Sometimes people wonder how to tell when a passionate critique of Israel crosses into dangerous territory. One answer is when Israel is portrayed, essentially or explicitly, as the enemy of the world.
This happened recently when Francesca Albanese, the globetrotting Hamas apologist who operates under the aegis of the United Nations, named Israel as the “common enemy of humanity” at an Al Jazeera conference that was also addressed by Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.
Over the weekend, Albanese was part of another anti-Zionist confab, where her fellow traveler Sally Rooney spoke of Israel in similar terms. Rooney, a sad Irish Marxist who writes novels about sad Irish Marxist novelists, gave a sad Irish Marxist speech to something called the People’s Congress for the Hague Group, which sounds like a labor union for war criminals.
The general tone of Rooney’s speech is captured particularly well by Brendan O’Neill:
“With ocean-going pomposity, she said we brave few who stand up for Palestine are standing up for the planet itself. Humanity’s very ‘future on this earth’ depends on us, she said, with all the humility of Caligula on a bender.
“Our ‘adversaries’, she continued, as if she were Boudica rather than a gold-collared luminary of the literary set, are the same people who are destroying life as we know it.”
O’Neill also highlights this line delivered by Rooney: “By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on earth.”
There are two primary points to consider here. The first is the subject of O’Neill’s column, which is that the cause of “Palestine” is not about helping Palestinians but about helping Sally Rooney—and the legions of likeminded bored-to-death Europeans—get out of bed in the morning.
Indeed, Rooney asked in her speech: “What else can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these? What else, in the face of such horror, can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves.”
To some people, the permanent war against the Jewish state is all there is.
But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.
In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.
It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.
Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.
Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.
All these things are real and, to judge by the public discourse, on the rise. But scapegoating Jews is not the cure. One can imagine a television ad in which hand-drawn clouds morph into words describing the symptoms of depression, as a voiceover recommends one consult one’s physician before taking anti-Semitism. The civilizational side effects, after all, are pretty rough.
And those civilizational side effects are precisely what the superstars of the People’s Congress for the Hague Group are threatening to bring down on everyone’s head. Rooney’s assertion that Israel is the great enemy of all the earth is the reason for the war in the Middle East in the first place. It is a battle cry that brings death and destruction to innocent people all over the world. And bored literary poster children have no right to make it their coping mechanism.
