COMPLICIT
Peter Oborne
Or Books
Europe’s greatest export is violence, not because the common folk have been
exorbitantly violent for centuries, but because States have. If the founding
fathers took one idea with them across the Atlantic, it was that violence to
get your own way is human nature. Those who support this morally vacuous
view, readily refer to Thucydides: “the strong do what they can, the weak
suffer what they must”, a doctrine applied, of course, only to States. No
one who upholds it believes the strong among the lower orders must be
permitted to use their muscle to twist the arms of the rich and powerful.
Every rich and so-called advanced nation owes its position, at least in
part, and usually greatly, to the willingness to use extreme violence.
Israel was brought into existence by terrorism and the shenanigans of the US
in the United Nations. Ghandi opined there was no need for a Jewish State:
Jews should be able to live freely and without prejudice in every country.
Balfour disagreed, because he was an antisemite who wanted to rid Britain of
a population he believed had done damage. The argument that Jews need Israel
to be free from persecution doesn’t fit with the evidence. Millions of Jews
live in the USA. They flourish. There is Jew hatred in America, but the
American State is not prejudiced against Jews. Most of the animus comes from
the unhinged far-right. Europe’s violence has been justified significantly
by racism. Hegel excluded Africa from history. Africans could not enjoy
freedom because they were incapable of reason. Africa is home to some 300
million Arabs. When the white, central European Jews began to settle in
Palestine in the late nineteenth century, they found the land populated by
Arabs. Those settlers were inheritors of centuries of European violence. In
addition, they were armed with a faith that the land had been given to
Abraham by god some three thousand years earlier. A faith is not a fact.
Israel was not essentially a reward to the Jews for the Nazi genocide. It
was adumbrated by Herzl in 1897 and at least suggested long before. Cultural
Zionism was a pluralistic doctrine of equality before the law for all. It
rejected out of hand the notion of an exclusively Jewish State. Asher
Ginsberg accused Herzl of naivety, but it was the Cultural Zionist view
which deserved that criticism. It was swept away by the political Zionism
which partook of the messianic view. Israel served the interests of Europe
and the US in the Middle East from its inception. It was a “progressive”
bulwark against “backward” people and the native Americans had seen what
happens to them. After 1967, however, the reservations about offending
Germany, a US ally post-1945, evaporated. Israel had shown in could defeat
the Arabs. The Holocaust was born. Henceforth, “Western” support for any
action by Israel was almost total. There were honourable exceptions, but the
direction was clear: those regressed Arabs had to be shoved out of the way
to enable progress. Israel protected US interests and the US was the
self-appointed fount of progressivism. Hence the slaughter in Gaza after 7th
October 2023.
Peter Oborne and his team have researched minutely the contribution of
Britain to what the International Court of Justice ruled might plausibly be
termed a genocide. Call it a hecatomb, a slaughter, a massacre; the evidence
stacks up that the Israeli State has engaged in mass destruction and killing
way beyond what was necessary to disable Hamas. Britain’s contribution to
this is significant and despicable. Most of the political parties, the
media, intellectuals, academics, business leaders, some church people have
excused an assault of extreme violence on an unarmed populace, leaving tens
of thousands of children dead and thousands maimed. They have sanctioned the
punishment of a civilian population by the denial of water, food and fuel.
They think they are civilised and progressive. They are brutes.
The case brought before the ICJ in 2024 was moved by South Africa. Within
living memory, British politicians toasted the apartheid regime which
consigned the coloured population of that land to a less than human status,
British businesses did profitable trade with the white oppressors (Margaret
Hodge was a beneficiary through her family’s investments in South Africa in
the 1970s and 80s, wealth she claims to have donated to charities whose
names she can’t recall) and the British media condemned Nelson Mandela as a
terrorist. It’s hardly surprising the South Africans would bring the case,
nor that the British Foreign Office should have called it “wrong and
provocative”. Oborne comments that many of the people he encountered in
writing this book who were abetters of the Israeli actions “…believe that
the actions of the Israeli armed forces are admirable, morally correct and
justified.” He judges they are not evil people. That raises the question of
what evil is. William Shirer in his study of the Nazis, expresses surprise
here and there that cultured, decent people could have participated in the
Nazi genocide; but that’s the point. Virtue isn’t here and evil over there.
