Nineteen months into Israel’s slaughter of Gaza’s children, moral ghouls like Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore are still being given a platform to smear as ‘antisemites’ opponents of genocide.
Anyone who at this point is still prioritising concerns about tackling antisemitism in Britain, the United States or Europe over halting a 19-month genocide in Gaza is secretly in favour of that genocide. They need to be shamed – and urgently.
We are long past the time when there can be any doubt that what the International Court of Justice feared 16 months ago was a genocide is actually a genocide. Israel is no longer even shy about admitting it is starving Gaza’s population. It has been expressly blocking all food and water into Gaza for more than two months.
We are at the point where even patriotic Israeli scholars who have been desperately trying to ignore that reality are belatedly and reluctantly conceding that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is indisputable. To understand the mental contortions they have been putting themselves through over the past year and a half, watch this interview by Owen Jones of Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a former Israeli intelligence official, diplomat and academic. Even he now admits: “I was wrong.”
But sadly, there are still plenty of people using their establishment platforms, and weaponising their establishment credentials, to muddy the waters. And muddying the waters, 19 months into a genocide, is as morally culpable as directly cheerleading that genocide.
Step forward, in disgrace, the latest genocide apologist: “acclaimed” historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore.
He spent his weekend wasting airtime on Sky News that should have been dedicated to the one million children being starved to death by a two-month-long, total blockade by Israel of all food and water entering Gaza. If ending that blockade isn’t your number one political priority right now, there is something very badly wrong with your moral compass.
Montefiore, author of a newly updated “biography” of Jerusalem, went on Trevor Phillips’ Sunday morning show to warn, not that children are suffering severe malnutrition in Gaza and are at imminent risk of death, but that British Jews like himself are worried about a supposed upsurge of antisemitism as a result.
This is the point where I am supposed to inject some concern about ancient Jew hatred. Let’s leave that for another time. Or rather, let’s break down what Montefiore and other genocide apologists are mostly referring to when they start warning of a sharp rise in antisemitism – warnings that always coincide with Israel doing something monstrous to Palestinian civilians, and doing it very much in the public eye.
According to Montefiore, “what we’re seeing is the end of the taboo on antisemitism that was really one of the results of the 1945 war and the Holocaust – and, you know, 80 years later, it [the taboo] has kind of run out.”
He adds: “Many of the things we took for granted in our democracies – of which the taboo on antisemitism is, is a key one – are now being challenged and will have to be fought for again.”
Part of the problem, he claims, lies with Palestinian rights activists who have been apparently getting too noisy about Israel mass-murdering Palestinian children with US-supplied bombs and are now getting too exercised over Israel’s aggressive starvation of the surviving children. The focus by anti-genocide activists on the murder of children, he says, is “exploiting medieval tropes of antisemitism”.
This echoes, he argues, “the medieval blood libel that Jewish people used the blood of Christian children to make their Matzah cakes for Passover, which started in Medieval Britain and which you’re now seeing regularly in the posters, on the rallies, you know, the anti-Israel, pro-Palestine” [sic].
If you’re surprised you haven’t come across any of these blood-libel banners at the anti-genocide marches – or seen them splashed all over the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph – that’s because they exist only in the imagination of establishment “public intellectuals” like Montefiore.
The danger two months into Israel’s strict starvation programme for Palestinians in Gaza, according to Montefiore, is not that one million Palestinian children – the most vulnerable part of the population – are at imminent risk of either a horrifying, drawn-out death or permanent physical and mental damage from extreme malnutrition.
No, it is that some observers may blame “Jews” – he means Israel and their Zionist apologists – for murdering children when the state that claims to represent Jews – a state which, we keep being told by Jews like Montefiore, most western Jews identify with – is actually pursuing a policy that would lead to the murder of up to a million Palestinian children through starvation, after that same state has murdered many tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and maimed and orphaned hundreds of thousands more.
According to Montefiore, Sir Keir Starmer, who long ago as opposition leader supported Israel’s blocking of food and water to Gaza’s population, needs to act more harshly still. Montefiore seems to be unaware that Starmer’s government has been aggressively using the police to repress marches protesting against the genocide and arrest and intimidate journalists trying to report on it more critically.
”I think there’s a danger of that in our own government – and I think, you know, the Labour party, with its massive majority, needs to be confident about the interests of the West.”
The bigger picture, he adds, is that “democracies need to win. … And I think that, you know, Ukraine, Israel are just two allies that need to win. We need to show that we can still win wars in the West.”
All indications are that, for Montefiore, Israel “winning its war” equates with it being given the room to continue starving one million Palestinian children. How else are we to interpret his words, given that he thinks opposition to Israel’s starvation programme echoes ”medieval tropes of antisemitism”?
Montefiore, of course, is far from alone among so-called “public intellectuals” in weaponising antisemitism to deflect attention away from a policy considered by the International Criminal Court as a crime against humanity – and for which it has issued an arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Last October, another “acclaimed” writer, Howard Jacobson, used his platform in the Guardian to claim that anyone who opposed Israel’s genocide was engaging in a blood libel. I called it at the time “the vilest article published by the UK media in living memory”. But Montefiore resurrecting the same obnoxious theme seven months further into the genocide runs Jacobson a very close second.
