Daily Times

The Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn is presently Great Britain’s favourite political piñata, getting clubbed for all directions by friends and foes alike. Often described as the party’s “token lefty” Corbyn in September 2015 capped a meteoric rise from outlier to chief after the incumbent Ed Miliband resigned following Labour’s general election rout. Things have gone pear-shaped for him since, especially following the Brexit vote where Britons opted to leave the European Union (EU). Staunchly pro-Europe, Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) were apoplectic at Corbyn’s lukewarm campaigning for the Remain vote, and subsequently passed a no-confidence motion in his leadership.

Labour’s new leader found himself in the firing line again on June 30 after his comments linking the Islamic State (IS) to Israel at an internal probe into anti-Semitism arising from the suspensions of MP’s Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone outraged sectors of the party. In trying to make a point about the fallacy of assigning collective responsibility to entire nations for the acts of a deranged few, Corbyn explained, “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the [Benjamin] Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.”

The backlash was swift as political opponents angling for his job jumped at the chance to skewer him. Ruth Smeeth, a Jewish MP, launched a fierce broadside at Corbyn for failing to defend her when certain participants at the probe, presumably his supporters, directed “anti-Semitic slurs” her way. She insisted Corbyn “resign immediately and make way for someone with the backbone to confront racism and anti-Semitism in our party and the country.” Outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron, himself humbled and forced to resign after the Brexit vote, could also not resist firing one last jibe at his hapless colleague, thundering in parliament “For heaven’s sake man, go!”

The British Jewry, meanwhile, reacted to Corbyn’s comments with predictable venom. Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, immediately denounced them as “demonisation of the highest order” and symptomatic of “how deep the sickness is in parts of the left of British politics today.” His accusation is strange considering a particular strain of the Jewish worldview spawned Britain’s Labour movement. I refer, of course, to Karl Marx and his scathing diatribes against the global capitalist order that eventually inspired “international socialism,” Bolshevism and the Soviet Union. Still, how do Israelis respond when two of their own, army generals no less, slam the Jewish state for massively oppressing Palestinians? Naturally, with dyed-in-the-wool indifference befitting an occupying force.

On May 20, storied Israeli defence minister and ex-army chief, Moshe Yaalon, quit his post citing an inability to reconcile with the “extremist and dangerous elements” taking over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party government. Netanyahu didn’t miss a beat and posthaste replaced him with the hawkish, hard-right politician Avigdor Lieberman, thereby validating Yaalon’s position.

Earlier the same month, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), General Yair Golan, had publicly voiced his alarm at Netanyahu’s penchant for fear-mongering designed to incite hatred for Arabs among Israeli Jews. Choosing Holocaust Remembrance Day with its historic gravitas to address this growing xenophobia, Golan rued what he saw as “revolting trends” harking back to Europe in the 1930s and the rise of fascism in Germany. “There is nothing easier than to hate those who are different; there is nothing easier than to sow fear and terror; there is nothing easier than to behave like animals,” he proclaimed somberly.

All the while, Palestine continues to bleed. The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a Jewish think-tank, estimates over 75,000 Palestinians have perished from Israeli military operations since 1948. Knowing the source, we can safely add a few thousand more to this number. Since September 2015 alone, some 200 Palestinians have been killed in new skirmishes with Israeli law enforcement. This uptick in violence is attributed to Netanyahu’s announcement upon reelection in March 2015 that there would be no Palestinian state created on his watch.

The Israeli premier’s intransigence has effectively put the UN-backed peace process in cold storage. Both sides have also acquired a savage bloodlust pursuant to his declaration. In November 2015, an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem emptied his entire gun magazine at a 13-year old Palestinian girl armed only with scissors. More recently, in late June, a Palestinian boy stabbed a teenage Israeli girl to death after breaking into her house in the occupied West Bank. Violence truly begets violence.

Taking advantage of US President Barack Obama’s personality clash with Netanyahu, however, the international community has begun turning the screws on Israel to try to put the peace process back on track. The EU decided in January that goods made on illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank could not be labelled “Made in Israel,” and companies continuing with the practice faced boycott or bans. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, reports such settlements, numbering in the hundreds, are “established on vast tracts of land taken from the Palestinians, in breach of international humanitarian law.” The situation in “Area C,” which constitutes 60 percent of the occupation, is especially dire.

The IDF exercises iron-fisted control over this zone, routinely stamping the rights of local Palestinians who are forced to live in squalour and dread having their homes bulldosed at a moment’s notice. UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon has already called Israel’s actions in these occupied territories tantamount to stoking “fear, humiliation, frustration and mistrust” in native Arabs, thereby sowing the seed of trans-generational hatred that will leave Palestine in flames for decades. Cameron similarly labelled its occupation “genuinely shocking” in his February address to the British parliament after touring Jerusalem. Israel, ironically, prides itself on being “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Yet, short of wearing yellow badges or pointy hats, the Palestinians may as well be living in Nazi Germany.

The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist