Brendan O’Neill ponders the unemployment of Israel haters

October 10, 2025 • 11:45 am

The lead story on last night’s NBC News was about the cease-fire in Gaza, and it showed Israelis celebrating the return of the hostages, and Gazan civilians celebrating the cessation of war. Even my Jewish friends in America are celebrating, though they’re properly wary of “stage 2” of the deal: will Hamas gives up its arms and aspirations to control Gaza?

But one group is not celebrating: the pro-Palestinian (and pro-Hamas) activists in the West. Why aren’t they celebrating? This is the question Brendan O’Neill asks in the Spectator article below.  If you won’t read the Spectator or Brendan O’Neill because they’re conservative, well, skip this, but I don’t have a lot of respect for people who would refuse to read a piece like this because of its author or place of publication.

The title is self-explanatory, and you can click on it to read it (or find it archived here). It’s not only well written, but, more important true:

Excerpts (I don’t have a lot to add):

Normal people are cheering the prospect of peace in Gaza. Some might even raise a glass to Donald Trump for his valiant efforts to end this horrible war Hamas started. But there are others who will be feeling forlorn. The anti-Israel mob, to be specific. Won’t you spare a thought for this tragic community that built its entire personality around hating Israel – what are they going to do now?

There is an eerie silence in anti-Israel circles this morning. The people who spent the past two years hollering ‘Ceasefire now!’ seem strangely downbeat about the prospect of a ceasefire. No doubt that’s partly because they would rather eat hot coal than credit Trump with a geopolitical win. But it’s also because they feel the rug of relevance being pulled from under their feet. The brutal truth: peace will rob them of purpose.

It’s been clear for some time now that the fashionable animus for Israel is more than a political position – it’s a religious crusade. These people see Israel not only as a nation fighting a war they don’t like, but as a demonic entity, uniquely barbarous, the poison in the well of humanity. Israel has become a Satan substitute for a godless activist class, the devil against which they measure their own decency. If this war ends, so might their false religion.

They wear the holy garments of Israelophobia so that others will know the depth of their devotion to the cause: the keffiyeh around the necks, the Palestine flag draped like a pashmina over their shoulders. They repeat Israelophobia’s mantras, with little thought but great bombast. Witness how ‘From the river to the sea’ usurped ‘Trans women are women’ as the mating call of woke’s true believers.

. . . .Perhaps the most dangerous thing for the genuflectors to Israelophobia is that Trump’s peace deal shatters the founding lie of their fake faith – namely that Israel is hell-bent on genociding the Palestinian people. In truth, Israel has signed up for a deal that envisions a ceasefire soon and which expressly says that not one Palestinian will be forcibly expelled from Gaza. And so their church crumbles under the weight of its own calumnies.

If the deal works, if Trump and Israel bring peace and banish the anti-Semites of Hamas from public life in Gaza, what will these people do? How will they get their moral kicks? By what means will they advertise to the world their implacable virtue? What will occupy their every waking thought and inform their every political utterance if not that dastardly Jewish State and its ‘genocide’?

Well, there’s always Trump.  Yes, he seems to have done a good thing this time—something that “progressive” leftists would rather die than admit—but he continues his crazy antics elsewhere. Still, Trump doesn’t seem to satisfy people’s needs to signal virtue like the Gaza war has done.

And just when I was about to ask “And what will Greta do?”, O’Neill beat me to the punch:

And poor Greta! She’ll have to go back to talking about climate change, won’t she? Having failed to ‘Save Gaza’, she’ll have to content herself with that oh-so-Nineties mission of saving the planet. Boring! One thinks, too, of the YouTubers who have monetised their hatred for Israel, spending every hour of every day slamming the Jewish State for clicks and bucks. Blessed be the peacemakers, sure, but won’t someone think of the videomakers?

