After a few days off duty I’d intended to return today with a post on US backed Islamist terror in Syria. It’ll have to wait, two things having distracted me. One being the Dawn French apology for an Instagram video insufficiently condemnatory of October 7, the other a Jewish Chronicle piece on why its author heroically defied calls to sign a letter condemning genocide in Gaza.
First the Vicar of Dibley. I haven’t seen her video – she’s taken it down to mollify the Lobby her critics – but the Independent tells us:
… [French] attempted to critique those supporting Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. In the since-deleted video she said, in an exaggerated tone, “complicated, no, but nuanced. But [the] bottom line is no.
“Yeah, but you know they did a bad thing to us… and we want that land… and we have history… Those people aren’t really even people, are they?” She continued with each statement ending with “no”.
The video, viewed more than four million times, was strongly critiqued, with many feeling she trivialised the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. In response, French issued a lengthy apology and acknowledged that her satirical video failed in its original intention.
I can think of three reasons why she categorically should not have apologised:
- As Jonathan Cook pointed out nineteen months ago, those who condemn the October 7 breakout have no control over how that will be used. Their condemnations will serve the media agendas of powerful interests to justify their complicity in genocide.
- Insofar as it targeted IDF personnel, the breakout was an act of lawful resistance to land theft, unlawful occupation, illegal settlement and ethno-supremacism in Palestine as a whole …
… and to incarceration in a Gaza described in 2004 by former Head of Israel’s National Security Council, Major General Giora Eiland, as “a huge concentration camp”. 1
- Even if we discount Israelis killed by the IDF on October 7, in an extension from military to civilian context of the Hannibal Directive – and even if we disregard Israel’s proven lies on beheaded babies and systematic rape 2– there is the matter of proportionality and that of collective punishment, a war crime. However we apportion the blame, some 1200 Israelis died that day. In twenty months of IDF response, no credible source disputes that many tens of thousands of Gazans have been butchered with US, British, Italian and other weaponry. We might ask, therefore, what an equitable ratio should look like. How many Palestinians should die to atone for loss of one Israeli life?
On the other hand I can think of only one reason for the apology:
- Dawn French has enraged powerful forces who will capitalise on her self abasement to discourage other celebs from leveraging their status and the platform it confers to speak out against a genocide.
I’ve just seen Caitlin Johnstone’s post today, Offending Zionists Is Good, Actually. She writes:
British comedian Dawn French was successfully pressured into publicly apologizing for a video she made in opposition to the Gaza holocaust after Israel supporters made a stink claiming she was insensitive to Israel about October 7.
I can’t believe it’s 2025 and people are still worried about offending Zionists. Oh gosh I’d better issue an apology, I’ve upset the people who are cheerleading an active genocide. Better be careful how I word this or I might seem insensitive to people who think it’s fine to bomb hospitals and burn children alive. Oh no I can’t say that because if I do I’ll be in hot water with the “intentionally starving civilians is good” crowd.
Fuck these freaks. Fuck ’em. The more butt hurt they are by the things you say, the better. It is good for evil people who desire evil things to be upset by your words and deeds. The more Israel’s supporters hate you, the more likely it is that you are a decent person. Say what needs saying and wear their outrage as a badge of honor.
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Did somebody say “genocide”? That brings me to the second distraction delaying my post on Syria. Have you noticed how precious celebrities can get when their inalienable right to artistic authenticity is challenged by such encroachments as being asked not to confer legitimacy, as Nick Cave was asked by Roger Waters and Brian Eno, on an ethno-supremacist state founded on stolen land? There are even those who have this “right” claimed for them, as when Ruchama Feuerman said:
Bob Dylan probably wouldn’t make any comment about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza today. Too fraught. Anyway, he’s too clever to paint himself into tight political corners he can’t get out of.
I’ve been a Bob fan 60 years, man and boy. But political inspiration? Gimme a break! As for a man gushingly described as “too clever to paint himself into tight political corners”, replace ‘Nazi Germany’ and ‘Dachau’ with ‘Israel’ and ‘Gaza’. See how that adds to the aura of mystique His Bobness has never been slow to wrap himself in.
(Bruce Springsteen’s endorsement of Kamala Harris last year hurt more than it should – do we expect too much of our artists and entertainers? – but anyone still Bobstruck should study the Zionist song, Neighbourhood Bully, approvingly quoted by Ruchama Feuerman.)
But at least I’ve heard of Cave and Dylan. See what you make of Nicholas Lezard’s June 1 piece in a Jewish Chronicle itself no stranger to Zionist fabrications. It’s short enough to replicate in full, alongside my own interjections.
Why I didn’t sign that writers’ letter calling the Gaza war a genocide
Whatever the cause, there is something about the words ‘we the undersigned’ that makes my heart sink
A week or so ago, I was invited, along with hundreds of other writers, to sign a letter that was to be published in The Guardian condemning Israel’s war in Gaza. The word that kept coming up in the letter was “genocide”. That, together with “genocidal”, appears 11 times in the letter, and it is not a long letter. “This is not only about our common humanity and all human rights; this is about our moral fitness as the writers of our time,” it said at one point.
