OPINION: For extreme anti-Zionists, on 7 October 2023, in Israel, nothing happened

In 2005, the Simpsons aired an episode where the eponymous family visit China; more specifically, Beijing. In front of the Forbidden City complex, a giant granite sign is pictured, reading: “TIAN AN MEN SQUARE: ON THIS SITE, IN 1989, NOTHING HAPPENED.”

It’s a throwaway joke, in an episode, series and a show full of them. But I couldn’t help thinking today about this split-second gag, intended to mock the Chinese government’s draconian laws regarding its mass murder of democracy demonstrators in June of that year. What inspired that thought was looking at how anti-Israel protestors have sought to ignore, as far as possible, the mass murder carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

For many of the “pro-Palestine” groups who have advertised events today, 7 October 2023 is described as marking “two years of genocide”. There is no mention of Hamas, or the massacre carried out by the dictatorial rulers of Gaza on that day. The reason for this is simple: beneath the screeching bravado of so many keffiyeh-clad SWP members with septum piercings, there is a subliminal terror of conceding an inch of rhetorical ground. To admit what actually happened would be to admit to even a scintilla of guilt on the part of the Palestinian cause – and that is something that the wider anti-Israel movement is forbidden to engage in. To suggest that ‘Palestinian freedom fighters’ are capable of evil would be to imply that they might, in fact, be wrong – and then, of course, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. To even suggest that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ‘complicated’ is considered a heinous crime in “Pro-Palestinian” circles.

Dig down further, and that lack of acknowledgement becomes far more insidious, ranging from pathetic attempts at justification to actual support. Vague platitudes about “resistance” give way to the opinion – which was openly voiced by a wide variety of people on 7 October 2023 – that what was happening was “decolonisation” or a “prison breakout”. “History didn’t start on 7 October”, organisations like Amnesty UK pronounce – as if this is earth-shattering news, and the last eight decades haven’t seen murder, expulsion and death carried out by both Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. (For decades now, for example, Israeli school history textbooks have taught that the idea that in 1948 all Palestinians somehow voluntarily left their land in the expectation that the Arab armies would be victorious in weeks and they could return to a land blissfully denuded of Jews is a ridiculous fantasy. They also teach about atrocities such as the Deir Yassin massacre. I leave you to figure out whether Palestinian textbooks teach about the atrocities carried out by Arab militias in the 1948 war.)

Move deeper still, and you get the inevitable mentions of the “Hannibal Directive”. As with the most successful conspiracy theories, this contains a drop of truth surrounded by an ocean of lies. As reported by Ha’aretz in July 2024, Israeli soldiers in certain areas of the Gaza border, in the chaotic hours after the Hamas invasion, were ordered to fire on anyone attempting to cross from Israel into Gaza. As well as Hamas terrorists, that order risked killing Israeli soldiers or civilians who Hamas were attempting to take as hostages. In the warped imagination of conspiratorial Israel haters, however, this has transformed into the false notion that Israel systematically carried out the mass murder of its own civilians in various kibbutzim around the Gaza border, while the Hamas terrorists who quite literally filmed themselves carrying out the atrocities are presented as some form of picnickers on a sightseeing trip.

The attitudes reported by Matthew Syed in The Times this week, when he went to a protest in support of Palestine Action, will be grimly familiar to most British Jews. He found a variety of people ready and willing to engage in Olympics-grade mental gymnastics to avoid the notion that Hamas has any responsibility for what has happened to Gaza.

Today, on the anniversary itself, the wider British public has briefly woken up again to what happened on 7 October 2023. Tomorrow, alas, it seems likely to slip back into its torpor, where it forgets what exactly precipitated the terrible suffering within Gaza over the last two years. And that is exactly what the groups who are pretending today that “On 7 October 2023 in Israel, nothing happened” are counting on them doing. We can only hope that they will resist the urge to do so.