War is hell for all and elite ignorance does not help

The war in Israel and Palestine is clearly real and terrible. You could pick 1000 starting points from October 7 to the levelling of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD – not to mention the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the French. What’s a few millennia between friends?

The difference between this and countless other wars is the fevered passion it triggers among academic and cultural elites in the West, and of course, our always impassioned undergraduate youth.

And that is what is so bizarre and disturbing about the anti-Israel and often outright anti-Jewish ferocity that seems to be sweeping the western intelligentsia.

The greatest irony is not so much that it is unintelligent, but that for a progressive cultural class so obsessed with seeking out and decrying racism in the most obscure and absurd corners, it is so singularly fixated with rage towards one particular ethnic group – the most overt definition of racism imaginable.

But first let us quickly and flippantly deal with the centuries of horror and genocide that have beset the holy lands since well before they were holy or otherwise. Like almost every populated place on the planet, they were subject to war and dispossession and numerous attempts at what we now call genocide.

Long story short, history was awful for almost everyone. And it was particularly so for anyone living in or exiled from the nexus of the three great monotheistic religions.

It is understandable that most people in an increasingly materialist and atheist society fail to know this. However, it is unforgivable that preachy and supposedly educated elites could be so ignorant of basic regional and global history.

Both sides have guilt in this. Either deliberately or unknowingly they pick and choose their historical starting gun or whitewash a broader historical scope. This only fuels the ongoing cycle of murder and hate.

Israelis should stop their illegal settlements on Palestinian land and Palestine should allow Israel to, you know, exist. But why allow commonsense or compromise to enter the debate?

No, let us heed the words of angry overprivileged students at western universities who flock to rallies chanting “Palestine from the river to the sea” without any understanding of the geographical consequence of that, or – worse still – with one.

Because that’s the craziest thing about this crazy debate: Namely that the chant “from the river to the sea” is literally a call for genocide, the elimination of Israel and all the Jews and Israeli Arabs therein.

It is deadset weird that in the same breath that radical progressives demand the banning of the Nazi salute, they also demand the annihilation of the Jewish state. For a movement so supposedly obsessed with genocide, you have to wonder which move they consider might have a more genocidal impact.

And then you have to wonder about the unconscious – or perhaps conscious – racism or welldocumented anti-Semitism of the white upper-middle class.

Long before and throughout the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas there has been a far more deadly and devastating war going on in exactly the same region. It is in fact the only ongoing war that Australia has been asked to join.

For a decade, Yemen has been beset by a civil war fought between Houthi rebels (backed by Iran) and the government (backed by Saudi Arabia). Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have died, not to mention countless combatants on both sides. Australia was recently and now infamously asked by the US to provide a warship to aid in the safe passage of maritime trade. Shamefully, we failed.

Now ask yourself: How many campus rallies have been held in solidarity with the Yemenis? How many protesters have chanted “Gas the Saudis”? How many people knew that war was even happening at all?

Apparently “all lives matter” in the Gaza war, but when Yemenis are being killed at 10 times the rate of Palestinians in a Sunni-Shiite war instead of an Israeli-Palestinian war suddenly the Left goes deathly silent.

When contrarians dared to write “#alllivesmatter” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement there was all hell to pay for their impudence.

The truth is that all lives really do matter and war is horribly cruel to almost every human being it touches. But the least sympathetic victims are those whose hypocrisy is exposed the moment the first bullet is fired.