How the 'blood libel' paradox keeps the West silent on Israel's genocide

The more depraved Israel’s actions, the more antisemitic it is to point out the truth. The painful reality is that, through Israel, the West can dress up boilerplate colonialism as a 'Jewish' project

There’s a dangerous paradox that helps to dissuade people, especially public figures, from speaking up even as Israel’s genocide in Gaza grows more horrifying by the day. Let us call it the “blood libel” paradox.

It works like this. In Medieval times, Jews were accused of murdering non-Jews, particularly children, to use their blood in the performance of religious rituals. Every time a Jew is accused of murdering a non-Jew, so the thinking goes, this endangers Jews by fuelling the very kind of antisemitism that ultimately led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Responsible people, or at least those with a reputation to protect, therefore avoid making any statements that might contribute to the impression that Jews – or in this case, the soldiers of the Jewish state of Israel – are killing non-Jews.

If such criticisms are made, they must be carefully couched by western politicians, the media and public figures in language that makes the killing of non-Jews – in this case, Muslim and Christian Palestinians – appear reasonable.

Israel is simply “defending itself” in killing and maiming 100,000s of civilians in Gaza after Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

The enclave’s masses of dead innocents are just the unfortunate price paid to secure the “return of Israeli hostages” held by Hamas.

Israel’s active, months-long starvation of Gaza’s children is a “humanitarian crisis”, not a crime against humanity.

Anyone who dissents from this narrative is denounced as an antisemite, whether they be millions of ordinary people; every respected human rights organisation in the world, including the Israeli group B’Tselem; the World Health Organisation; the International Criminal Court; genocide scholars like Omer Bartov, himself an Israeli; and so on.

It is the perfect, self-reinforcing loop, one entirely divorced from the reality being live-streamed to us daily.

Aid death traps

The outrageous consequences of the “blood libel” paradox were highlighted a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza by the Jewish writer Howard Jacobson.

Writing in the Observer newspaper, he accused the western media of a “blood libel” for reporting the fact that children were dying in enormous numbers in Gaza – even though that same media had been keen to minimise the death toll; implicitly questioned its truthfulness by attributing the number to the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; and constantly rationalised the killings as part of Israeli military operations to “defeat Hamas”.

Jacobson, like other fervent apologists for genocide, wanted more. He demanded the media avert its eyes from the slaughter entirely.

Since then, Israel’s crimes against the people of Gaza have become ever more shocking, hard though that was to imagine nearly a year ago.

Israel has stopped food from reaching Gaza except through a mercenary force it has set up with the US, misnamed the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.

Its job, as whistleblowing Israeli soldiers have told us, is to lure the ablest from among the starving masses – mainly young Palestinian men – into death traps with the promise of food. Once there, Israel carries out what Doctors without Borders calls “orchestrated killing” by shooting at them.

Israel has armed and hired as its Gaza goons a criminal gang under the leadership of ISIS supporter Yasser Abu Shabab. Their job has been to loot aid trucks that try to operate outside the GHF set-up and steal aid from ordinary people, sowing further terror and chaos and allowing Israel to blame Hamas for Gaza’s starvation.

Far-right Israelis – that is, the people who elected the Netanyahu government – have been filmed stopping aid trucks trying to transport from Jordan food supposed to reach Gaza’s people, even as children are regularly dying from malnutrition.

And eminent western doctors such as Nick Maynard are returning from Gaza with the same horror stories: that they see Israeli soldiers using Palestinian children as target practice. One day the gunshot wounds in the children arriving at hospital are clustered in the head. The next day in the chest. The next day in the abdomen. The next day in the genitals.

The “blood libel” paradox means that Israel can act with ever more brazen depravity – of the kind documented above – and western leaders and media continue to ignore, or downplay, or rationalise these horrors.

It is the ultimate “get out of jail” card.

Phoney ‘fog of war’

There are several points to be made about why this is such a dangerous response to the Gaza genocide – but one, equally, that is all too useful for western capitals.

First, and most obviously. Israel is not “the Jews”. It is a state. Not just that, but it was founded as a very specific kind of state: one that is the last exemplar of a long and very ignoble tradition of western-sponsored settler-colonialism.

Settler-colonialism seeks to replace a native population with western-aligned immigrants through extreme ethnic-based violence. Think the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa. They all committed appalling crimes against their indigenous populations.

Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians is not unusual. It is the all-too-familiar, logical consequence of a racist colonial replacement ideology. We have been here many times before in modern history. If it wasn’t a blood libel in those earlier cases – but rather an established historical fact – why should Israel’s genocide be viewed any differently?

Second, this genocide is not Israel’s. It is the West’s. This is utterly a western co-production. Israel could have done none of the destruction of Gaza, the mass slaughter, the starvation of the population, without western assistance every step of the way.

It has been US and German bombs dropped on Gaza. It is British spy flights over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus that have been providing intelligence to Israel. It is western capitals that have been repressing protest and making it a terror offence to try to stop the genocide.

It is the US and Britain that have been sanctioning and threatening the International Criminal Court to force it to reverse its decision to seek Netanyahu’s arrest for starving Gaza’s population. It has been western capitals staying silent as their citizens have been taken hostage by Israel illegally in international waters for trying to bring aid to Gaza.

And it is the western media that first lamely accepted its exclusion from Gaza by Israel, then barely reported Israel’s unprecedented mass murder of Gaza’s local journalists, and now eagerly conscripts its exclusion as the excuse for failing to scrutinise Israel’s actions amid a supposed “fog of war”.

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1907141811216568790

If noting that a genocide is taking place in Gaza amounts to a “blood libel”, then every western government is implicated in that libel. Are they all to be let off the hook? They very much hope that you will think that way.

Insurance policy

And third, it would be astonishing if Israel weren’t committing a genocide in Gaza, given that its every crime against the Palestinians has been supported decade after decade by the West.

Israel has grown emboldened. The “blood libel” paradox has been its insurance policy against scrutiny and criticism.

The West has given Israel a permanent licence to brutalise the Palestinians, to ethnically cleanse them, to steal their land, and to kill them. The worse it behaves, the more the “blood libel” kicks in to shut down criticism. The more depraved Israel’s actions are, the more antisemitic it becomes to point out the truth.

For more than a century, generation after generation of western leaders have been backing Israel to the hilt. Why would Israel not conclude that there are no red lines, that it can do as it pleases and that the West will still arm it and still justify its crimes as “defence” and “counter-terrorism”?

The “blood libel” doesn’t protect Jews from another genocide. It licences Israel to destroy the Palestinian people, and to savagely bomb its neighbours, with utter impunity, while western leaders remain tight-lipped in a way they would never do were it Russia, China or Iran committing far less egregious atrocities.

Which, of course, is exactly what encourages antisemitism. Utterly baffled by this state of affairs, some observers are fooled into imagining that the only possible reason is that Israel controls the West; that it has special, unseen powers to intimidate the US, the strongest, most militarised state in history; and that behind all this, Jews and Jewish money are what pulls the levers in western capitals.

That assumption is a flight from a far more difficult, painful reality: that Israel is the bastard child of the West. It is nothing exceptional or extraordinary. It is white, western, colonial, genocidal racism, repackaged as a supposedly “Jewish” project.

Israel can carry out its crimes in the promotion of western control over the oil-rich Middle East, and the West knows that any criticism of its imperial control and pillage can be dismissed as antisemitism.

It’s win-win for colonialism. It’s lose-lose for our humanity.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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