Even by the standards of anti-Zionist hostility we’re accustomed to while monitoring the Guardian, a commentary published by the Irish Times on Oct. 3 is simply odious. Here’s the headline of the piece by a socialist activist (and ‘Comment is Free’ contributor) named Eamonn McCann:
Here are some of the hysterical passages from an essay simply dripping with contempt towards the Jewish state:
The late Mary Holland once explained to me why she had changed sides on the Israel-Palestine issue after spending just a few hours in the region. She had arrived as a supporter and admirer of Israel, looking forward to experiencing the ways in which people who had survived one of the most appalling atrocities in all of human history were gathering in their ancestral homeland to envision and create a state of their own.
As soon as you walked out of the hotel, she recalled, you could see something was terribly wrong. Arabs shrinking back on the pavements to allow Jews to pass, being literally, physically pushed out of their way if they didn’t move fast enough, and, worst of all in her account, the Arabs’ heads-down acceptance of it all.
My old political mentor, Tony Cliff, born Yigael Gluckstein, founder of the Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted a similar sort of epiphany. A teenage member of the socialist Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair in the 1930s, he discarded the Zionist component of his belief “in one go” after watching a group of Jewish settlers moving through a market in Haifa systematically pouring kerosene over the produce on display on Arab fruit and vegetable stalls.
…
Last week, Orla Devine, in her early 20s, from Greysteel in Co Derry, described (orladevine.wordpress.com) her first day as a volunteer with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel: “Abed Abu Jawwad stands in front of the rubble of his home where he and his family were sleeping only hours earlier. At 7am that morning, whilst the children were still sleeping, seven Israeli military vehicles, one bulldozer and approximately 40 people from the Israeli authorities surrounded the land of Abed, and his son Mahmoud Abu Jawwad, in Humsa village and began demolishing both houses and four animal shelters before they had the chance to empty them of all their belongings.”
It’s the routine nature of the incidents she recounts, as of the incidents that shifted the thinking of Mary Holland and Tony Cliff, that speaks most persuasively of the settled hatred that lies at the heart of Israel’s official ideology.
Commenting on the recent incident in which a French diplomat, Marion Fesneau-Castaing, punched an Israeli soldier in the West Bank, and criticism of Israel’s behavior towards Fesneau-Castaing by the former head of the Israel-Ireland Friendship League, Tom Carew, McCann adds:
Mr Carew was acting in Israel’s best interest in denouncing the assault on diplomats delivering aid to Palestinians. But Israel apparently cannot see that. Which will be the cause of its downfall in the end.
McCann’s agitprop – which uses a few fantastical anecdotes to advance a version of the “Zionism = Racism” smear – is simply indistinguishable from what’s published at Islamist extremist sites, or at Iranian propaganda organs like PressTV.
It’s such “everyday” hatred which continues to define the anti-Zionist ideology of the ‘sophisticated’ European far-Left.
