When Jew hatred masquerades as moral outrage: A response to Rob de Mezieres

“God’s ‘chosen people’…my ass!”

That Rob de Mezieres chose to conclude his article of 9 December (How to Justify a Genocide: Zionist Israel’s 3 Big Lies) with this bile-ridden little jibe pretty much says it all. When the word “chosen” is brought up in contexts like this, it is a dead giveaway: It means Jewish people, and it can be taken as read that readers of this publication would have known exactly who was being referred to.

However, while much of De Mezieres’ screed is framed as a denunciation of the supposed crimes of the Israeli state, what it really reveals is the extent of his own unapologetic prejudices when it comes to Jews. It is in this light that his diatribe against Israel needs to be interpreted.

Ever since the Hamas terror attacks of 7 October 2023 and their ensuing violent aftermath, the public discourse has been replete with unbalanced rants against Israel. It is not often, however, that writers have been quite as shameless as De Mezieres when it comes to combining anti-Israel invective with making openly derogatory comments about Jews in general, impugning their motives, questioning their fundamental integrity and distorting and denying them their very history and identity.

Some people evidently believe that the prevalence of unbridled anti-Israel rhetoric provides a licence to indulge in crass displays of Jew hatred – in a word, antisemitism, a word specifically denoting racism towards people of the Jewish faith and/or ethnicity.

De Mezieres is quite unapologetic about revealing his own prejudices on this score, going so far as to mock any concerns Jews might have in this regard and inferring that in fact they are making it all up in order to, as he puts it, “regurgitate, ad nauseam, to guilt-trip the world into supporting Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza”. What comes through, according to this, is that Jews are manipulative, dishonest and not to be trusted, including and perhaps especially when they presume to protest about prejudice towards them. 

‘Chosenness’

Returning to the “chosenness” theme, one needs to explain how, always taking into account the relevant context and intent of those who employ the term, it has both historically and in our own day been used to denigrate Jews and their beliefs. Displays of religious bigotry commonly take the form of twisting certain doctrines of a particular faith so as to portray that religion, and by extension its adherents, as something abhorrent, ridiculous, and generally contemptible.

So far as Judaism is concerned, few such distortions have occurred as regularly through the ages as the malicious caricaturing of the theme of “chosenness”, whereby Jews are portrayed as imagining themselves to be superior to everyone else and consequently justified in pursuing their own selfish interests at the expense of humanity as a whole.

De Mezieres provides a textbook example of how just to go about this, not just with his above-noted concluding remark, but in an earlier comment that is if anything even more egregiously offensive. As he charmingly puts it, “Hmm…why does that ‘chosen people’ thing have a disturbingly familiar ring? Oh yes, I remember now…) Hitler and his Nazis anointed themselves the “Master Race”. Zionists call themselves “God’s chosen people.” Tell me…what’s the fu**** difference?”

There has to be something a little sick about equating what is in fact a nuanced and conditional point of religious doctrine dating back over three millennia with the racial superiority notions of those whose extreme hatred of the Jewish people led to the systematically annihilation of three-quarters of European Jewry. But then, mocking Jews by throwing the colossal tragedy of the Holocaust in their faces and holding them up as being no better than those who perpetrated those crimes against them has long been a commonplace Jew-baiting tactic. 

Another place where De Mezieres crosses the line into outright antisemitism is in his invoking of the supposed “Fake Jews” canard. Also an increasingly commonplace form of anti-Jewish discourse, what this seeks to do is effectively write the greater part of the Jewish people out of history, depriving them the most fundamental aspects of their origins, identity and heritage through denying that they have any links, genetic or otherwise, with the historic nation, and land of Israel.

As per De Mezieres formulation: “As we’ve established, Israel was peopled by mostly white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, which means…they are NOT actually Semites – neither are their descendants. The TRUE semites are the brown-skinned Arabs and Palestinians in the Middle East.”

In the first instance, the obvious point to make is that the majority of Israeli Jews – estimates range between 55% and 62% are not white. They do not come from Europe but other parts of the Middle East (including Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran) as well as from Arab-speaking countries, notably Egypt, Libya and Morocco, in North Africa. That alone refutes the writer’s ill-informed assertion that Israeli Jews are usurpers of a land and heritage that belongs to others.

His assertion regarding the purported origins and true identity of Ashkenazi Jews goes beyond merely getting the facts wrong, however. What he writes amounts to denying, not just without evidence but in the face of extensive evidence to the contrary, an entire section of humanity the very core of their own history and identity.

The assertion that Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites flies completely contrary to the documented historical record. For the greater part of the centuries when they lived in exile, Jewish communities lived entirely apart from their neighbours.

The theory that the latter converted to Judaism is obviously untenable since the prevailing culture of extreme religious intolerance in Christian-dominated Europe for most of the period when Jews were in exile, not to mention the marginalised, vulnerable position that Jews as a despised religious minority found themselves in made it impossible for mass conversions to Judaism to take place.

