Star Wars tells the story of a heroic resistance struggling against
a fascistic empire that commits genocide at the push of a button via
its planet-sized weapon, the Death Star. But this Death Star has a
fatal flaw: a small hole in the side, and if you can fire a rocket
into that hole then you blow up the entire Death Star, you avert
impending genocide, and you lift the imperial jackboot from the
necks of free peoples everywhere.
This is the metaphor that Irish actress Denise Gough, who is
starring in a recent Star Wars TV spin off, reached for a few weeks
ago, when she wanted to explain why defeating Israel is the key to
ending all global suffering. “The Death Star is like all of it”, she
said: Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, “all of it, everywhere”, and Palestine
is like that small hole, the weak point of the entire imperial
system. “If we can free Palestine,” she said, “it explodes
everything” and ends imperial oppression for all.
The novelist Pankaj Mishra made a similar argument, albeit in more
highbrow terms, in his recent book, The World After Gaza, in
which Mishra argued that the war in Israel and Gaza is of a
different quality and significance than any other on earth, not
because of the scale of death and destruction, the depth of Western
involvement, or its sheer longevity, but simply and solely because
Israel is Jewish. Only the Jews, he wrote, straddle humanity’s
deepest fault lines: in the last century, “between religious
tradition and secular modernity, capitalism and socialism, democracy
and totalitarianism”; and now, in the form of Israel, “between Arabs
and Jews, Global North and Global South, and white and non-white
One more example: in August last year, Michael Fakhri, the United
Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and a professor at
the University of Oregon School of Law, published a report titled
peoples”. Therefore the “Jewish State”, he wrote, is “of great and
ominous significance” for all of humanity; and it is Israel, not
Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, or Xi’s China, which is causing a
“collapse of the free world”.
“Palestine and the Right to Food”, which argued that “the tools and
techniques that will free the Palestinian people from occupation,
oppression, and exploitation will ultimately be the same ones that
can free us all.” Fakhri was writing about hunger and the global
food industry, and it’s that same claim, that same belief, that
freeing Palestine frees the world; in this case, it promises
liberation from the harms done by industrialised agriculture and
processed foods. Even this, it seems, could be overcome if only Gaza
were free. “Most of the world’s population”, Fakhri explained,
“suffer under food systems that harm or kill them through slower
forms of violence than in Gaza today”; “By fighting Israel’s
starvation campaign against the Palestinians, people are in effect
also fighting for their own freedom from hunger.”
I have no idea what the people making these arguments think is the
material basis for their claims. It strikes me as implausible, to
say the least, that the IDF lifting restrictions on Gazan fishermen
would somehow bring an end to agricultural deforestation in Brazil.
But these aren’t really material claims at all, but modern
expressions of a persistent and enduring belief that Jews, in one
form or another, are the keystone in the arch that holds up
civilisation, and that if you want to bring the existing order
crashing down and replace it with something radically
transformative, you have to first remove this Jewish influence; or
at least take away its power.
