In an off-the-wall Observer article recently, author Howard Jacobson essentially smeared as antisemites anyone who dares to criticise Israel’s murder of almost 17,000 children in Gaza in the last year. And amid the backlash, he has dug in, suggesting that the Israeli occupation forces “have to” keep committing genocide.

Howard Jacobson: “There was no alternative”

Speaking to the New Yorker, Howard Jacobson repeated his concern that people would conflate being Jewish to being an Israeli soldier, saying:

You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers.

Then he added that the Israeli attacks on Gaza after 7 October 2023 “turned out very badly”. And with the caveat that he doesn’t like Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, he insisted:

that didn’t mean that something didn’t need doing. There was no alternative to it.

It is actually tragically sad to see Jacobson back himself into a corner, as he does. Because there’s no recognition that 7 October came in the context of decades of brutal Israeli occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. And there’s no recognition that addressing that context would be the real alternative to trying to genocide Gaza into submission.

The number of deaths ‘had to be high’

Howard Jacobson also argued that, after 7 October, it wasn’t possible to “measure life for life”. It wasn’t a case of just avenging the deaths in Israel. Instead, he insisted:

in the attempt to make sure that this never happened again, the numbers were going to inevitably have to be high.

This has consistently been Israel’s strategy in previous attacks on Gaza and elsewhere. And it has never deterred ongoing resistance against Israel’s colonial occupation.

Despite his awareness that the ongoing genocide has “turned out very badly”, he added:

I think the West should continue to give them weapons

The call of Western governments to allow Israel to commit war crime after war crime with impunity was “sound”, he suggested. It has been the people standing up against genocide that “you couldn’t trust”.

On Israel’s actions in the last year, he said:

I do not support everything that they have done. But I get why they have to do it.

No, Howard Jacobson, Israel didn’t “have to” commit genocide

Howard Jacobson has shown his shameful lack of empathy for the world to see. That’s on his conscience. But in the spirit of empathy, we should try to understand how he got to that position.

One American-Jewish scholar argued in 1967 that “Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be”. This paranoid mindset is powerful.

In one academic paper, Gilad Hirschberger, Tom Pyszczynski, and Tsachi Ein-Dor explained that a “primordial fear of death is the driving force” of Israel’s military actions. And “Jewish fear of collective annihilation is a crucial element” of them. And psychologically, this pushes many people in Israel to see things in “black and white”, to oppose “concessions for peace”, to “favor violent solutions to conflict, and relax their moral restraints at times of war”.

A study the paper analysed showed that, when researchers mentioned the Holocaust to Israelis, this “significantly increased support of a pre-emptive strike on Iran when told that the US was opposed to such action”. This showed the “link between Israelis’ fear of annihilation and their siege mentality, such that feelings of isolation perpetuate existential anxieties”. When they learned that the US supported such action, however, it ‘reassured’ them and led to “more measured and less emotional responses”.

The paper stressed that a:

sense of security cannot be established with weapons or financial aid. Rather, existential, psychological security is the knowledge that the world recognizes Israel’s basic rights and will support Israel when it makes concessions and takes the necessary risks. Then, when the siege mentality is lifted will Israel feel confident enough to make peace with its neighbors.

Fear can push you to crazy places

In short, fear as a result of trauma can be a powerful motivating force.

It can make you sick, push you to criminal acts, or convince you to support others committing crimes. Or as seems to be the case for Jacobson, it can make you vulnerable to manipulation by cynical propagandists or demagogues, sometimes resulting in the perception of marginalised groups as dangerous enemies who need to be dealt with.

In this case, fear can push you to justify horrific acts against these perceived enemies, as Howard Jacobson appears to do.

Obviously, mental anguish is not the same as direct physical pain. Someone making you feel uncomfortable or scared is never the same as someone physically assaulting you, slowly torturing or starving you, or murdering you and your family. However, understanding this mental anguish and addressing it is a crucial part of ending apologism for genocide.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.