Rather, we have a moral faculty which we have to employ every day. Moral
choices are hard. They often involve a degree of self-sacrifice. Our moral
faculty is the enemy of narcissism and self-complacency. People can listen
to Beethoven’s 9th while they send others to the gas chamber
because they have annulled their requirement to make moral choices by
convincing themselves they are righteous. This is what Diderot was hinting
at in his remark about the last king and the last priest. Kings and priests
are convinced of their goodness, which is why they often behave so badly.
The 7th October attack was a mistake in every sense. That some
sections of the British Marxist left responded by calling for rejoicing was
vile. Killing civilians is a war crime and morally repugnant. Taking them
hostage the same. The suffering of the Palestinians doesn’t justify
barbarity. It was right to offer comfort to the families of the dead and the
seized and to sympathise with Israel’s grief; but it was right also to point
out that the long humiliation of the Palestinians was the source of the
anger which propelled the violence. It quickly became apparent that some of
those killed were victims of Israeli fire. The testimony of Yasmin Porat is
particularly pertinent. It was comprehensively ignored by the British media.
Most importantly, there was a need for Israel’s allies to act, as Oborne
puts it, as critical friends. That would have required the British State’s
willingness to refute accusations of antisemitism and the British’s media to
offer unbiased reporting alongside its tilted commentary.
When Foreign Secretary Cameron appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee
some months after the start of Israel’s mass murder, only Brendan O’Hara of
the SNP gave him anything to think about by asking if he had received advice
from Foreign Office lawyers about breaches of international law. O’Hara
worked as a TV producer before entering parliament. Interestingly, he was
educated at a Glasgow comprehensive. Cameron was unable to recall what
advice he had received, just what you’d expect from someone educated at Eton
and Oxford. Perhaps those years in the Bullingdon had destroyed too many
neurons. He admitted the Israelis had turned off the water supply to Gaza.
An opportunity for Starmer, which he inevitably passed up. Expelling
thousands from his party on false grounds is more his style.
The major political parties were neurotically wary of evincing the slightest
support for Palestine but on the far-right, Richard Tice surpassed himself
in vulgarity, cruelty and stupidity by calling the Green Party the “Gaza
Party” and Sadiq Khan “the mayor of Gaza”. Of course, the British citizens
who were demonstrating peacefully and calling for a ceasefire were
pro-Hamas, motivated by antisemitic hatred and the ICC was a “total joke”.
Such comments would fall flat and be mocked by an informed public, but the
media ensured there was plenty of support for Tice’s strain of ingrained
ignorance.
Dan Gillerman told Sky News that the Palestinians are “human animals”.
Perhaps Mr Gillerman thinks Israelis are something other than animals. Maybe
they aren’t part of the human species which got here in the usual
fashion-evolution and natural selection- perhaps they arrived from outer
space and don’t share at least 99.9% of their DNA with the rest of us. What
Gillerman means, of course, is Palestinians are less than human. Perhaps
he’d like to provide us with the evidence. The Nazis were human. So was
Stalin. Humans are perfectly capable of barbaric violence. What stops them
is a culture of non-violence and the rule of law. Gillerman has an
impressive business record, he was a Permanent Representative to the UN and
is an adviser to Blackstone; evidence that you can have the sensibility of a
gangster and still do very well.
Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the UK from 2022-25 opposes a
two-state arrangement and has given support to groups opposed to
miscegenation. It’s an interesting position: Jews marry only Jews, the short
route to a restricted gene pool, but maybe she thinks Jews don’t have genes.
She was one of those who asserted definitively that Israeli babies had been
beheaded on 7th October. The world still awaits the evidence.
Ezra Yachin was once a member of Lehi (The Stern Gang) a terrorist
organisation which carried out multiple outrages during the British Mandate.
It’s odd that the Israelis and their allies who wring their hands over
terrorism and declare their absolute opposition, have nothing to say about
Lehi, the Hagana or the Irgun. Jewish terrorists, it seems, were good
terrorists. The Daily Express gave him space. Oborne describes
the paper as “one of the great titles in British newspaper history”, which
says more about his generous nature than about the moral depravity of a
publication that opens its pages to an advocate of indiscriminate violence.
Dan Hodges is the son of Glenda Jackson and Roy Hodges. He used to be a
member of the Labour Party. He now writes (badly) for the Daily Mail.
