What is Behind the Gaza Blood Libels?

During and after Operation Breaking Dawn in Gaza, the usual blood libels proliferated. Jews are once more accused of murdering (i.e. intentionally killing) children and Israel is accused against all evidence of targeting civilians. Some governments are simply as usual echoing the standard Anti-Semitic propaganda of the Palestinian Authority while others are making independent Anti-Semitic judgements. It is admittedly difficult to argue with Anti-Semites, but most world leaders who sanction such official Anti-Semitic rhetoric don’t regard themselves as Anti-Semites and the vast majority of governments that peddled blood libels during and after the Gaza operation certainly do not regard themselves as Anti-Semitic. So why are Erdogan who is killing without reason in Syria and Putin who is killing without reason in Ukraine sanctioning blood libels against Israel which is merely defending itself against genocidal Gaza Jihadists? Both demand that Israel engage in warfare without causing any human collateral damage whatsoever (something which simply is not possible in warfare in an urban context) despite Turkey and Russia causing extensive human collateral damage in Syria/Iraq and Ukraine respectively. What could possibly explain this curious double standard other than creating a unique Anti-Jewish standard effectively making it impossible and therefore illegitimate for the Jewish state to defend itself? (Jews were legally prohibited from defending themselves in both Islamdom and Christendom in medieval times and so this sentiment still lingers.) While those governments that simply spout the official Ramallah talking points are difficult to argue with, other governments that engage in Anti-Israel blood libels do sincerely wish to influence Israeli policy. However, how can they imagine influencing the Israeli government through bigotry? This is senseless! No one would imagine influencing Muslim governments by articulating Islamophobia and so why do some governments ignorantly delude themselves that Anti-Semitic attacks on Israel are effective means for influencing Israeli policy? The explanation is that there is an astounding ignorance about Anti-Semitism in the international community and this is why it is tolerated and even espoused even by many of those who nominally oppose Anti-Semitism.

Published by Daniella Bartfeld

Daniella Bartfeld is the founding director of the Aliyah Organization.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s