Then there’s “acclaimed” historian Simon Schama. Surprise, surprise, he has exactly the same concerns about what he views as a surge in antisemitism supposedly apparent in growing opposition to Israel starving and murdering Gaza’s children.
In March he delivered a lecture in London at which he focused on the supposed “toxic” spread of antisemitism among the West’s “younger generation” and said a BBC documentary he had been commissioned to make on the Holocaust, The Road to Auschwitz, was his attempt to “resist the temptation to dilute, to moderate, to universalise”. [my emphasis]
Yes, you heard that right. Schama thinks drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust is a bad thing. Why? Because if we are allowed to imagine that any people can turn abuser and any people can become victim, then Israel loses that special dispensation it long ago acquired from western capitals to murder Palestinians en masse without consequence.
Over on X, Schama spent last week tweeting against Louis Theroux for his documentary, The Settlers, which was a vanishingly rare – especially for the BBC – close-up examination of the day-to-day violence faced by Palestinians in the West Bank from Jewish supremacist settlers, who are now heavily represented in the Israeli government and the Israeli military.
Simply by talking to settler leaders and ambling around the Palestinian city of Hebron, which is being gradually taken over by the settlers with support from the Israeli army, Theroux managed both to capture on film their violent, racist tirades against Palestinians and personally come up against the heavy-handed, and often masked, violence of Israeli soldiers there to enforce settler privilege and Palestinian servitude.
Watch Theroux’s documentary here.
Schama obviously was not happy with the BBC airing this rare glimpse of the horrifying conditions facing Palestinians in the West Bank – a pale echo of the conditions long faced by Palestinians in Gaza, conditions that provoked growing support for Hamas’ policy of armed resistance and led to its desperate, violent one-day jail break on October 7 2023.
Schama would rather the BBC financed only films like his that turn the lens back seven or more decades to Jews as victims of genocide rather than one that shows the current reality of Israeli Jews as instigators of genocide and Jews like Schama as apologists for that genocide.
Whatever talents Schama has as a historian notably desert him the moment the issue is Israel or Palestine. Below he retweets approvingly a post from the genocide-approving former Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons peddling the obvious lie that Israel stopped occupying Gaza when it pulled back to a siege perimeter around Gaza in 2005, still controlling the enclave by land, sea and air.
The positions adopted by Montefiore, Jacobson and Schama on “antisemitism” are not politically or ethically neutral – nor is their preferential platforming by the establishment media. They are there to throw sand in our eyes, to suggest that the rightful anger evoked by the mass slaughter and starvation of children in Gaza by an apartheid, self-declared “Jewish” supremacist state is rooted not, as it is, in basic decency and humanism but by some perverse impulse towards antisemitism. That is pure genocide apologism on the part of these “acclaimed” public intellectuals.
They are as morally culpable as the court historians who in 1930s Germany denounced those who opposed the extermination of Jews, Romanies, Communists, the disabled and gays as anti-Aryan racists.
Montefiore, Jacobson and Schama’s veiled working assumption, given explicit voice by Israeli politicians, is this: “There are no innocents in Gaza. No one in Gaza is uninvolved.”
It is with this entirely bogus premise in mind that they sell to themselves – and try to sell to us, via complicit platforms such as Sky News and the Guardian – the idea that anyone who opposes the mass slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s children is “involved” too, that they must have favoured the murder of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, and therefore they secretly harbour a desire to see all Jews wiped out.
The reality is that if prominent Jewish public figures like Montefiore and Schama were truly worried about an upsurge in antisemitism they would stand foursquare against Israel – a state claiming to represent them – for not only starving Palestinian children but publicly championing that starvation.
If they really thought antisemitism was a tangible threat, they would not so readily identify with a genocidal “Jewish state” that has revived what were once clearly hateful blood libels against the Jewish people and made them appear more plausible by decimating Gaza’s children with a state-backed programme of indiscriminate bombing and starvation carried out in the name of Jews everywhere.
Remember, just last month Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, stated: “Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza.”
You cannot watch as a state claiming to represent you kills tens of thousands of children, maiming and orphaning hundreds of thousands more, and then starves them all, and decry the inevitable backlash as “antisemitism”.
You can’t for two reasons.
First, because that backlash is not antisemitism. It is a fully justified, morally imperative reaction to state-sanctioned mass murder. It is the minimum necessary response to state terrorism.
And second, because to decry and smear those protesting the mass slaughter of innocents as antisemites is to harness your Jewishness to a morally abhorrent cause: of protecting and perpetuating that slaughter. It is to use your Jewishness as a bludgeon to silence anyone else who still has a moral compass. It is to weaponise your Jewishness to excuse and defend genocide. And it is therefore to provoke exactly what you claim to be trying to stop: antisemitism.
Montefiore, Jacobson, Schama. Each is a ghoul, morally hollowed out by a depraved political ideology of ethnic supremacism called Zionism.
That ideology was always leading towards genocide. And when the moment arrived, each of us faced the ultimate moment of reckoning. Would we stand up and say “No!”, or find an excuse to rationalise the slaughter of children?
Source: Jonathan Cook
Emptying Gaza – with Norman Finkelstein (Chris Hedges, 17.04.2025)