than Hamas terrorists – whose dehumanising, celebratory footage from body cameras corroborates the pogrom – be interpreted as Israeli propaganda?
Western Jewish fears now centre on the blind Left fervour that blames all Jews for defending Israel from more savagery, and the failure of state institutions to protect them.
Here, Freeman lays bare the shocking fact that Jews have come to understand how isolated and hated they really are.
Indeed, American historian Deborah Lipstadt says anti-Semitism arises “independently of any action by Jews’’. Even before Israel retaliated, anti-Semitic protests erupted through cities once viewed as bastions of liberal sensibility – Sydney, New York and in the UK, home to thousands of Jews, the London-based Freeman reminds us. Sympathetic to the Palestinian cause herself, she was shocked by the reactions.
“Anti-Israel protests happened so regularly in London that I stopped taking my children into town on the weekends, because they were bewildered by all the placards warning about ‘Zionist racism’ and ‘Jewish apartheid’ carried by people who looked like they could be our neighbours.’’
Undoubtedly, the protests frequently held in the midst of Jewish communities, have heightened Jewish fears.
History has not only repeated itself after the Holocaust but morphed into a perverse incarnation through which the Left – including universities, arts, politics and media sectors – is united over a hatred of Zionism, twisting the facts as “resistance’’.
Forget October 7. On that day Freeman recounts 34 Harvard student organisations issued a statement saying “they hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’’. That was the consistent “context’’, capped off with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ vacuous quote that October 7 “did not happen in a vacuum’’.
Methodically, Freeman unravels the ignorance blinding those who purport to represent liberal values, conveniently latching onto, for instance, South Africa’s accusation of genocide against Israel, in turn exposing South Africa’s double standards.
No surprise that online conspiracy theories reinforcing virulent, ancient anti-Semitic tropes are in vogue, she muses, noting Tik Tok is more youth-friendly than mainstream news.
Yet neither does Freeman let Israel’s far Right government or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu off the hook, saying many Diasporic Jews who have a strong connection to Israel have spoken out about the cruelty towards Palestinians, West Bank settlements – partly under the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority – and far Right fundamentalism.
Throughout, she despairs about the desperate and dead Palestinians but posits: How can Israel be so entirely blamed for attacking Hamas and Hamas given a free pass for using their own citizens as human shields, and still hold Israeli hostages? The back-and-forth are questions Jews ask themselves daily.
Even after Israel collated evidence from Hamas’s own cameras of it murdering Jews and aired it globally in a film titled Bearing Witness, many people dismissed it as PR.
How so? In validating the point, Freeman looks at the Holocaust, and how it can be erased by far Left stereotypes who simply equate it with the deaths in Gaza. It’s the same.
“The Jew is never the victim. So the Jew can always be hated,’’ writes Freeman.
Vicious anti-Semitism is going unchallenged as identity politics drives the agenda that Jews are not victims because they are white, rich, colonising oppressors, who could pass as non-Jews.
Since October 7, the perception that Israeli Jews are ultra-white European interlopers has gained popularity, despite the fact Gaza is run by Hamas.
In truth, more than half of Israeli Jews are from Mizrahi North African and Middle Eastern backgrounds – i.e. Arabic Jews -and were evicted from those regions in 1948. I would add Jews are indigenous to Israel and first achieved self-determination there 3000 years ago. Many were forced into exile, but they have remained there throughout the years.
Yet that’s all irrelevant in the “context’’ of identity politics – a euphemism for the justification for October 7, as Freeman puts it. With its central tenets linked to Palestinian oppression, it is analogous to LGBTQ+ (“never mind that same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Gaza’’) along with trans people and Black Lives Matter.
“This is why so many Western activists … see the Palestinians as akin to black slaves and the Israelis as plantation owners, with a total lack of embarrassment about their historical ignorance,’’ Freeman says. The reality is Hamas has put Israel in an impossible position, threatening to obliterate it from the map. “Progressive activists insist Israel must find ‘a peaceful solution,’ which is clearly an impossible command given that Hamas is determined to eradicate it.’’
The historic lost opportunities for peace accords, tragically lying at the door of both sides, do not bode well either.
By the end of her essay, Freeman unfortunately feels just as confused as when she began, portentously asking: “Why is it impossible for so many of the Left to feel enormous compassion for the Palestinians and also to understand that Israel cannot live alongside a terrorist group dedicated to its extermination? A two-state solution has rarely felt so distant.’’
Long term, Freeman raises the question: will the 20-something protesters chanting “from the river to the sea’’ who eventually sit in the seats of power have changed their thinking by then?
It’s a chilling conundrum, given the outsourcing of critical thinking to the revival of an ancient hatred.
Deborah Cassrels is a Sydney writer.
Blindness: October 7 and the Left is available here.
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