The marches have always been the dead giveaway. Since October 7, the pro-Palestine lobby has enjoyed unprecedented success in manipulating the media coverage of Israel’s war to free its hostages from Gaza.
The world lapped up inflated casualty tolls from the Hamas health ministry, swallowed without question the claim that Israel was deliberately manufacturing a famine to wipe out Palestinian children, and nodded along solemnly to patently absurd allegations of genocide.
But there was one thing the Hamas-Iran-Qatar axis could not control: its useful idiots in the West. Israel’s fightback had barely begun two years ago when throngs marched through London brandishing Palestinian flags. What were they protesting? The IDF was still scrambling to mount a rescue operation for abducted Israelis.
The only massacres or atrocities to protest were those that had been conducted by Palestinians against Israelis, and Western sympathisers were certainly not demonstrating against those. They were celebrating their victim-idols’ daring slaughter of defenceless Israelis.
As then, so now. Today’s demonstration in London must be the first recorded example of people protesting the end of a supposed genocide. Just as there is no genocide, other than the well-documented, intergenerational Palestinian campaign against Israeli Jews, the protests in London and elsewhere reveal the true nature of the pro-Palestine movement.
For one, there is nothing especially pro-Palestine about it. Western Leftists and intellectuals have for decades encouraged the worst of Palestinian revanchism and extremism, holding out the false hope that rebuffing Israeli peace offers in favour of continued struggle would bring victory.
Many Palestinians have died at their own hands or those of the IDF, but no charge sheet would be complete without listing the aid and abetment of cosplaying revolutionaries on the university campuses and in the newsrooms and trade unions of the West.
For another, this is a movement more concerned with dismantling Israel than with building up Palestine. Some strands of opinion have been honest about that all along, while others spent many years feigning support for the two-state solution outlined in the Oslo Accords, which gave greater international recognition and diplomatic heft to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In the wake of October 7, with Western elites and institutions shifting sharply in favour of the Palestine side, activists have had less need to be circumspect.
A video from today’s march posted online by the ironically named Stop the War Coalition showed protesters chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”
For those not familiar with the geography, the river is the Jordan and the sea the Mediterranean, and in between the two lies Israel. The slogan is an unambiguous call for the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with Palestine, a territory which has never previously existed as a nation-state or sovereign entity.
The slightly more respectable fringes of the anti-Israel movement try to downplay the deeply extremist politics with which they have involved themselves, but the London march makes that all the more difficult. There is a ceasefire. The killing has stopped. Aid is going in.
Who in their right mind protests that? A movement so morally rancid that it sees peace for Palestine as an impediment to vilifying Israel.
The marches have always been the dead giveaway. Since October 7, the pro-Palestine lobby has enjoyed unprecedented success in manipulating the media coverage of Israel’s war to free its hostages from Gaza.
The world lapped up inflated casualty tolls from the Hamas health ministry, swallowed without question the claim that Israel was deliberately manufacturing a famine to wipe out Palestinian children, and nodded along solemnly to patently absurd allegations of genocide.
But there was one thing the Hamas-Iran-Qatar axis could not control: its useful idiots in the West. Israel’s fightback had barely begun two years ago when throngs marched through London brandishing Palestinian flags. What were they protesting? The IDF was still scrambling to mount a rescue operation for abducted Israelis.
The only massacres or atrocities to protest were those that had been conducted by Palestinians against Israelis, and Western sympathisers were certainly not demonstrating against those. They were celebrating their victim-idols’ daring slaughter of defenceless Israelis.
As then, so now. Today’s demonstration in London must be the first recorded example of people protesting the end of a supposed genocide. Just as there is no genocide, other than the well-documented, intergenerational Palestinian campaign against Israeli Jews, the protests in London and elsewhere reveal the true nature of the pro-Palestine movement.
For one, there is nothing especially pro-Palestine about it. Western Leftists and intellectuals have for decades encouraged the worst of Palestinian revanchism and extremism, holding out the false hope that rebuffing Israeli peace offers in favour of continued struggle would bring victory.
Many Palestinians have died at their own hands or those of the IDF, but no charge sheet would be complete without listing the aid and abetment of cosplaying revolutionaries on the university campuses and in the newsrooms and trade unions of the West.
For another, this is a movement more concerned with dismantling Israel than with building up Palestine. Some strands of opinion have been honest about that all along, while others spent many years feigning support for the two-state solution outlined in the Oslo Accords, which gave greater international recognition and diplomatic heft to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In the wake of October 7, with Western elites and institutions shifting sharply in favour of the Palestine side, activists have had less need to be circumspect.
A video from today’s march posted online by the ironically named Stop the War Coalition showed protesters chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”
For those not familiar with the geography, the river is the Jordan and the sea the Mediterranean, and in between the two lies Israel. The slogan is an unambiguous call for the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with Palestine, a territory which has never previously existed as a nation-state or sovereign entity.
The slightly more respectable fringes of the anti-Israel movement try to downplay the deeply extremist politics with which they have involved themselves, but the London march makes that all the more difficult. There is a ceasefire. The killing has stopped. Aid is going in.
Who in their right mind protests that? A movement so morally rancid that it sees peace for Palestine as an impediment to vilifying Israel.