Melanie Phillips, a Jew for genocide?

Some time ago Melanie Phillips of the Mail on Sunday and Jewish Chronicle, described mild mannered Jewish critics of Israel as "Jews for genocide." Her zionist colleague at the Jewish Chronicle, Guardian columnist and occasional leader writer, Jonathan Freedland, baulked at that description. But now here's Melanie in this week's Jewish Chronicle joining the Israeli Jewish zionists who have lost their moral compass completely and are now discussing, indeed planning, depriving the Gaza civilian population of all of the means of life itself.

Is the Jewish people capable of defending itself properly? This may seem an absurd question to ask when Israel has created a formidably armed society in an explicit renunciation of the powerlessness of the Jewish diaspora.

But with Israel under internal and external pressure over its decision to designate Gaza a “hostile entity” and the prospect that it may cut off its fuel and electricity, we might ponder the absurdity of it not doing so.

Has something changed here? Israel has always been based on a cultivated and encouraged genocidal impulse of settlers towards the natives. All are agreed that Israel isn't colonial in the expoitative sense. Elimination of the natives was always the aim of the mainstream zionist movement. But what happened to the circumspection called for by Herzl and practised so adeptly by a combination of labour zionist hypocrisy and western government and media connivance? Decades the zionists have spent covering their crimes and blaming the victims as the aggressors. Now Melanie Phillips - yes a wacko but - a mainstream journo can openly join the settler population in occupied Palestine in calling for the application of a water diet on top of the food diet forced on the Gaza population. The Jewish Chronicle is happy to publish this outrage but their readership is almost entirely Jewish (and its circulation is in decline). I must check the Mail on Sunday tomorrow to see if Melanie Phillips sees fit to share this sordid genocidal racism with her goyishe readers.

I should say that I did my usual here and only read part of the article. I just returned to it and I see that Melanie Phillips is promoting the same racial mythology that Howard Jacobson was promoting a couple of weeks ago. It's the idea that all Jews come from an Israel that was purged of its entire population by the Romans and that in the intervening 2,000 years Jews have done nothing but "yearn" for return and suffer a real physical exile. The difference is that while the "left wing" Jacobson thinks we should "feel" for the Palestinians' exile (don't panic, not in a doing anything about it sort of a way), Phillips pretends that they haven't been exiled at all or if they have they deserved it for being enemies of the Jews.

So where now? An open call in a Jewish community newspaper for the intensification of a genocidal campaign that was first mooted in the 1890s and initiated in 1947 and continuing "even as we speak." The call has already been made in the mainstream Israeli press and there have been Israeli cabinet ministers openly calling for what would be called nazi policies were they repeated in a European cabinet. How long before this enters the mainstream discourse of the west. And how long before some of the fascist parties of Europe start to say that all they want is what Israel already has?

I'm not sure but I think a line has been crossed here. I think that sort of thing shouldn't even be published but I wonder if there will be any counter argument in the JC next week. A truly unedifying spectacle, the Jewish community openly discussing whether or not one and a half million people should be deprived of the means of life itself.