The Creeping Authoritarianism of Political Anti-Zionism
The Creeping Authoritarianism of Political Anti-Zionism
Out of Scotland comes the logical endpoint of the Orwellian war on Israel’s legitimacy, which also happens to be a war on reason and persuasion.
John Mason, a 16-year parliamentarian with the Scottish National Party, has been expelled from the party for saying that there was “no genocide” in Gaza. In August, Mason stated an obvious truth: It is not genocide to be winning a war. He was investigated for the statement and says he’s been informed he will be expelled from the party.
The accusation of genocide in Gaza, where Israel moved 1 million civilians out of Rafah so it could dislodge Hamas fighters from underground tunnels there, is on its face preposterous. Mason pointed this out. In responding to another MP’s tweet lobbing the big lie at Israel, Mason noted that if Israel wanted to commit genocide, the war would look very different.
I suppose it says something about the dumbing down of political discourse that that even has to be explained. Genocide is a defined concept, and a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio approaching 1:1 is objectively not genocide. But if you’re on the anti-Israel global left, you may not acknowledge that words have definitions. Which is another way of saying you are punished for believing there are such things as “facts.”
Mason didn’t take it even that far: He believes a party should at least be able to withstand internal disagreement over whether something that’s not a genocide is a genocide.
“To be expelled over a disagreement over the definition of a word — an important word, genocide — but to be expelled for that reason is extremely disappointing,” Mason told BBC Radio.
To his credit, rather than succumbing to some kind of Soviet reprogramming, Mason stood by his statement: “There is a war going on. Lives have been lost, desperately sadly, as they have been in Ukraine, as they have been in every war. But there is a difference between war and genocide and to say that every war is genocide is not the way we use that word.”
He also pointed out that just because something isn’t genocide doesn’t mean it is above reproach, just that accuracy in criticism is important. “We don’t tend to say that the bombing of German cities was genocide, we don’t tend to say that Hiroshima was genocide — these were acts of war, maybe disproportionate.”
Mason seems understandably baffled by the controversy. But it’s a glimpse into where political anti-Zionism is headed. Mason was told he violated a party rule with his comments but has not been told what that rule was. There’s a certain consistency to this. After all, if the modern left-of-center anti-Israel movements are going to subscribe to Soviet anti-Zionism, the same folks surely subscribe to Soviet logic as well.
At its heart this is an authoritarian mindset: It’s never clear what the rules are so you must obey the party leadership, never challenge it. You are in violation if the party says you are.
And it’s easy to see where this is going. Scotland has laws against “hate speech,” and the trend both there and in wider Europe is to increasingly criminalize speech. It’s likely that future crackdowns will make Mason’s punishment seem positively generous—he’s not even going to jail for saying Israel isn’t committing genocide! What a benevolent system this is.
Modern Western progressive politics exists on a slippery slope—there is no even ground. For how long will it even be considered acceptable to deny an anti-Jewish blood libel?
We should note the flip side of this. The pro-Hamas hordes marching through the streets of the enlightened West have been openly calling for genocide against Jews, including but not limited to chanting a Hamas founding statement that seeks the murder and expulsion of non-Arabs from the region.
This is permitted speech, but at what point will it become mandatory speech? In the Scottish National Party, it is not permitted speech to say that Israel isn’tcommitting genocide. It’s not much of leap from Mason’s expulsion to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” becoming something like a loyalty oath, the way professing one’s anti-Zionism already is among various university clubs in the U.S.
“Israel should disappear” is rapidly becoming the default position of political parties and movements around the world. The SNP’s expulsion of Mason suggests it’ll soon become the only acceptable position.
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