Bernard Spiegal

It’s over.  The besottedness with Israel is drawing to a close.

Among the general UK population, but particularly among younger generations, sympathy and support for Israel is plummeting, and the trajectory of disdain is heading ever downward.

Thus, a poll conducted by YouGov and commissioned by Action For Humanity International reported on the 4 April in the The New Arab that on the question of UK arms sales to Israel:

• ‘56 percent to 17 percent are in favour of halting arms exports and equipment to Israel with the two countries having defence deals worth millions of pounds and a number of Israeli weapons factories operating in the UK, including Elbit Systems.’

• ‘On the part of Labour voters, 71 percent said they backed a halt on arms sales, and 38 percent of those intending to vote for the right-wing Conservative party said the same, although 36 percent of Conservative voters disagreed on stopping arms sales’.
• To the question, does Israel violate human rights in Gaza, ‘the majority of those surveyed agreed’.
• Conservative voters ‘showed hesitancy with agreeing that Israel was violating human rights with the vote split 42 to 24 percent’.
• Potential Labour voters at the next election agreed ‘by 77 percent that Israel’s actions are violating human rights in Gaza.’

A YouGov poll found that 66% of UK public opinion thought Israel should implement a ceasefire in Gaza. Perhaps more intriguing, is the finding that 66% think Israel should be prepared to enter peace negotiations with Hamas, this demonstrating significantly more political nous than either the Israeli or UK governments. 

Honk for Palestine

There are other indications that Israel is holed below the water so far as public support is concerned. This, perhaps, is merely anecdotal evidence, but I draw significance from the many motorists honking their car horns for Palestine at the request of those conducting a vigil outside the London American Embassy last week. Arguably, the mix of taxi, van, lorry and upmarket car drivers pressing their car horns is a valid, if rough and ready, indication of general public support for Palestinians.

And in the same vein of anecdotal evidence, my usually immediately successful online purchasing of Palestinian flag badges was thwarted because, for the first time in my memory, those badges had sold out and there’s a wait for new stocks.

And then of course there are the London demonstrations, and the many local ones around the country. It is remarkable that, certainly the London demonstrations, have consistently attracted massive numbers on a regular basis.

Disjunction

Yet all the above – polls and anecdotal evidence – are as nothing to the UK and West’s Establishments, elites and vested interests. Their active support of Israel fuels and funds its war machine, in addition providing political cover to the hourly slaughter Israel vents on Gaza, and on the West Bank, too. 

Here in the UK, the proponents of peace and justice for Palestinians and Jews alike are doubly disadvantaged in having a Conservative government that refuses to halt arms sales to, and purchases from, Israel whilst the Labour Party similarly fails abysmally in not calling for an end to the UK-Israel arms trade. 

This disconnect between the publics of the West and the political elites that control the levers of influence and power, is replicated in the wider international field. In this, the global south, led by South Africa charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice – now joined by Colombia and Nicaragua filing a request to join the case – demonstrate support for Gaza and Palestinians, whilst the global West, in acts of commission and omission, collaborates with Israel in the daily slaughter of Gaza’s Palestinians; and in the West Bank.

Besottedness with Israel: It’s over

It’s true that, at present, international civil society’s manifest and widespread support for Palestinians has not been able to translate itself into meaningful action that actually affects the situation on the ground. This primarily for the reasons given above: that Establishments and political elites tenaciously hold to the pursuit of their own interests – to secure influence in the Middle East; to support their arms industries; to prop up authoritarian, non-democratic regimes – wrongly, believing support for Israel is also in their own interest. In the longer term, this is unlikely to be the case, if only because Israel is a state that, in the absence of external threat, is essentially unstable, with powerful, structured-in centrifugal forces pulling it apart. I discussed this a bit in ‘Israel: A state of contradiction’.

A change in the terms of trade

What is drawing to a close, is the effectiveness of the pro-Zionist lobby’s intimidatory tactic of crying ‘antisemitism’ at each mere sniff of criticism of Israel; or that invoking the Holocaust can now so easily be effective in silencing criticism of Israel and Zionism.

This growing sceptical stance has most recently been inadvertently, aided by the Chief Executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s (CAA) almost farcical antics attempting to act as a disruptive force at a recent pro-Palestinian London demonstration. He failed, thanks to the police who contained his malign idiocy with a degree of grace. I have previously written a few words about the CAA.

Many will now see that deployment of those two tools of censure and attempted erasure – the cry of ‘antisemitism’; and the inappropriate invoking of the Holocaust – as a perverse, morally barren response to what we all see daily being done in Gaza by the Zionist state of Israel.

The terms of trade in narrative cogency are changing.