Israel is at war with innocence

New Statesman​

30-05-2025

A bystander wearing an Israel flag with a cross in the middle, prays near the Capital Jewish Museum following the shooting of two Israeli Embassy staff members. Photo by Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty Images
How imponderable it is that people once believed history followed a moral or rational arc. Such antiquated optimism now seems obscene. Past atrocities become present pretexts; victims repeat, as perpetrators, the crimes once visited upon them. Virtue-signalling, in which social groups display their status as historical victims in order to morally overwhelm those they perceive as their oppressors, is but the sugary peacetime tip of that retributive spear.
The Jews behind Benjamin Netanyahu – they are not my Jews – have, for the first time in modern Jewish history, completed the cyclical transformation into their persecutors. Pursued for millennia across continents; displaced, tortured, murdered, and then gassed and incinerated in the millions, the Jewish people are now being put in mortal danger by the current Israeli prime minister, who is presiding over the mass murder and mass starvation of the Palestinians. For every Palestinian innocent Netanyahu murders – including 16,000 dead Palestinian children so far, out of 50,000 Palestinians killed – he is passing a death sentence of revenge on innocent Jews everywhere in the world.
Two of these Jewish innocents were murdered in Washington DC last week when a pro-Palestinian American travelled from Chicago and shot to death Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, both employed at the Israeli Embassy. Milgrim was involved in humanitarian efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. Lischinsky, half-Jewish, was a devout Christian who had grown up in Israel and possessed a deep love for the country; the two young people were about to be engaged. It is indecent to categorise them as Jewish victims, as if on the opposite side of some ledger from the Palestinian victims. They are all, Palestinian and Jew, along with the Jews murdered on October 7, part of the same casualty count: the count of the innocent.
After he shot Milgrim and Lischinsky, the assassin cried 'Free Palestine!' That putative motive was sickeningly absurd, just as much as the IDF's recent killing of a Palestinian paediatrician's nine children as part of a tactic – so Netanyahu's government says about its siege of Gaza – of compelling Hamas to free the remaining hostages. The present destruction of life on both sides is no more politically effective than were the demented attacks on 7 October and Israel's dementedly disproportionate response. A child who has spent one afternoon on the playground knows more about the cyclical nature of revenge than these hardened 'warriors' do.
History's twisting and twisted path is endless. Just at the moment when Israeli policy toward the Palestinians can truly be called a deliberate plan to erase them, American liberals have struggled to respond forcefully and loudly, with a unified voice, to the horror in Gaza. Such a unified response can be found on the American far left, butin a way that discredits their cause, celebrating, for example, the murders of Milgrim and Lischinsky – along with Luigi Mangione's assassination of a healthcare executive last December in New York – as heroic blows for justice.
These extremists are the same people who seemed to commandeer the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia after October 7. In the city where the 9/11 attacks happened, they took down an American flag and ran up a Palestinian flag in its place. As a result of such callous gestures, as well as anti-Semitic rhetoric, the far left's efforts on behalf of the Palestinians now have the moral status of the domestic terrorist group The Weather Underground in the 1970s. This, tragically, includes any and every Palestinian, and every person, who non-violently protests Netanyahu's mass murder in Gaza. There are, it seems, no people any more in American politics and society. Only pretexts.
American liberals, Jewish and otherwise, find themselves in disorienting straits. Their preferred news sources, in particular the New York Times and CNN, have reported on the atrocities in Gaza with unsparing honesty and depth. But there are few, or no, prominent voices characterising the slow extermination in Gaza for what it is and calling for it to be stopped.
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Part of the reason for liberals' helplessness is Trump's disingenuous manoeuvring. His phoney war on American universities in the name of anti-Semitism has infuriated them. At the same time, the actual surge in anti-Semitism in America, and throughout the world, has made them mute their criticisms of what Israel is doing. So they decry anti-Semitic acts, then denounce Trump's cynical claims that he is purging the universities of the same. But just as Trump's curbing of American democracy, under the pretext of anti-Semitism, is endangering the future of liberal America, Netanyahu's war on the Palestinian people is jeopardising Jewish lives.
Faced with this twisted situation, American liberals are left spinning fantasies about what they would like to see happen rather than directly speaking out against what is happening. The idea that Trump's warning off Netanyahu from striking Iran has signified a break between America and Israel is delusional. And should Trump leave Israel to its own devices, it will only signify to Netanyahu that he is free to inflict whatever agonies on the Palestinians he desires, as he is now doing.
Capable of self-annulling acts of love and sacrifice, the human ego is also a suppurating agent of monstrous vanity. Having experienced terror for millennia, experiencing it once again in their very own historical sanctuary, on 7 October, a substantial number of Jews in Israel refuse to relinquish their status as victims – even as, or perhaps because, they are haunted by the trauma of being victims once again. This simultaneous return of the repressed and restoration of victim-power now provides the moral basis – the moral, ego-flattering permission for the ego to act amorally – for Israel's erasure of Gaza.
Israel's policy in Gaza currently seems to reflect this notorious remark by American Air Force general Curtis Le May during the Second World War: 'There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore.' But if there were no innocent civilians, then Israeli outrage at the slaughter on October 7 would be unjustified. If there were no innocent civilians, there would be no moral purpose in recording the deaths of murdered Palestinian children. It is governments, or entities claiming to function as a government, that have the blood on their hands. It is the innocents, ordinary children, women and men, who have history wreaked on their heads by governments, for the sake of justice they never called for, and of revenge they would gladly live without.
[See also: Sanction Netanyahu's cabinet ultras now]
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