He declared not a “single penny” should be spent on rebuilding Gaza till
every Hamas terrorist was dead or in custody. Imagine if someone had argued
that because of IRA outrages the entire Catholic population of Northern
Ireland should be permitted to starve. That Hodges was once Labour and
declared himself an unflinching Blairite says much about the moral vacuity
of the organisation and its erstwhile leader.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle which breached the IPSO
code 33 times in the 3 years up to 2021. He was educated at Oxford and did a
Phd in Creative Writing, which doesn’t prevent him writing third-rate
novels. He has authored Israelophobia which claims that anti-Zionism
is covert Jew-hatred. That’s a marvellous double-bind: the Israeli States is
Zionist, thus, if you criticise it, you’re an antisemite, thus the Israeli
State is beyond criticism. What do they teach people at Oxford? Simons
claimed many Muslims were brainwashed into a death cult. Quite a claim when
you consider the Israelis ban journalists from Gaza, the Israeli people are
kept in the dark about the mass murder and slavishly supported the misnamed
“war”.
There are others: Douglas Murray, Philip Ingram, Rachel Reeves. The point is
simple: the Israeli view is given great value, the Palestinian, virtually
none. The Israelis are the victims. The Palestinians monsters. Yet, this
perspective was contradicted by the British people who from very soon after
start of the Israeli action, supported a ceasefire by big majorities. So
much for democracy.
Oborne reminds us that on the occasion of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of
September 1982, Margaret Thatcher called it “an act of sheer barbarism”. She
opposed unlimited support for Israel. When Israel attacked a nuclear
installation under construction in Iraq, she called it “a grave breach of
international law” She declared she supported international law: “Once we go
away from that we shall not know where we are.” Today, for those remarks,
she would be dismissed as an antisemite and an apologist for terrorism.
Let’s not forget her support for Pinochet. Allende was democratically
elected. Pinochet was a fascist brute whose regime had no democratic
legitimacy. She also supported Reagan’s actions in Grenada, Lebanon and
Nicaragua. She was a hypocrite. Yet the fact remains that forty years ago a
world leader could seriously criticise Israel without being labelled an
antisemite. Not anymore.
What has happened? As Uriel Tal, erstwhile Professor of Modern Jewish
History at Tel Aviv University writes:
“The bitter cries about anti-Semitism which allegedly raise its head again
all over the world serve only to cover up the fact that what is
disintegrating in the world is Israel’s position, not Jewry’s. The charges
of anti-Semitism aim only to inflame the Israeli public, to inculcate hatred
and fanaticism, to cultivate paranoid obsession as if the whole world is
persecuting us and that all the other people in the world are contaminated
while only we are pure and untarnished.”
It is because across the world, and especially in the global south, Israel’s
position has weakened as people have accepted the case for a Palestinian
State, that the “new antisemitism” has emerged, in the view of the
Perlmutters, anything that does not explicitly support the State of Israel.
Thus, Israel stands for the righteous community, purity, democracy peace,
justice, equality, and endless amounts of ice-cream. This is the Pollyanna
view close to that Noam Chomsky said his father espoused: the sun always
shines in Israel. It’s a delusion. In its current iteration, Israel is a
delusion. It has no right to the West Bank under international law, no right
to lay siege to Gaza, no right to murder Palestinian children, to bomb
hospitals and schools, to deliberately starve an entire population. But it
believes it does. Where does that belief lie? In the minds of millions of
brainwashed Israelis. And we are supposed to accept it. Tush. To do so is
moral suicide.
On November 3rd 2023, Camilla Tominey wrote in the Daily
Telegraph: “ A country that prided itself on tolerance has now shown
itself to be home to many thousands of people who are not only happy to be
useful idiots for Hamas, but who revel in their anti-Semitic ideology.” Odd
she invokes tolerance as she puts her wild intolerance on display: anyone
who opposes the wholesale murder of the civilian population of Gaza is a
friend of Hamas and a wallower in hatred of Jews. Douglas Murray picked up
on the theme on November 8th:
“Muslim groups, Palestinian groups, pro-Hamas groups..will again defile the
Cenotaph and the statues of our dead and our war leaders….I think the police
in the UK have failed by allowing people to march through our
streets..chanting “Allahu
Akbar” and “Jihad,Jihad”…”
When right-wing commentators start to denigrate the police, what is waiting
in the wings? If the police can’t be relied on to implement the law, who
can? This is classic pre-fascist fare: convince people the existing forces
of law and order don’t work and you have opened the way to the SS. Hence,
Murray continued:
“Now, is it time to send in the army? At some point, probably, yes. But if
the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in…it will be
very brutal.”
