When I watch BBC news, which I watch more than any other channel, I know that compassionate people all over the UK are absorbing images of suffering from Gaza and hearing about the children, women, doctors and journalists who seem to be paying the price of war. The viewers are told of imminent starvation, due to Israel withholding humanitarian aid. As I follow COGAT, the  Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, I have reason to believe that Israel is not withholding aid but that the presence of Hamas and UN agencies delay or impede the distribution of goods. I know that this is not generally believed, the reason being that a country which is said to be starving people, primarily children, women, doctors and journalists, is not likely to be believed when it denies the proposition already in circulation.

The findings of the BBC, Amnesty, the UN and their special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories are cited time and again by progressives and classically conservative antisemites alike to apostrophize diaspora Jews, bound up with concern for Israel’s survival, for our families sheltering from the endless rockets, thoughts of the hostages and whether they are still alive and the need to prevail over Hamas and the Islamic Palestinian Jihad. How can we explain this to the social media belligerents, who post photos of dead children, often holding me personally responsible which, to be fair, is because I generally voice support for Israel and defence against the usual calumnies.

I understand that they believe they are witnessing – via BBC, Sky, CNN and the Guardian – barbaric violence against a defenceless people and they are irritated to be called antisemites, which they strenuously deny. And they wonder if all that persecution of Jews over the centuries, which some of them studied for Key Stage 4 History, was not after all for some good reason. When Roald Dahl said that Hitler did not ‘pick on Jews for no reason’ he was not quite such an outlier as one would hope. The number 109 is attached to so much social media that one recognizes it on sight, like a swastika or the lightening flash of the British fascists. What is 109? They say we were expelled from 109 countries and that, if a child were expelled from so many schools, one would have to suppose that there was something wrong with the child’s behaviour. As shown in the link below, the number 109 is ‘white supremacist numeric shorthand ‘ but white supremacism reaches beyond its own borders and is deployed in the argument against Israel and Zionism by some in the middle ground, who find themselves charged with antisemitism.

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/109110

When those driven by righteous fury against Israel are called antisemites, they point out that anti Zionism is not antisemitism; that certain men wearing streimels and peyot are photographed burning Israeli flags; that Palestinians are actually semites while – and here they are stepping inadvertently into the antisemitic quicksand – while Jews are a Turkic people called Khazars. QED, they are not antisemites, and at this point they may remember to post the meme of Shulamit Aloni saying ‘It’s a trick, we always use it.’ If you google these words alone, Shulamit Aloni will come up, mentioned in many articles which set forth our trickiness, our use of the ‘victim card’ to carry out acts of barbarity.

Unfortunately, it has been impossible for me to be unacquainted with the myriad clichés of online antisemitism. If you are on social media, they will come to you.

How does one explain to an apparently well-meaning and conscientious person who makes use of all these clichés, memes and biased agencies that they have strayed on to the road more travelled, where jackboots marched and, before them, the Black Hundreds, the Holy Inquisition, the Crusaders and more. Their alibi is the so called ‘Jewish bloc’ on the Palestinian demos, who hate Zionism even more than they do.

Some insist that we can never explain sufficiently and that this is why Israel has to be strong, against the day when the nations of the world decide, like Roald Dahl, that if we are outliers, outsiders indeed, there must be some good reason.

I know the forms of antisemitism but not the answers to it. I also believe that Israel has to be strong against the day when the nations rise up against us. I believe that some people will risk everything to stand with us, to prevent that happening, but I also know that adversaries are being created day by day. The market for biased reporting is self-perpetuating: the viewers expect it now and may not accept anything else.