Owen Jones is digging himself into a deeper hole and, in the process, demonstrating how the UK Labour Party’s antisemitism problem is making itself irrelevant to Israel.
Last week, Jones, a Corbynista columnist at The Guardian denounced Israel for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, justifying his pompous outrage — as I explained — by stripping the numbers of any context. The comparatively low number of Israelis murdered in Palestinian terror attacks isn’t for the lack of Palestinian effort.
And Israelis don’t apologize for surviving years of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, car-rammings, rocket barrages etc.
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Now, Jones weighs in with a new followup column doubling-down on his use of casualties as a moral barometer and poo-pooing Jewish anger at Jeremy Corbyn’s wreath-laying homage at the graves of Black September terrorists associated with the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972.
To take a side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict is to inescapably associate with those who have committed acts of violence. The conflict is an unequal one, between occupied people and an occupier; between refugees and a military regional superpower armed and backed by the west. According to Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, Israeli security forces have killed 9,456 Palestinians since 2000, compared to the 1,237 Israeli security personnel and civilians killed by Palestinians. Any civilian death is inexcusable: the Munich atrocity was an atrocity.
It’s a good thing a Palestinian attempt to blow up a Tel Aviv fuel depot miraculously failed in 2002. An explosion would have created a fireball killing thousands of people. Had the attack succeeded, I don’t believe it would’ve changed the calculus of Jones’ support for the Palestinians.
As for three other points Jones makes:
1. The gathering Corbyn attended was a “peace conference” in name only. Being in Tunis, there wouldn’t have been any Israelis. Besides, the gathering featured speakers from terror groups glorifying violence such as this:
At the event in Tunisia, top Hamas leader Oussama Hamdan presented a ‘four point vision to fight against Israel’ and praised the group’s ‘great success on the military and national levels’, adding that the violence was ‘magnificent’.
2. It’s fine to show solidarity with the Palestinians. But which Palestinians? Corbyn laid a wreath at the graves of Palestinians responsible for murder of 11 Israeli athletes. Full stop.
3. I remember then-foreign minister Jack Straw’s wreath-laying at Arafat’s grave in 2004. Israelis were upset. But the lack of scandal was because we didn’t expect better of Straw, not because we consider it acceptable to pay homage to terrorists. Years later, Straw’s dramatic antisemitic meltdown in the British House of Commons validated Israel’s attitude towards him.
The more extreme Labour becomes in its Palestinian sympathies, the more it makes itself irrelevant to the Mideast conversation. As Hannah Weisfeld and Alex Sobel recently pointed out — also in The Guardian:
But it also means that there is almost zero chance of the Labour party ever being able to make any kind of meaningful contribution to influencing the direction of political travel inside Israel, which is, ironically, apparently the issue that people were so concerned about in relation to adopting the IHRA definition. Because why would a country, of which most of its Jewish population (which makes up about 80% of the total population) are either refugees themselves, or second or third-generation refugees as a result of antisemitism in its most extreme form, listen to a political party perceived not to take antisemitism – in all its forms – seriously?
Corbynistas wish their party’s dumpster fire of antisemitism would just disappear, but Jones just adds fuel to the fire.
Image of Jones via Wikimedia Commons;
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