We know what “From the river / to the sea” means now: an Israel without Jews. The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC), a group of Muslim fundamentalists and affluent socialists, protests across Britain and this is its song. It will be at the Israeli embassy in Kensington tonight because it is not enough to hate Jews. Jews in mourning must hear it. Celebration of Jewish death is implicit in this activism: they do it now, on Twitter and in life. In Brighton one speaker called the pogrom in Israel “a victory… so beautiful and inspiring”. Child abduction, murder, rape, terror: they call it resistance. No political solutions are offered, or desired.
They say they love the Palestinians. Rather, they are using them. From their affluent liberal democracy, they wish war on them, and they will not pay for it. They have nothing to say to Palestinian moderates, liberals, or gays — they treat them as a mass — and no bombs will drop on Crouch End or Hackney. They are dilettantes and, in their way, I think they are as haunted by the Shoah as Jews. According to the novelist Howard Jacobson, their hatred is a yearning for absolution. If Jews are demonic, the Shoah is nothing to fear: we brought it on ourselves. They are unconscious of this, being stupid, but I find it comforting, this addled search for sense in what they cannot understand.
