Melanie Philips: ‘You don’t need to go to the theatre in Britain or belong to a teachers’ union to be ambushed by the current firestorm of hatred against Israel, just when you least expect it. In the Times today Caroline Holliday muses why her son’s teenage fatherhood isn’t such a disaster. She thinks of all the terrible things that might have happened to him instead, including this:
‘He could be conscripted into the Israeli Army at 17 to learn how to humiliate Palestinian families on the West Bank’.
‘The casual malice and malevolence of the libel, the ignorance and prejudice it reveals and the stunning irrelevance of the reference feel like a physical punch to the solar plexus. This is a newspaper feature about teenage pregnancy. It has nothing to do with the Middle East at all. Yet reaching into her general knowledge for an example of the horrors that might have befallen her son, this woman’s mind not only turns seamlessly to Israel but to the big lie that is being told about its behaviour. It does not occur to her that the principal danger to her son, in the unlikely event that he were ever to be an Israeli soldier, would be being blown to bits by a human bomb, with his head used maybe for a football as certain Palestinian butchers did with their Israeli soldier victims not long ago.’