In the end I didn’t sign it. My arm was sore. I had got Repetitive Strain Injury from signing similar letters about the situations in Chad, Jordan, Sudan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, and a few other places where bad things were happening to innocent people …
Spoiler alert: his arm wasn’t sore and if he ever got RSI it was not, as he is about to make clear, by signing “similar” letters about situations in Chad, Jordan etc. He’s invoking poetic licence to make the most specious of points. So, as I did with The Bob, let me offer a thought experiment. Should all who condemn the Nazi Holocaust also research and condemn each and every other crime against humanity by the West?
Or was the Holocaust egregious even by the low standards of its day? Mr Lezard will say it was, and I agree. Ergo, some war crimes are special. Glad we got that sorted.
I was worried whether we writers were at risk of eroding our brand as the moral arbiters of the world. And who can forget the letter written on October 8, 2023, calling on the world to condemn Hamas and demand the return of the hostages? I imagined their exiled leaders, frowning over The Guardian in a luxury hotel suite in Qatar, and the regretful shaking of heads as the senior representative, Khalil al-Hayya, announced to the others: “I’m sorry to break it to you, lads, but we’ve lost Ian McEwan.”
Unravel this and we’re left – I think, though his sarcasm can confuse – with Mr Lezard bewailing the absence of such a letter, it not having occurred to him that thousands of Palestinian men, women and children jailed without charge – and tortured – under Israel’s draconian Unlawful Combatants Act are also hostages, for use in prisoner exchanges.
Actually, I wasn’t invited to sign any of those other letters; possibly because they were never written. But the one about Gaza – not the one about Hamas – certainly was. I genuinely wonder why writers should care about the one atrocity rather than the others; perhaps that is a mystery we will never be able to unravel.
Let me help you out, Nick. When genocide is live-streamed and enabled by my government and yours, it’s in a class of its own, deservedly singled out for condemnation; not because – I know you’ll be getting to this – we who do condemn it are ipso facto antisemitic.
Still, we should pay attention to writers because they know about words, and therefore morality, better than anyone. I know this because I am a writer.
Oh dear. Even when feigning humility, Nick has to play clever dick.
So, if they say it’s genocide, then genocide it is, and if you look at the UN’s somewhat elastic definition of the term, you just have to accept that common usage means the word has shifted its meaning, just like “disinterested”, “decimate”, and – to pluck an entirely random example from thin air – “Zionist”. “Genocide” now very specifically means “bad things done by Jews, I mean Israelis.” You may recall the case of Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who was the UN’s special advisor on the prevention of genocide, who explicitly said that Israel’s reaction to the October 7 massacre was not genocide. She received a large number of death threats as a result, and her contract with the UN was not renewed.
Here we get to it. Carefully avoiding the task of telling us why and how the UN definition of genocide …
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
… is “somewhat elastic”, Mr Lezard, who is a writer, offers yet more sarcasm:
“Genocide” now very specifically means “bad things done by Jews, I mean Israelis.”
And not just sarcasm. Blink and you’ll miss the bit – “… I mean Israelis …” – where he insinuates that all who oppose a rogue settler state premised on ethno-supremacism (and backed by the West for reasons set out here and here) are in truth motivated by antisemitism.
The writers of the letter are very careful to distinguish between the acts of the Israeli government and military, and the wishes of the people. In fact, they go further: “We assert without reservation our absolute opposition to and loathing of antisemitism, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli prejudice.” And it is in the same spirit that I say, without reservation, that I hate Netanyahu and his coalition of right-wing zealots, and think that his current policies are not only causing direct harm to the entire population of Gaza, but enormous harm to Israel’s international reputation, such as it is, alas, and also to Jews around the world who are going to be subject to attacks from people who have not stopped to ask them their position on Netanyahu’s war.
Netanyahu’s war? Here’s the ethno-state’s most prominent liberal newspaper five days ago:
Haaretz, June 3, 2025
It’s tough being a liberal Zionist. An inexorable logic flows from stealing the land of an entire people and slaughtering those who resist, while looking for legitimacy to a three thousand year old text and a distant genocide. Each cycle of dispossession and resistance hardens the heart and erodes the space for bleeding hearts and writers.
So did Nicholas Lezard himself stop to ask Israelis their views? Clearly not, but he finishes on a noble flourish; as fake-humble a slice of navel gazing as you’re likely to endure in a month of Sundays:
I wonder, though, if I would have signed the letter had it not used the g-word. Possibly, especially since it also calls for the return of the hostages. But on the whole I am not a letter-signer, because my father told me always to be very careful to read something before I signed it, and also because there is something about the words “we, the undersigned” that makes my heart sink a little bit, whatever the cause is that the undersigned are endorsing. These letters have a language and tone all of their own, that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one of irreproachable righteousness, and I never feel irreproachably right, even though I am a writer.
Meanwhile the slaughter he distances himself from on the one hand, slyly minimises on the other, proceeds apace.
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- Eiland was neither deploring nor confessing Gaza as concentration camp, but seeking US consent to shift Gazans to the Sinai Desert on the ground it would be an improvement for them!
- Since thousands of Gazans have been beheaded by IDF shrapnel and bullets, and since rape of Palestinians is routine in Israeli prisons, well might we heed the Arab saying that every Israeli accusation is in reality a confession.