There it is, the call for military rule or civil war, and why? Because
British citizens exercise their right to demonstrate. The question of
whether chanting “Jihad, Jihad” or anything else which offends the Right, is
illegal, is a matter for the courts. We have adequate laws against hate
speech and incitement to violence. Of course, virtually no one on the
marches has engaged in these chants. Many have chanted, “From the river to
the sea, Palestine will be free” which has been seen as a call for the
elimination of Israel, an extreme interpretation. The meaning can be
restrained to Israel obeying the law and supporting a Palestinian State.
One of the most penetrating chapters is “I Sold My Footage to Reuters”
(perhaps it should be I Sold My Footage to Rotters). It tells
the story of Annet de Graaf and her 51-minute video filmed at 6 minutes
after midnight after the Ajax v Maccabi match in Amsterdam in November 2024.
On 8th November news outlets around the world were reporting
attacks on Maccabi fans by antisemites. Not Ajax fans, of course, as the
club has a record of supporting Israel. Biden condemned it, Lammy was
“horrified”. Netanyahu said he was sending a plane to pick up the victims.
On 6th November, the day prior to game, Maccabi fans behaved
loutishly, chanting “fuck you, fuck you, Palestine” (I wonder if Murray
thinks this calls for the army), attacking a taxi, tearing down Palestinian
flags. There was bad behaviour on the other side, the police reporting a
What’sapp group calling for a “Jew hunt”. On the afternoon of 7th,
Maccabi fans gathered in Dam Square where there was some trouble, including
pro-Palestinian demonstrators getting beaten. On the way to the stadium the
Maccabi fans chanted “Death to the Arabs”. So far so unpleasant, but not
serious violence and certainly not anything resembling a pogrom.
De Graaf was in the centre of the city when the Maccabi fans arrived after
the final whistle. There were relatively few, but at about 11.45 p.m.a group
of some thirty Maccabi supporters, already in aggressive mood ran past her
and were soon joined by others. She was in no doubt about their identity.
She filmed them pursuing three Dutch men and beating one of them. Though de
Graaf didn’t see them, there were attacks on Maccabi fans, six went to
hospital, one suffered a broken leg. This is all appalling and a disgraceful
misuse of sport as an excuse for maliciousness, but it was elevated into
something much more serious by the intervention of the Israelis.
In the early hours, Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the UN tweeted:
“There is a pogrom currently taking place in Europe in 2024”,
somewhat like responding to teenagers hanging around the local Spar
by claiming an armed robbery is under way. Naturally, that paragon of reason
Wilders, got involved:
“Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv
supporters in our streets.”
Outwitted by the Israeli propaganda machine, the Dutch authorities accepted
and recycled their version with the result that leaders across the planet
mouthed the untruths without a thought for careful examination of the
evidence.
Worse though, de Graaf’s footage was employed far and wide to support the
fairy tale. Her protests made no difference. She filmed Maccabi fans chasing
Dutch citizens and beating one of them, the world was told the attackers
were antisemites. Sky News outdid itself; on 9th November
it showed the footage and told the truth, but this was quickly taken down
and replaced by a report associating what was shown in the footage with
antisemitism.
Like the work of Mark Curtis, this book reveals how corrupt, cowardly,
bullying and morally bereft are the British State and media. But not the
British people. In his conclusion, Oborne gives cause for hope: the
International Centre for Justice for Palestinians has launched Global 195 to
pursue war criminals involved in the mass murder in Gaza. No doubt the CST,
the British Board of Deputies, Conservative Friends of Israel, Labour
Friends of Israel, Rabbi Mizri, Jonathan Freedland, Kemi Badenoch, Keir
Starmer, virtually every UK paper and many more will call this antisemitism.
If you don’t have a picture of Netanyahu on your mantelpiece, you’re an
antisemite. But Uriel Tal is right, the status of Israel is collapsing. Avi
Shlaim predicts it won’t recover from the inevitable reckoning. It will be a
long, hard task, but the perpetrators of the crime against humanity which
was the massacre in Gaza will be brought to shame and justice. The British
people, like most people across the world, wanted a ceasefire. They were
denied because democracy is curtailed. Goerge Orwell remarked that decency
can be found only among those who have no power. David Hume pointed out in
the 18th century that power is always with the people, who are
cowed by having their opinions shaped by their manipulators. We have to put
our faith in the people, in democracy, in the rule of law and never cease
campaigning until justice and truth prevail. As Annet de Graaf puts it, “If
you just stick to the facts and hold firm, truth is simply truth.”