Sometimes, a curtain draped across a mirror is torn aside, and a horrified public suddenly glimpses what it has become.
Two things happened this week which briefly interrupted the smooth acceleration of pathological Jew-hate in the West.
A film called “NAZA” won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It was directed by journalist-filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, radical anti-Israel activists with a long history of delegitimizing Israel through defamatory falsehoods, in conjunction with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, a byword for malevolent misreporting of the Jewish state.
“NAZA” is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage or unintended civilian casualties. In war, such casualties are sadly inevitable. In the Gaza war, Israel reportedly achieved the lowest ratio of civilians to combatant deaths anywhere in the world because of the unprecedented measures it took to save civilian life wherever possible.
Yet the film claims that the Israel Defense Forces willfully caused widespread civilian deaths. Under the laws of war, armies must assess likely civilian casualties before striking military targets. The film misrepresents the IDF’s fulfilment of that duty as evidence that it intentionally subjected civilians to indiscriminate bombing.
Its shock value lay in its reliance upon voices it said belonged to members of the IDF’s crack intelligence division, Unit 8200. But these were anonymous voices, with no corroboration of who they were or even evidence of what they were claiming.
The second event was a horrifying report compiled by Britain’s Campaign Against Antisemitism revealing the systemic intimidation, threat and menace now confronting Jews who seek treatment from the National Health Service.
A Jewish cancer patient said that while removing a growth from his forehead, his surgeon told him that Jews shoot children “in the head or the legs” for “their own amusement.” A nurse said that a colleague made a Nazi salute shortly after finding out she was Jewish. A senior Jewish medical professor had received antisemitic death threats. A Jewish emergency worker was physically attacked by a colleague.
The CAA said that Jewish patients were terrified of their surgeons, and Jewish nurses and doctors were being pushed out of the hospitals to which they had devoted their lives.
The unhinged obsession with Israel long predates Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership; it’s rooted in historic Western Jew-hatred.
These two things crossed a line.
In Israel, there’s been a seismic reaction against the film, with Abraham and Szor coming under pressure even from their comrades on the left.
That’s unprecedented. Israel has been profoundly changed by the enduring trauma of the Hamas-led atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023 and the war that followed. Israelis are painfully aware of the heroism of the IDF troops, so many of whom have lost their lives, limbs or mental stability in the desperate fight against a fanatical genocidal enemy—and who have now been trashed in this film, allegedly by their own brothers in arms.
Even in anti-Israel Britain, there’s been widespread shock over the discovery that British Jews are too frightened to go to the doctor or hospital because they fear they may be attacked or even killed under the surgeon’s knife or general anesthetic.
Both developments show that the West is in the grip of a pathology created by the alliance between left-wingers and Islamists. And some Israelis are themselves contaminated by this deadly sickness.
More than that, such Israeli anti-Zionists are central to creating and maintaining that pathology. The importance of people like Abraham and Szor to the derangement of the West can’t be overestimated.
That’s surely the real reason for the astonishing 25-minute standing ovation the film received in Venice.
This wasn’t a normal response. It was a cathartic expression of intense relief that here was an apparently copper-bottomed reason for treating Israel as the acme of evil, a cosmic menace, a plague on humanity—that the evidence had been provided by Israeli Jews, and stellar military ones to boot.
Anti-Zionist Israelis who give such reputational cover to liberal and Islamist genocidists are essential to the global effort to defame, delegitimize and destroy the Jewish state.
Despite the strong pushback to both the film and the British health service revelations, nothing is likely to change. The curtain has been ripped aside, but a veil will soon descend once again.
Supporting Palestine has become the issue that powers progressive politics. To oppose it is socially unacceptable; it’s not Palestinian propagandists but their Zionist targets who are regarded as pariahs.
But Palestinianism is not a worthy cause at all. It stands instead for the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews and the theft of their historic identity in their ancient homeland.
The reason British Jews are so frightened if they’re treated by a nurse wearing a “Palestine” pin is that the Palestine cause itself is understood to pose a direct threat to Jewish well-being. The “Palestine” flag has become the modern-day swastika.
The overwhelming majority of Israelis have no time for the left. But the left-wing minority that’s disproportionately represented in Israel’s universities, the media, the arts and the legal profession packs a cultural punch that has done Israel untold damage abroad.
The left-wing minority disproportionately represented in academia, media, the arts and the legal profession packs a cultural punch that has done Israel untold damage abroad.
Yet just as with the devastating global campaign to turn Western minds against the Jewish state, the Israeli government has never treated this with any degree of seriousness.
On the contrary, it thinks that its society’s rampant leftism is a sign of cultural health. It’s repeatedly used it to claim that Israel is a Western society like any other, and that its manifold internal disagreements are proof positive of its open, democratic and liberal nature. It fails to see, however, that the left-wing mindset is now a direct threat to Israel just as it is to the Western nation-state and its historic identity in Britain and America.
This evil is not confined to left-wing extremists and Islamists. It is sustained by a spectrum of progressive thinking that ignores, sanitizes or implicitly validates it.
Many woolly-minded centrists, including too many diaspora Jews, think, for example, that the “settlers” are violent and the “occupation” is illegal; that the Palestinians are a deserving cause; and that antisemitism is being caused by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremists in his coalition.
This is all false. The overwhelming majority of the 500,000 Jewish “settlers” are upstanding individuals legally entitled to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
Netanyahu may be everything his enemies think about him, but the unhinged obsession with Israel long predates his leadership and is rooted in historic Western Jew-hatred.
As for the Palestinian Arabs, who have waged war on the Jewish homeland for a century and who still overwhelmingly want Israel destroyed and the Jews murdered, they deserve nothing. Their behavior has made any claim they may have had totally forfeit.
Evil gains traction, however, because good people stand by and do nothing. Those who promulgate these lies should be treated like pariahs. Those who nod along with them—or worse, parrot and validate them—should be called out for their cowardice, ignorance and moral bankruptcy.
That means Jews should call out other Jews. American Jewish leaders are as silent about the demonization of Israel in the Democratic Party as they are quick to call out Jew-hatred on the right.
In Britain, Jewish representative organizations harbor among their members viciously anti-Israel Jewish groups, while some Jewish community leaders are even afraid to voice in public their support for Zionism.
In Israel, there’s a strain of poisonous leftism in the universities, the media and the upper echelons of the IDF and security establishment that should be called out as treasonous in a time of existential war.
Western and Israeli leftists who hate their historic culture, hate America, hate Israel and for whom the most terrible thing they think can ever happen to them is to become “right-wing” have caused the West to smash its moral compass on the altar of Palestinianism.
Today’s leftism is a sign of a malignancy in the body politic. That is why it’s joined with that other malignancy, radical Islam, which intends to murder Jews, destroy Israel and bring down America.
It’s time to call out the pariah left and its weapon against civilization, the Palestinian cause, for the evil being done in their name.
