In February 1840, the Jewish world was thrown into a tempest. Following the disappearance of a Catholic monk and his Muslim aide, the Jewish community of Damascus faced accusations of ritual murder of the disappeared people and of using their blood for baking Matzah.
While blood libels were hardly a new phenomenon for Jews in European countries, and though several attempts at making these accusations were made in the area in past years, the libel known as the “Damascus Affair” of 1840 is deemed to be the first to have been widely propagated, bringing with it devastating outcomes for the Jewish community in the MENA region.
The libel spread like wildfire, and the French and Ottoman authorities concluded torturous investigations, which ultimately brought leaders in the Jewish community to “confess” to committing the acts. The leaders were imprisoned, popular violence against the Jewish community increased, and the penetration of classical European antisemitic tropes into the Arabic-speaking world became a fact.
That Jews are traditionally not allowed to consume even animal blood, let alone human blood, did not matter. And that Matzah is traditionally supposed to be made from only flour and a minimal amount of water was also not of any consequence. The mobs who despised, boycotted, and attacked Jews acted based on the slogans they had heard, with a strong sense of doing away with evil and possibly bringing about social justice.
In their eyes, an evil community that kills religious leaders and feasts on their blood surely constitutes a threat to society as a whole. These vile creatures must be held accountable, shamed, denounced, or even killed. They must not be part of modern, liberated societies.
Interestingly, it was the intervention and protest of world Jewry and Western diplomats that pressured the Ottoman authorities to release the prisoners and refute the libel finally, in an act which both granted protection for the Jewish community from further violence for a while but ironically also paved the road for even more popular antisemitic beliefs regarding the alleged influence of Jews over Western powers.
In any case, now there was no going back: the dam of classical European antisemitism in the Middle East, confined to rare episodes until then, had been breached.
144 years after the Damascus Affair, UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese would parade a horrid picture of a starved-looking child from Gaza and imply that Israel was behind his death from hunger. That his parents pictured right next to him did not suffer from malnutrition at all did not matter. That Hamas terrorists are documented time and time again stealing aid from their supposed constituency was hardly of any importance.
And that Israel lets in thousands of tons of aid into an area controlled by a fanatic, ruthless enemy who swore to repeatedly commit atrocities such as sexual violence, baby kidnapping, family burning, and mass shootings at a music festival is not of any consequence.
This picture circulated by Albanese and other activists in cyberspace is a new, modern, digitized version of the historical blood libels. It, too, incites the multitudes into rage and hatred, creating an urge to strike at the perceived perpetrator and bring upon alleged “justice.”
From labels to libels
But pictures are hardly the only blood libel circulating nowadays. In a more sophisticated manner, pseudo-intellectual accusations are being labeled against Israel as a marketing strategy, using negative buzzwords aimed at vilifying, delegitimizing, and dehumanizing a modern Jewish collective. Three main ridiculous yet rallying accusations, or modern blood libels, come to mind: “genocide”, “apartheid” and “colonialism,” which declare Jews and Israelis as ‘fare game.’ And here, too, facts don’t matter.
Israel is absurdly accused of annihilating or attempting to eradicate a collective, namely the Palestinians. For the “genocide” slogan carriers, it matters not that numbers provided by Hamas are far from being peer-reviewed statistical research (notedly the UN has just silently altered Hamas’s accounts regarding women and children being killed, slicing them by half), nor that Hamas refuses to acknowledge what part of their exaggerated numbers is comprised of their militants.
For them, the fact that no instances of real genocide in this world were confined to these small numbers in which the militant-to-civilian ratio is 1:1 or 1:2, nor did they feature the direct introduction of aid from the attacker to the civilian, allegedly ‘genocided’ population.
Claiming that a war against a terror organization that led to the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the holocaust, a war in which Gazan civilians have never ever been intentionally targeted, where the Gazan population receives exact instructions and detailed maps as to where the attacking army would strike next, and in which the attacking army directly supplies them with food and aid, repeatedly halting fire when civilians come too close to war zones – is nothing short of a disgrace to any population who went through real large scale attempted genocide, from Jews to Armenians, Tutsi, Ukrainians, Irish, Rohingya, Native Americans, and others.