I like what O’Neill said, but remember that the war is far from over: we still have to go to phases 2 and 3: setting up a Gazan government and having Hamas surrender, giving up its weapons and, ideally, migrating to Qatar or some other state.  And until that’s done, the protests will continue and the Israel haters will march on. As O’Neill says:

Of course, there’s another possibility – that they will double down. That they will carry on traipsing against Israel, zombie-style, even when peace descends. Indeed, Your Party, the Zarah Sultana/ Jeremy Corbyn freakshow, is advertising a march in London this weekend. ‘We march on’, the flyer says, ‘until apartheid falls’. For two years, they screamed ‘Ceasefire now!’ – so why are they still marching? I’m tempted to go and laugh from the sidelines. Who’s with me?

Not me!  For peace hasn’t descended yet.

They will continue marching until there are two states: Israel and Palestine, or one state: Palestine engulfing Israel.  Either is a long way off.  The main point that should dampen O’Neill’s glee is that although the protestors did cry “Ceasefire now!” what they really meant was “Eliminate Israel and get rid of all the Jews.” And that ain’t gonna happen. So the marches will continue.

29 thoughts on “Brendan O’Neill ponders the unemployment of Israel haters”

  1. The conservative site Red State today pondered the silence of the “Ceasefire Now!” crowd. A friend of mine wonders what the next big thing will be.

  2. I find the “T&%p did a good thing” line rather odd. We would be nowhere close to the point things are at now, had T$&p not given Bibi carte blanche to kill everyone and destroy everything. That after doing this they’ve secured a peace deal doesn’t seem quite so laudatory.

    1. The Gaza war has been going on for two years. If Israel was indeed interested in “killing everyone and destroying everything”, they could have accomplished that in less than a day.

    2. Please give me a break. The IDF has clearly not been trying to “kill everyone and destroy everything” whether or not Trump gave them free rein.

      Nobody gave the U.S. carte blanche to bomb Japan or Germany during WWII, but it’s likely that doing that saved lives in the end.

      1. Sorry, not “everyone.” Just some 70k people, which seems like enough to make the point.

        Most of my family lives in Israel, so of course I’m glad there’s a cease fire. I was simply observing why some may not want to give T*^%p applause for it.

        1. Do you not realize that half of those people killed might be Hamas members or other terrorists?. No, the point is that the IDF risked their lives to not kill civilians when they could have killed everyone in Gaza from the air with no trouble. You are quoting Hamas figures, as well.

          I see you are also unwilling to spell Trump. Woes seeing his name offend you? I think you need to joing the crowd at Pharyngula

        2. I will confront you more directly, Mr. Kaufman. No, 70,000 even if true is not enough to “make the point” if Hamas is able to fight on. Quitting without surrender by the enemy would require mowing the lawn again in a few years. It may anyway. Military historians such as Margaret MacMillan (no relation) say that 30% casualties in a military force usually make it unable or unwilling to fight, and 10% losses among a militarized civilian population render it unable to produce enough to feed itself and sustain a war. Many belligerents throw in the towel at much lower casualty figures, with a nod to the inevitable, while some fanatical militaries in dictatorships may be willing to incur bigger losses, especially with outside help. Willingness is different from ability, though, especially if blockades, perfectly legal under the laws of war, produce widespread hunger. The enemy government must always divert “humanitarian” aid to its military to sustain the soldiery. Hamas is not uniquely evil here — why else did we put up with rationing during the Second World War? So all nations at war must endure civilian hunger and deprivation inflicted on them by us their enemies, if we can. The Royal Navy starved Germany during the First World War. America starved Japan in the Second.

          So somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 deaths and disabling casualties, depending on how distributed between fighters and militarized civilians (even if they are militarized merely as human shields), could be inflicted on Gaza if Israel’s goal was to “make the point.” That Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump seem to have brought this to an end with only 70,000 enemy deaths (top end of credibility), return of surviving hostages, and a bearable (maybe just bearable) number of IDF casualties — may the recoveries of the living be speeded by this news — is a remarkable humanitarian achievement.

        3. Sir,

          Whatever the IDF has done or is doing or will do, do you have any specific thoughts to express regarding Hamas’s refusal to allow Palestinians citizens to use the underground tunnels to protect themselves?

      2. It is unclear (at least to me) if the bombing of Germany saved or cost lives. The nuclear attacks on Japan are considerably less ambiguous (to me). Perhaps 20,000,000 Japanese would have died had the US invaded Japan. To their mutual credit, Truman and Hirohito were horrified of what the invasion would entail (teenage Japanese girls attacking GI’s with bamboo sticks and being killed by automatic weapons). The nuclear attacks put an end to that nightmare and saved millions of lives.

