Don’t you just hate it when brown people reject your white saviourism? So rude! Such mannerless ingratitude greeted the Global March to Gaza last week. These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere had planned to trek to Rafah in Gaza to save poor, hungry Palestinians from Evil Israel. But they came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles and roundly told them to fuck off. Wait, you people don’t want to be saved by a plummy white lady from London in a keffyeh?
I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but can we please not overlook how unbelievably hilarious it is that the Global March to Gaza has been thwarted by angry Arabs. That this swarm of pompous gits who fantasised that they would shield the Arabs of Gaza from the ‘genocidal lunacy’ of the Jewish State were instead roughed up by the Arabs of Egypt who don’t want their nation used as a stage for moral masturbation by every puffed-up Palestine fetishist of the West. That instead of getting bottles of water to Gaza, these people had bottles of water lobbed at their own heads by pissed-off Egyptians. The mirth of it all might just get me through the rest of this year.
The Global March to Gaza consisted of 4,000 people from 54 countries. They had planned to walk to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza where they would have ‘demand[ed] that Israel re-open the border [and] create a humanitarian corridor’. How the Jewish State would have trembled before this mighty delegation that included a gaggle of anoraks from Welsh CND, a British art curator called Tasmin and a bald politician from Ireland! Honestly, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the unworldly vanity of this dishevelled army of weak-chinned Westerners who really thought they could finger-wag a war out of existence.
Some of the marchers were from North Africa. Others were from the West. Like the self-styled ‘empathetic human’ from the UK who said ‘I endeavour to do what our governments have failed [to do]’ and ‘mobilise [my] passion and humanity’. Or the Brit who lamented her ‘privilege’ of being a ‘white, north European living in relative peace’ and promised to do something worthy for once, like ‘lend my presence to this cause’. Or the Canadian who said ‘I can’t ignore my conscience’. All I’m hearing is I, me, mine. Was it really Gaza they wanted to liberate or their own morbidly obese egos?
Sadly, by which I mean hilariously, their cloying pity for Arabs crashed against the reality of Arab self-respect. I am still not recovered from the sight of these self-loving midwits in their culturally appropriated keffiyehs being shouted down by Egyptians in real keffiyehs. On the road to Ismailia in northern Egypt, the marchers were stopped by security forces. So they gathered in a square by the mosque and chanted ‘Free, free Palestine!’. Locals weren’t best pleased. Well, would you be if a gang of pious pricks from afar rocked up in your town and started yelling political shit near your place of worship? The locals shouted at the ‘empathetic humans’. They threw plastic bottles at them. White Saviour card, declined!
The outsiders hollered ‘Shame on you’ at their Arab critics. Yes, in English. These are the kind of people who look down their noses at Brits who holiday in Spain and never utter a word of Spanish and yet here they were barking English-language insults at Egyptians in Egypt. There will never be a better representation of the phoney virtue and haughty self-regard of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set than this dystopic image of Westerners in Arab headgear screaming ‘shame’ at real Arabs who just want to go about their day without encountering some tit from Britain ‘manifesting passion and humanity’.
Some of the marchers were arrested. They were bundled on to buses and taken to the airport to be returned to the ‘privileged’ lives they hate. They were ‘shocked’ by their treatment. Why? Anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of Arab politics will know that Egyptian officialdom is iffy about the Palestine issue. They don’t want the Gaza tragedy leaking into their already troubled land – hence, Egypt’s border with Gaza is if anything more militarised than Israel’s. The childish moral fables that the West’s white-saviour classes tell themselves – where Israel is the source of every ill in the Middle East, if not the world – took one hell of a beating in Egypt.
The farcical state of ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is best summed up in that viral clip of a Welsh male nurse begging Egyptian cops to have a heart. He weeps as he pleads to be let through so that he might help the poor people of ‘Falasteen’. The children are starving, the women’s breasts are empty – prove to the world that Arabs have ‘white hearts’ and let me pass, he says. This is the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement’s Four Lions moment. Indeed, if I ever write a satire on these keffiyeh pricks, this is exactly what will happen: an emotionally incontinent white man in a keffiyeh will holler ‘Let me save Palestine!’ as bewildered Arabs raise a what-the-fuck eyebrow.
The hilarious collapse of the Global March to Gaza follows Israel’s thwarting of Greta Thunberg’s ship of fools. That watery clown show, where 12 moral preeners imagined they could land in Gaza and ‘save’ its people, was likewise motored by a toxic mix of political infantilism and moral self-importance. From grumpy Greta being flown home to that Welsh dude being memed and mocked across the internet, the cult of the keffiyeh is in trouble. Many can now see that the aim of this activism is not to feed people in Gaza but to feed the vanity of Westerners bored with their privileged lives. It’s an orgy of Orientalism in which the activist class cosplays as Arabs because they think it’s lame and shameful to be white.
That’s what ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is now, everywhere from the keffiyeh-fest on the lawns of Harvard to the ludicrous white-saviour theatrics in Egypt: a fairytale for self-hating, time-rich Westerners in which Arabs are always the victims and the Jewish State is evil incarnate. It has no basis in truth, of course, but then truth is not the aim: moral absolution is. Cry more, Israelophobes – your sanctimony is crashing against the shores of reality.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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