Israel as the New Rogue State

The people who have thrown their lot in with what poses as a political movement but is in fact more like a Two Minutes Hate against Israel – liberal commentators, left-wing activists, Islamists – are the same people who criticised the Bush regime for dividing the world into Us and Them, Good and Evil, Decent and Rogue. Yet the anti-Israel lobby does the same thing, only its pet rogue is Israel rather than Iraq, and it has won the backing of academics, the serious media and the liberal bourgeoisie rather than colonels and the white-haired right. Fundamentally, the anti-Israel spasm in respectable Western circles is driven by the same urges that underpinned the Bushites’ clumsy interventions into foreign affairs: a desire to escape political stasis at home by seeking the super moral clarity of a fantasy apocalyptic stand-off on the world stage.

Anti-Israel activists’ reliance on the template vocabulary of the Western foreign-policy establishment is striking. They recycle the kind of language that actually should be ruthlessly critiqued and studiously avoided. Left-wing journalist John Pilger says the flotilla incident confirms that Israel is a ‘rogue state’, echoing various other respectable writers that also have branded Israel a ‘rogue’ (Pilger goes on to say: ‘“Rogue” is too soft. Israel is a criminal state.’)

Brendan O'Neill, Spiked