When pro-Palestinian protesters gather on the streets in Australia and throughout most of the western world, they are often described pejoratively (although I’d argue accurately) as a sea of beards and blue hair chanting “from the river to the sea”. I long for the occasion when a reporter asks, which river and what sea? The answers, I assure you, would make grown geographers cry.
A Jewish friend and an unashamed progressive tells me: “We will forgive comrades for their ignorance but we will remember those who are genuinely anti-Semitic.”
He believes the bearded and blue-haired for the most part are not anti-Semitic but it is clear the lines are becoming blurred.
If it’s not anti-Semitism then it is a wilful blindness, a crude anti-intellectual aversion to seek some form of truth. The worst excesses of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and in Gaza in what we might loosely call social policy are roughly ignored.
One group of progressive activists in the US are known as Gays for Gaza, known derisorily as Chooks for KFC. The LGBTQ community in the US is free to marry and suffer no legal discrimination for their sexual orientation. It’s a comfortable world where many of the battles have been largely won. Genuine activists like those associated with the Stonewall Uprising in New York in 1969 or the first Sydney mardi gras in 1978 who put their bodies and their futures on the line to stop police persecution are now seen as museum pieces.
Yet, Gays for Gaza has sided with Hamas while it continues to criminalise same-sex relationships. Maybe one of Gays for Gaza’s 11 secret herbs and spices induces myopia. The use of generalised terms such as “unnatural offences” means that same-sex conduct is punishable in Gaza by up to 10 years in prison.
In 2022, the Knesset passed laws permitting LGBTQ Palestinians fleeing persecution in Gaza to enjoy residency in Israel with permission to work in the country. While that system is a long way from perfect, the fact it exists at all is an inconvenient and roughly ignored truth by progressives, gay and straight.
The progressive left who now hang on every word issued by Human Rights Watch has studiously shunned the NGO’s submission to the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women Committee in 2018, which outlined discriminations against women and children in Palestine with some of the worst excesses occurring in Gaza under Hamas.
Abortion is prohibited and criminalised in Gaza and the West Bank. Women who undergo an abortion face three to six years in jail. There are no legal exceptions. According to the submission, 51 per cent of married women in Gaza reported suffering at least one form of violence; physical, sexual, psychological or economic, at the hands of their husbands. Yet there are no domestic violence laws in Gaza.
Child marriage is prohibited (under 15 years) but there are no records of any prosecutions. In 2016, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found child marriage accounted for 21 per cent of married women with just 1 per cent among males of the total married population in Gaza.
Family law in Gaza has been purloined from Egyptian Family Rights Law. Muslim Gazan men can have four wives while a woman under normal circumstances cannot marry without the permission of a male guardian. Men can divorce their wives without any legal constraint while wives must either obtain permission from their husbands or make an application through the Gazan courts seeking divorce due to “harm”. That process involves a mediation process where the wife sits in the same room as her tormentor.
Honour killings have been on the rise in Gaza. In 2017, 28 women or girls were murdered with their killers offering dishonour to the family name as a defence in Gaza and the West Bank. In 2016, the figure was 23. Honour killings are subject to prosecution but defendants are frequently offered reduced sentences, some of which had convicted murderers released with impunity.
I could go on. Feminism has its limits, apparently. If the blue-haired are anything to go by, gender inequality is tyranny only in the West. LGBTQ activism is directed at bakers refusing to bake wedding cakes for gay bridal parties rather than the black letter law expressions of vile persecution. Anti-Semitism has been rebranded without irony or nuance with the battlelines stuck in a dismal ahistorical argument around claims of colonial oppression.
The shift from the progressive left to the brink of virulent anti-Semitism continues to alarm and astonish. It is driven by ignorance of history, a blinkered view of geopolitics and the shrieking defence of the indefensible. Such is the moral certainty, the easy way the progressive left lurches into hatreds based on race and ethnicity.
Meanwhile, Jewish progressives are interrogated on social media as if they have become spokespeople for the Netanyahu government and must answer for every perceived excess or outrage. If it’s not anti-Semitism then it is one short step away from it.
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