Are we supposed to believe, moreover, that those “authentic” Jews who actually passed on the entirety of Judaism’s (detailed and complex) religious teachings to the supposedly inauthentic white Europeans abruptly and mysteriously disappeared en masse thereafter? The notion is as preposterous as it is offensive, and of course there is zero evidence for it. It can be added that the predominately Middle Eastern origins of European Jews has also been confirmed by the findings of modern-day population genetics, with multiple independent studies demonstrating the common origins of Ashkenazi Jews and their co-religionists in most other parts of the diaspora. 

Attempting to lie an entire segment out of history can only be regarded as an egregious form of racism, and that is precisely what Rob de Mezieres is guilty of. Early on in his article he writes, “Yes, at some stage they will slap you with that battered, old, well-worn, overused A-card”, the ‘A’ of course referring to antisemitism. To that I can think of no better a response than to invoke the tried and trusted adage, “If the shoe fits, wear it”. 

Having demonstrated the extent of De Mezieres’ prejudiced attitude not simply against Israel (though that too is hardly acceptable) but towards Jews as a whole, it becomes easier to understand the underlying motivation behind the remainder of his article, which is primarily a diatribe against Israel itself. It would take a much longer article than this one to properly respond to each and every one of the incendiary charges he hurls at the Jewish state, but at least some of his more outrageous misrepresentations can be addressed. 

The extent to which the writer is prepared to twist the facts so as to make them fit better into his radical anti-Israel thesis is shown early on in his piece by his underlining of the word “allegedly” regarding the Hamas Massacre on 7 October 2023. That he pointedly chose such a term tells its own story. Given how conclusively those atrocities have been confirmed (including even by the United Nations, despite its being dominated by countries hostile to Israel), it amounts to dishonest historical revisionism at its worst.

Not unlike those who deny that the Holocaust ever took place but is a Jewish fabrication aimed at currying sympathy from the international community while extorting reparations from innocent Germans, apologists for the Hamas terrorist organisation have from the outset sought to deny, or at least greatly minimise the extent of the atrocities perpetrated against the Israeli people on 7 October. De Mezieres is one of them. As he writes, “we’ve now seen multiple reports from credible news outlets – including Israeli media – revealing that many of the Israeli citizens killed on 7 October were killed by IDF soldiers as part of the “Hannibal Directive” (look it up). Including – according to an Israeli police investigation – numerous Israeli citizens at the Nova music festival allegedly gunned down by IDF combat helicopters. Also, despite those accusations of “mass rape” by Hamas and “burned bodies” being thoroughly debunked, Israel, the US and their Western lackeys and puppet media continue to push those lies”.

To that, one can simply refer the writer to the UN’s report on the sexual assault and rape on 7 October, as well as the Sheryl Sandberg documentary, Screams Before Silence. The claims that the murders, mass rapes and burning of bodies on 7 October have been “debunked” is likewise an outrageous lie. Simply stating that something did not occur does not factually rewrite the historical event.

As for the concept that many Israeli’s were killed due to the “Hannibal Directive”, this is concocted after the  fact to detract from the crimes of Hamas on the day. Ultimately, though, the most conclusive evidence for what took place that day originates with those who actually perpetrated the atrocities – the relevant members of Hamas itself.

Not only did those concerned not attempt to conceal their crimes, but they gleefully publicised and celebrated them. The writer here makes himself culpable of the most flagrant atrocity of denialism while at the same time fabricating atrocities committed by the victims of those outrages. This is not legitimate freedom of opinion but outright fake news.

Moving on to the writer’s description of Israel’s actions as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”, this lacks both a basis in law and any objective representation of the complex realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. De Mezieres refers to the deaths of “tens of thousands of mostly women and children” without clear citation of credible data to substantiate these figures. As all but goes without saying, there is no acknowledgement of the fact that by deliberately basing its military operations right in the heartland of Gaza’s civilian population, Hamas itself must be regarded as culpable for the non-combatant casualties resulting from the war that they themselves chose to start. 

Israel’s right to exist

The article contains numerous other statements that lack substantiation and are factually incorrect. One is the writer’s assertion that Israel has no right to exist and that there is no legal basis for its right to be sovereign state. This is a gross misrepresentation of the most basic facts, legal, historical or otherwise.

If anything, Israel has an even greater claim to legitimacy than most countries since it is one of the very few sovereign states whose very coming into being was largely predicated by a majority vote to that effect in the United Nations. Mysteriously, De Mezieres asserts that “just because Israel is ‘recognised’ by 163 of 193 UN member states doesn’t make it legal”.

Amongst other things, Mr De Mezieres, yes, this does make a state “legal”. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? It is hard to imagine what rationale De Mezieres might have had for making so extraordinary an assertion, but then perhaps there never was any. Like Hamas and others of that ilk, what the writer is really saying is not that Israel has no right to exist but that he doesn’t wish it to do so.  

What it really comes down to is that De Mezieres’ true motivations are very far from being underpinned by any genuine sympathy for the Palestinians, let alone any other innocent victims of the tragic, and unnecessary conflict in the region. Both in tone and content, his article reveals a visceral antipathy towards Jews, their history, identity and beliefs. The rights and wrongs of what is happening in the Middle East simply provides him with a convenient framework through which he can propagate his deeply prejudiced views.