Lopsidedness

Each of the key libels the deranged Left levels at Israel has been fabricated in order to impose an inverted logic on one of the significant features of a century-old conflict between competing nationalist aspirations which, in combination with others, render it existential from the Jewish perspective. 

These are the essential pair...

‘Genocide’

Not only does this represent a fairly deliberate appropriation of Jewish historical experience and a reworking of the ‘blood libel’, it rather crucially diverts attention away from an obvious lopsidedness in the conflict: Israel has had the means to commit genocide and has not*, its enemies have demonstrated their genocidal tendencies at every available opportunity, they have only lacked the means. 

Hence this war has always been an existential struggle for Israel, for the Jews can only really end it by submitting to national dissolution and genocide, where by contrast, the Palestinians could end it almost right away by taking a territorial deal in return for recognition as a nation state and an end to all hostilities. 

‘Apartheid’

This is one of the most pernicious, and not just because it suggests that Jews themselves are beholden to a retrograde, racist ideology.

Those who use it have to be aware that non-Jews in Israel benefit from civil and political rights which Jews could never enjoy in a Muslim-majority country, no matter how weakly fundamentalist. 

Should there one day be peace, with Jewish and Arab states living alongside each other, it will still remain likely that there will be far more Arabs in Israel than Jews in Palestine. 

This is another critical disparity at the heart of the conflict, because it underpins the very need for a state where Jewish safety and self-determination is preserved, and also explains why the ‘right of return’, which Palestinians have refused to surrender as part of any peace agreement, poses such a significant threat to the population of Israel as currently constituted.

* Even if they have tried, they have failed, for the population of Gaza has increased by over 2% since October 2023, with 50,000+ live births according to internationally-recognised statistics.