OPINION: Where have all the grown-ups gone?
How did we end up in a place where saying, 'I support the Palestinians and the eradication of Hamas' gets you branded a traitor by both sides?
Richard Ferrer has been editor of Jewish News since 2009. As one of Britain's leading Jewish voices he writes for The Times, Independent, New Statesman and many other titles. Richard previously worked at the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, edited the Boston Jewish Advocate and created the Channel 4 TV series Jewish Mum Of The Year.
Wouldn’t it be nice, just once, to have a march that wasn’t a frothing hate carnival for people who think Hamas is the Che Guevara of Gaza? A march not made up of people who, if they saw the Star of David I proudly wear around my neck, wouldn’t accuse me of supporting apartheid. But also – and here’s where I risk upsetting my own lot – a march not made up of people who think dropping 1,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas is a substitute for policy.
You see, the biggest casualty of this whole seemingly endless nightmare, apart from the 1,200 men, women, children and babies slaughtered by Hamas on 7 October and the thousands of Palestinians dead in the rubble of Gaza, is honest debate. Nuance. The unfashionable grown-up idea that more than one thing can be true at the same time.
We’ve completely lost it. Or more accurately, we’ve had it ripped from us by the zealots, who are too busy screaming blue murder at each other across social media to act their age.
It’s puerile. Infantile. Nappy-brained logic. It’s geopolitical conflict as football: pick a scarf, chant the songs, hate the other side
Let me state some uncomfortable truths, which shouldn’t be uncomfortable at all. First: Hamas is a psychopathic death cult. Not some misunderstood resistance movement. It is a misogynistic, homophobic, Jew-hating Islamist murder machine that dragged babies out of their homes and burned them alive and would joyfully slaughter my wife and children given half a chance. It shoots its own people on sight for speaking out of turn or retrieving aid stockpiled for its own use or black-market profit. If your response to that is “but” then mazeltov – you’ve lost your mind.
Second: the Israeli government, led by teflon Benjamin Netanyahu, doesn’t seem remotely interested in the best interests of its own people – let alone the 58 precious hostages, most now presumed dead, still languishing in terror tunnels.
We don’t need another Saturday afternoon hate march, courtesy of Jeremy Corbyn and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. We need a march with banners that declare, “No to Hamas, Yes to peace
By now Netanyahu’s primary goal should be blindingly obvious to anyone breathing. Clinging to power. If that means surrounding himself with militant thugs like his security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir and finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, so be it. He is a man who knows that dragging this war out may be the only thing keeping him out of a prison cell.
And yet, these two truths – that Hamas is monstrous and Netanyahu a millstone – cannot co-exist in the brains of most people. If you say the first, you’re accused of being a genocidal Zionist. Say the second and you’re dismissed as a terrorist sympathiser. It’s puerile. Infantile. Nappy-brained logic. It’s geopolitical conflict as football: pick a scarf, chant the songs, hate the other side.
You’re either mindlessly parroting “Free Palestine” while ignoring the fact that Hamas would kill or oppress 90 percent of the people standing next to you for prizing free speech or being female, or pretending that every Israeli missile only kills the bad guys.
Where have all the grow ups gone? Where are the people who can say, calmly and maturely, that Palestinians deserve a future free from Islamist tyranny and the IDF, and that Israelis – the vast majority of whom oppose Netanyahu (76% did not vote for his party in the 2022 election) and have only ever wanted peace – deserve to live without fearing the next 7 October? How did we end up in a place where saying, “I support the Palestinians and the eradication of Hamas” gets you branded a traitor by both sides?
Where are all the people who, to quote the philosopher Alan Partridge, are “hopping mad and want something in the middle”?
We don’t need another Saturday afternoon hate march, courtesy of Jeremy Corbyn and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. We need a march with banners that declare, “No to Hamas, Yes to peace.” One where Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists – everyone – can stand together and say: we are done with this wretched cycle of one-eyed righteousness.
Let’s have that march. A march for the middle. For nuance. For grown-ups who don’t take perverse delight in treating this living nightmare like a spectator sport.
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