Now we see you - again

So this is what it has come to: all that talk of decolonisation, of freedom fighters, of liberation and heroic resistance. All those open letters from academics, the marches and protests and hashtags, and it ends with this: parading the coffins of children as some kind of triumphant prize, surrounded by masked gunmen dressed like terrorists from central casting, under an antisemitic image of a Jewish leader as a bloodsucking vampire with a slogan claiming that Jewish Nazis killed their own.

Sometimes a person’s initial response, coming from their gut, is the truest of all, and this feels like an appropriate day to remind ourselves of how some people reacted to the images of death, murder and kidnapping emerging from southern Israel on October 7 and the days that followed. While the Jewish world was full of shock and grief, what did some other people think about Hamas kidnapping babies?

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) decided to organise not one, but two demonstrations: one outside the Israeli embassy for Monday 9 October, and another through central London the following Saturday. “The Palestinians will continue to enact their God-given right to resist oppression and occupation by any means necessary,” promised one of the speakers at the 9 October rally, to cheers from the crowd.

In Manchester, the local PSC branch paraded behind banners that read “Glory to the Palestinian Freedom Fighters”, and “Manchester Supports Palestinian Resistance.”

A speaker at an anti-Israel protest in Brighton said “Yesterday was a victory … it was so beautiful and inspiring to see … we need to celebrate these acts of resistance because this is, this is a success.”

The Socialist Workers Party said “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.”

Islamist groups 5 Pillars and CAGE published an open letter signed by over forty-five “leading members of the British Muslim community” affirming “the right to armed struggle … We reject the use of the word “terrorism” to describe Palestinian acts of resistance.”

Around 3,500 “academics, students and activists” from 120 different British universities signed a letter whose only oblique mention of the Hamas terrorist attack was to justify it. “Israel stands as an ongoing settler colonial project,” it asserted, “and we demand recognition of the right to resist Zionist settler colonialism.”

Numerous Palestine Solidarity Campaign branches and student Palestine Societies posted their solidarity with this “resistance”.

Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University described the kibbutzim of southern Israel - including Kibbutz Nir Oz, where the Bibas family lived - as “settler colonies" (even though they are on sovereign Israeli territory) and predicted that “the colonists’ flight from these settlements may prove to be a permanent exodus”. He was wrong about that: unlike the corrupt, hollow Assad regime in Syria, the dictatorships swept away in the Arab Spring, or the Afghan government that couldn’t survive without US backing, Israelis have proven on October 7 and every day since that they have the will to fight and die for their country. They aren’t going anywhere.

Some seem to have regretted their initial flurry of enthusiasm for murder and kidnapping. A lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London - my alma mater where I did my PhD - tweeted “Sometimes partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp where a million people are starved has consequences.” He has since deleted the tweet.

An editor at Novara Media tweeted “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide, as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers' territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn't apologise for it.” She has since deleted the tweet and, against her own initial advice, has indeed apologised for it.

This is just a sample of the outpouring of nauseating justifications and excuses for Hamas on that day. Back then, shortly after the October 7 massacre, I wrote:

Now we see you. Now we see who and what you really are, with clear eyes. For years we have been told that this is just about supporting human rights, opposing occupation, protesting war crimes. That Hamas was moderating. That antisemitism is not tolerated in your movement. That all you want is one state with equal rights for all. But now we see you. You don’t stand for human rights or against war crimes, not where we are concerned. Right now, it looks for all the world like you are standing for the murder of Jews.

Today, the Jewish world is grieving again. The hope that the Bibas family might have survived became totemic, and now they are lost forever. Looking at the coffins of Shiri*, Ariel and Kfir Bibas and Oded Lifschitz being presented today in the latest macabre demonstration of Hamas’s cruelty, I am reminded of those feelings once more.

We see you yet again, all of you who have marched through our cities these past 16 months with your pictures of Hamas paragliders and bulldozers, your placards praising Hamas, your calls for “armed resistance” and “Intifada”, your red triangles and green headbands. You could have led a movement calling for peace, for coexistence, for the return of hostages and an end to all killing. But you didn’t, and this is where your movement has ended up: with Jewish children in coffins turned into grotesque propaganda props by Hamas, all in the name of your glorious resistance.

*Since publishing this post it has emerged that the coffin of Shiri Bibas did not, in fact, contain Shiri’s remains, but that of an unidentified other person. I find it unfathomably chilling that I am even writing these words, that such a thing could even occur, but this, it seems, is where we are.