One Year On: The hate machine

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Hard to believe it's been a year. Every day, we wake up to the same news. Bleak, ceaseless horror, without remission or improvement. And every day it feels a little more normal, a little less noticeable. And that, of course, is when the true despair overtakes you. When that which is unspeakable begins to seem unremarkable, simply through repetition.

Nearly a year now since October 7th, when terrorists killed 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals. Nearly a year now since Israel's response, which has killed over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and over a thousand in Lebanon.

This is not about the political or the military response. There are plenty of pieces about that. It is about the dual form of racism that the war has set free and the manner in which they have galloped around the earth, poisoning everything they touch. It’s about how we learn to hate.

I wonder if the organisers of those pro-Palestine marches ever wonder how much they gave up. I wonder if they recognise, just even for a moment, what kind of coalition they could have built against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government if they had not tolerated patently anti-semitic rhetoric and behaviour. I wonder if they know how many Jews and non-Jews might have marched alongside them.

Even in the earliest days of the protest movement, when the memory of the October 7th atrocities were still fresh, there wasn't even a trace element of sympathy for those who had been killed. There wasn't the slightest interest, or recognition, of Jewish suffering. 

People would go on marches dressed up in Hamas-style headbands. People would hold placards portraying Jews as snakes. And then there was that ubiquitous phrase: "From the river to the sea". It doesn't have to be genocidal. You can present it as about Palestinian freedom rather than Jewish annihilation. But the basic fact was that many people did consider it genocidal and that, far from discouraging its use, this lent it potency. It was taboo. And there was a real thrill, a sense of identity, to be found in embracing that which affronts your enemy.

I wonder what kind of movement could have been built by people who wished to make Jewish people welcome? One which did not make them feel afraid of entering central London on a Saturday? One which showed even the slightest interest in policing its members, in discouraging the worst sort of anti-Jewish rhetoric?

Maybe nothing. Maybe it would have made no difference either way. But it would have felt less poisonous at home. That much is true. We'd have had that much, at least.

We knew everything we needed to know about what was happening once they started tearing the posters down. They'd appeared all over London, but in perhaps larger numbers near where I live, in North London. Posters showing the Jewish hostages, many of them from the Nova music festival: Young, vibrant, beautiful. Now either dead, or undergoing the most unspeakable ordeal, or, if they're very lucky - through no mercy of Hamas and no consideration of their own government - back home. Posters to remind us of the people who had been taken and the need to bring them back. Posters which were aimed at, and criticised, the Israeli government more than anyone else.

As soon as they went up, people tore them down. It was too much to bear, you see. It simply could not be the case that Israel's bombing was wrong but that the kidnapping of these people was wrong too. If Israel's bombing was wrong, it meant Israel's people had to be robbed of their humanity. No amount of empathy could be felt towards them. To feel any empathy for a Jew was a kind of racism, because why should we single out people for care when dozens are namelessly bombed in Gaza each day?

With that action, it was perfectly clear what we were facing: a zero-sum approach to compassion, the eradication of shared humanity as a concept. What began in the Middle East juddered outwards, from its epicentre in Gaza to cities around the world. Like an infection, seeping in every direction. And it has defined the year which followed.

When the bodies of six Israeli hostages were recovered last month, I learned all about them. The newspapers gave me a summary - their family, their interests, their education, their hopes. Each death was given its space. Photos were published of them. And those photos were not of the moment of capture. They were not defined by the worst thing that had happened to them. They were of better times, smiling at the camera, their humanity obvious and vivid. 

Those who are outraged about Gaza will ask in response: What about the Gazans? How come they don't get their photos placed prominently in the paper? And the thing is: They're right. They are entirely correct. 

There is something plainly racist about the way we cover this war. Arab lives are numbers. Each day, the death toll is updated, embedded in the copy. Black and white in place of colour. Twelve this time. Eighty next time. Two-hundred-and-three the time after that. Another strike - to the south, to the north, to an area people had previously been advised to flee to. Another raid, another insertion. A thousand this time. And the body count ticking up each day until eventually you realise you can't make sense of it, it's just numerals, there are no human lives contained within it, there's no human sentiment sparked by it. That's when the humanity of the people on the other side is finally eradicated: when everything which would have made you feel empathy for them is stripped from the account of what happened to them. 

Partly this is to do with the fact that journalists cannot get access to Gaza, because the Israeli government blocks them. But then, this is itself a racist function: an attempt to make sure that attacks on one set of people are deprived of the kinds of details which trigger our sense of connection. This is selective empathy as a weapon of war. After all, when an Israeli government spokesperson comes on the radio to justify what they are doing, the very first thing they will do is appeal to the audience's sense of identification. 'How would you feel if these rockets were falling on London?' 'How would you act if these hostages had been taken from Birmingham?'

The photos we see of Palestinians are not of smiling young people before tragedy befell them, their eyes alive with possibilities. They are of corpses in the rubble, of families wailing, of people covered in dust in the aftermath of a bombing, of men holding the body of their child. They are defined by the worst thing that happened to them. Arab lives become a kind of homogenised trauma, like a sort of natural disaster. It's upsetting. But it does not trigger the same sense of association, the same kind of 'us' feelings that we get with pictures of Israelis. There is no individuality. Just a universalised harrowing. There is no inner life revealed. Just the effect of the violence upon them. 

What other reason but racism is there for the manner in which we treat Arab lives? What possible other reason could there be? How would we react to this many Jews being killed? This many Americans? This many Brits? We would consider it one of the greatest acts of national trauma we had ever experienced. We would be in a state of despair. But you can kill tens of thousands of Arabs and the world will barely lift a finger. You can kill them and after a while they will barely appear as people, they will just sort of fade into numbers, a tally, an Excel spreadsheet, a stack of units where personhood used to be. 

Now everyone retreats back into their shell, trying not to think about it too much. At the Tory conference the leadership hopefuls pledge their allegiance to Israel. Robert Jenrick inexplicably demands that we put Stars of David at every entry point to the UK. None of it is real. None of it involves the remotest consideration of what is actually going on - the share of moral blame, the need to de-escalate, the importance of human life regardless of its ethnicity or religion. It's not even really about Israel. It's just tribalism. Israel has become a kind of right-wing totem, a piece of culture war iconography, one of the symbols we use in place of thought to express our political identity.

On the left, Palestine has the same role. There's not the slightest equivocation or internal struggle. There's not the slightest thought, really. The flag is planted, the armies mass, we march in step with our fellow political believers, reducing the Middle East to a kind of proxy contest for our own small-minded domestic concerns.

That which is impartial, or composed of half-measures, or which equivocates, is instantly dismissed as the work of the enemy. BBC coverage is now daily branded pro- or anti-Israel. Whichever side you're on, it's on the other. This is how straight reporting looks in the middle of a black-and-white tribal dispute. Keir Starmer is attacked by pro- and anti-Israel figures, for measures which have broadly pursued a middle course. I don’t even particularly agree with the course he has taken. But it is telling that a middle course is naturally considered in line with one’s opponents.

The mere act of not submitting to one side or the other is treated as an affront. Because that is what the hate machine wants. That is what it needs: For you to feel deep empathy for one life and none for another. 

This is how it functions. It won't feel like hate at the time. It'll feel like you're deeply upset for what has happened to someone. But instead of directing that feeling towards universal sentiments, it will use it to establish the moral worth of one set of people and the denigration of the other.

One year. One year of blood and death and lives cut short. And on the outside, we simply bleed out. Each day, a little more: politically, emotionally, morally. That's the truth of what's happening. 

We bleed out morally.