        1. What matters is to never do that again. No mass starving of civilians, no conquering living space, no carpet bombings. What was perhaps acceptable back then should not be okay now.

          1. In existential war you will do all that and much worse. Optional war, perhaps not. Depends on how badly you need to win and how resourceful and unscrupulous the enemy is. At the limit you’ll do whatever it takes to destroy his ability to make war on you. Kill all his ten-year-old boys if you have to so they don’t grow up to be his soldiers. The only mandatory rule is to stop when he surrenders.

            Protecting its people from extermination is just as much the absolute duty of the state today as it was back then. That doesn’t change. The only thing that’s changed is our belief for the first time in history that we will never need to do that again, not that we mustn’t. You can’t say it’s not OK now until you know we won’t need to ever again. There’s nothing magic about the passage of time that makes the necessary into the impermissible.

  3. It all depends on phase 2 and 3. I am not optimistic.

    But even if that all comes to pass, the questions “How will they get their moral kicks? By what means will they advertise to the world their implacable virtue? ” is that they will simply move on to another Flashy Cause with a healthy dose of amnesia. Maybe they will take over campuses and stop traffic for long overdue demonstrations to Stop the War in Ukraine.
    Nah. Those are White people.

    It really does irk me to see that Tr*mp might actually get his Peace Prize, though. It is ok to be annoyed at how this might play out.

      1. He’s supporting the opposition in Venezuela. She is the opposition. It follows, in my opinion. And who wouldn’t oppose the crazy Chavez/Maduro regime?

        I’m with Jerry in publicly recognizing when Trump (that POS, miserable excuse for a human) does something right.

  4. I can’t be the only one that finds the phrase, “false religion,” unnecessarily redundant, am I?

    I suspect that Qatar might be putting some pressure on Hamas behind the scenes in light of the announcement that Qatar will be building an Air Force Base in Idaho. https://tinyurl.com/mr3c6den

    1. I am flabbergasted at the naysayers who think letting the planet’s foremost funder and defender of Islamist terrorism have a role in the design, funding, construction and continuing operation of a US military facility which will have computer connections to the US Department of Defense is one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas.

      Such negativism!

    2. I strongly suspect Qatar leaned on Hamas, too.

      In any case, here’s hoping for the return of the hostages and peace.

  5. Yup. It’s all true. Most of the protestors are losers in search of meaning. Where will poor Greta turn up next? We should have a contest to see who guesses correctly.

  6. I will read this right now. Brendan O’Neill has been magnificent on the October 7 pogrom and its repercussions, at the Spiked website. Day after day, piece after piece, he’s been providing bracingly written spot-on argumentation.

  7. Jerry, thank you very much for posting this and for posting the archive link. I really appreciate being able to read this; and I have to be very careful with my subscribe dollars as a retiree.

    1. If you copy most paywalled urls and paste them into an archive website you will be able to read them. If someone has already archived the article it will appear right away and if they haven’t it will take a couple of minutes while it archives it for you.

  9. From what I have seen the Israel-haters are not pivoting but bearing down even more. Since there ceasefire there have been numerous posts and some protests still calling for BDS and accusing Israel of ‘apartheid’ and other hand catch-phrases.

  10. Without commenting on the post (which I broadly agree with) I will say that there are three great weekly British political magazines: on the right there is the Spectator, now edited by Michael Gove; on the left is the New Statesmen, and in the centre the Economist. Thing is that all three are intelligently written, arguing their corner with good writing and clarity of thought. I might not agree with what they are saying (especially the Speccy!) but that doesn’t detract from their quality.

  11. Brendan O’Reilly is not a conservative. He is a former Marxist-Leninist who calls himself a Marxist libertarian and is a free-speech absolutist. He’s written a fine little book about Oct. 7, “After the Pogrom.”

  12. Pingback: Middle East ceasefire is widely celebrated – but Peters notes that the pro-Palestine protesters have been silent – Point of Order

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