Israel has come to be the most demonised nation on Earth. Its actions in Gaza are continually vilified as ‘genocidal’. Last month’s air strikes against Iran were denounced as ‘unprovoked’ and ‘illegal’. In the one-sided narrative that is now dominant in the West, the Jewish State is the aggressor, while the terror groups and regimes that attack it are cast as innocent victims. Natasha Hausdorff – barrister and legal director at the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust – joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to debunk the lies we are constantly told about Israel. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.
Brendan O’Neill: How degraded has the debate become around Israel right now?
Natasha Hausdorff: It’s been deteriorating extremely rapidly – but this is perhaps unsurprising. For decades, we have had a media that, for the most part, propagates the lies of terrorist organisations. This has come to a head in everything we have seen being reported, in particular out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Ultimately, it is misinformation that has been informing – or perhaps disinforming – public debate.
O’Neill: What did you think when you saw a very large crowd of privileged Britons chanting ‘death to the IDF’?
Hausdorff: Let’s be clear that this was essentially calling for death to Jews. It is simply an evolution of ‘From the river to the sea’, which we’ve heard from 7 October onwards.
I saw a distinct lack of pretense to this sort of unbridled Jew hate. Glastonbury has been a very unwelcome place for Jews and Israelis for years. It was reported that there was even a Hitler flag being displayed on some of the tents. This is deeply, deeply concerning – but likely only the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who have been swept up in all this because they think it’s the fashionable thing. Apparently, it’s the way that you demonstrate your moral credentials these days – by siding with internationally proscribed terrorist organisations and saying things like ‘up Hamas’ and ‘up Hezbollah’.
O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim Israel is guilty of genocide?
Hausdorff: Not only is it grotesque, it has no basis in reality whatsoever. But it is being advanced with a very particular purpose. I remember being on SABC – the South African version of the BBC – just after South Africa had brought its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). My counterpart said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous now we can finally use Israel and genocide in the same sentence, and nobody can tell us otherwise?’.
The word ‘genocide’ was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish and Jewish jurist, to provide legal terminology around the Holocaust. But now the term is being inverted, and Jewish Israelis are being accused of the very crimes that were committed against them – not only during the Holocaust, but also on 7 October. Indeed, these were real acts of genocide that were committed against Jews and Israelis, by terrorists who celebrated their crimes on GoPro footage and spread it around the world via social media. Hamas were very clear about their intent: they were targeting Jews because they were Jews.
O’Neill: Are we experiencing a kind of moral inversion in the West, in relation to this issue?
Hausdorff: Let’s not forget, we’re speaking from central London. On Edgware Road, people were setting off fireworks on 7 October. Of course, 9/11 was celebrated in a similar fashion in the West Bank – so this isn’t surprising to anyone who has followed national security policy or public feeling in many places across the Middle East. I’m not surprised by the immediate finger-pointing at Israel, nor that the Western coloniser-colonised framework has been projected on to it. Jews are now considered to be white – even though anyone who has been to Israel will know that that couldn’t be further from the case.
Western education has long been pushing these ideas. I taught in 2008, and would set up societies for young people in inner city schools. At a school in Bethnal Green, in conversations about current affairs, the students were coming out with things like ‘McDonald’s pays the Jews to kill all the Arabs’. One teacher told me she couldn’t study set texts with the children at this school for GCSE, which included The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, because she said they kept coming out with things like, ‘If only Hitler were here today, he’d sought out the Jews once and for all’. It was becoming a breeding ground for extremism. From that school, three girls left to join ISIS. So when I talk about education, I’m not just talking about the moral rot that is taking hold at universities. I’m talking about the hotbeds of radicalisation that have been at play in city-centre schools. Unfortunately, when these individuals grow up, their opinions also shape political discourse.
Natasha Hausdorff was speaking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the whole thing here:
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