The apartheid libel is similar. Using this term to describe Israel is nothing short of preposterous. This allegation steals solidarity from people who underwent real apartheid and had to undergo segregated bathrooms, separate bus lines, neighborhoods, water fountains, and even law systems.
The false portrayal of Israeli society as a European one segregated from non-Europeans is as far from really as it gets, with ministers, Supreme Court judges, athletes, diplomats, actors, journalists, and even pop stars and celebrities from all sectors and minority groups attest.
Then there’s the “colonialism” libel, which is perhaps the most ridiculous one. The attempt to label Jews as colonizers in their ancestral homeland is at best a projection of the European perception of ‘white peoples’ arriving at a foreign land and oppressing ‘non-whites.’ This is inapplicable to the Jewish presence, allegiance, and history in the Land of Israel and incompatible with the diversity of both Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Israel, most of which are inherently Middle Eastern.
Despite what the highly developed imagination of some Hamas sympathizers may portray, Jews were never ‘sent’ by a European superpower to pillage the resources of a native people for the benefit of an Empire. If anything, they were driven out from their centuries-old residences in the diaspora and reunited with their brethren back at the incessant Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias.
In the attempt to re-establish their national homeland, they bought land where necessary and established agricultural and urban communities under the harshest of circumstances. They attempted all the while to make peace with their neighbors.
To compare the Jewish people’s historical presence, ingathering from diverse exiles, legal land acquisition, and war forced upon them by another group that refused to accept its presence – with the colonial narrative of claiming the land for the crown, forced conversions, pillaging of goods for the motherland, slave trade and extermination of entire nations – is as far away from the truth as it gets.
The newly influenced masses
Just as with the old blood libels, here too the facts listed above don’t make a difference. For the newly incited mobs – stealing solidarity, projecting false narratives, and appropriating real, terrible experiences of genocide, apartheid, and colonialism are non-issues. For them, the only things that matter here are the branding, the label, the libel.
And just as with historical blood libels, the modern blood libels aren’t simply lies or stigmas that create tensions or friction between groups, but rather a dangerous, unfounded type of discourse with perilous consequences, which creates an atmosphere where people’s lives are treated as fair game. The new unfounded blood libels, conveniently propagated and then quoted and requoted by the likes of Amnesty, B’Tselem, and UN rapporteurs, make up for an evident, worrying impact on the ground, triggering masses into ‘hate mode’ and declaring open season on Israelis and Jews.
From violent masked university students urging online followers to “thank them” for not “murdering Zionists” to the shameless bullying of 20-year-old Eden Golan by influenced participants at the Eurovision Song Contest, from October 7 deniers to Hamas sympathizers or justifiers to pointing at Jews in a rally as the “next targets of Al-Qassam” – Israelis and Jews are being stripped of their humanity by ardent “social justice warriors,” who cite and recite these buzzwords as justification for their violent acts, in an ominous pathway to even more violence, as that, unfortunately, witnessed in the horrible hate-motivated murders of Benjamin Harouni and Paul Kessler.
It must be stressed again: just as it was in 1840, all these actors, from students in encampments to Eurovision participants, act from a wholehearted belief that an apartheid colonial state is committing genocide and that it’s incumbent upon them to disavow and act against anything and anyone perceived as remotely related to these actions.
The ability to brainwash and mobilize masses by a strategic, decades-long trickling of negative buzzwords provides an important lesson about the prevalence of perceived truths rather than fact-based reasoning, mass indoctrination and misinformation at the service and under the auspices of totalitarian regimes, and feelings of self-importance and perceived ‘revolutionary spirit.’
In order to combat these misconceptions, it is first and foremost incumbent upon all actors resisting the evils of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their supporters to acknowledge their nature and the nature of those propagating them and to call out these anti-intellectual marketing strategies for what they are: not labels, but blood libels.