Since the October 7 butchery of Jews by Gaza’s reigning death cult, the anti-Zionist left and the antisemitic right have indulged in a masterclass of double standards and selective outrage. Social media algorithms, designed to inflame, flood our feeds with Gazan disaster porn.

“The facts of Israel’s bloodshed are staggering.”Credit: Getty Images

Instagram influencers are suddenly brave opponents of the Zionist colonial-settler state. Many of them know little of the Oslo Accords, of Yitzhak Rabin, of Ehud Olmert’s peace plan. They couldn’t tell you who invaded and occupied the West Bank as soon as Israel was created (hint: it wasn’t Israel, and it rhymes with “Blordan”) or who invaded and occupied Gaza (hint: it wasn’t Israel, and it rhymes with “Blegypt”). The online warriors elide the Arab states’ sterling effort at wiping out Israel in 1967 and the attempted do-over in 1973. They denounce Israel’s failure to create a Palestinian state while ignoring the repeated reluctance of Palestinians to condone a two-state solution during periods when a majority of Israelis believed it was not merely desirable but inevitable.

So Jewish Australians have found it head-spinning, since October 7, to be collectively blamed for the plight of Palestinians by anti-Zionists who don’t seem to give two stuffs about actual, real-life Palestinian people – activists who never mention the sinister coercions of Qatar, Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon; who’ve never campaigned for the right of Palestinian refugees to escape Hamas’ brutality by seeking better lives in neighbouring Arab states; who remain silent about Muslims being crushed in Syria, Chechnya, Yemen and Sudan; who chant catchy slogans whose subtexts they don’t understand about rivers and seas, and globalised intifadas; who pretend that Iranian theocracy and jihadist ideology aren’t a problem in Palestine or the wider Muslim world. Many pro-Palestinian Jews who detest Netanyahu are rendered mute by a tsunami of foggy-headed anti-Zionist righteousness so selective that it smells like an anti-Jewish........

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