Faced by the horrors of Gaza, Scotland’s leading opinion writers have denounced western solidarity movements. David Jamieson asks how, and why, our commentators have abandoned reason and moral sense.
The killing of Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues, some of the last remaining journalists in Gaza, continues a campaign that amounts to the effective liquidation of the profession in the strip. Hundreds of journalists have been killed, some with their family members, and many more have been wounded or intimidated. Academics, medics and artists have also been targeted, in an attempt to silence the voice of Gaza, already locked behind Israeli walls and fences. Foreign media is subject to a blanket ban. It is the consensus view among scholars in the field, human rights organisations and the aid community that genocide is being committed.
Against this backdrop, we cannot help but reflect on the performance of the journalistic vocation in the west. Leading figures have equivocated, waffled, looked away or even defended Israel’s actions. Among the most established voices, a faith has taken hold that if western states have backed Israel, it must be for some good reason, even when this is not apparent. Reporting al-Sharif’s death in sombre tones, the BBC asked: “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?”
In Scotland too, the complacency is marked. Before surveying some of the worst examples of recent commentariat delinquency, and explaining this collapse of intellectual and moral faculties, we should remind ourselves, even summarily, of the gravity of events.
At time of publication, around 60,000 Palestinians are thought to have been killed, but it is impossible to know the true number. The Lancet medical journal has reported that the death toll is widely under-estimated. Hundreds of thousands more are unaccounted for, untold numbers are injured, malnourished or sick, and there is no functioning state apparatus to collect information about the population. Around 18,000 children have been killed. Approximately all Gazan dwellings have been either damaged or destroyed, with 70% reported beyond habitation. After Israel unilaterally abandoned the ceasefire in March, they began a new project of levelling thousands of Palestinian homes. Entire neighbourhoods are disappearing. The vast majority of the population is displaced, often herded from one location to another and attacked in transit or in designated safe zones.
The major institutions sustaining life in Gaza have been dismantled. The health system has been subject to constant attack. In just the first three months of the assault on Gaza, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 600 attacks on hospitals and other medical infrastructure. According to the UN, at least 94% of Gaza hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, with half non-operational and need overwhelming.
More than 1000 Mosques have been destroyed. Churches have likewise been bombed. In both cases buildings were attacked with congregations sheltering inside. Within months of the commencement of the onslaught there had been hundreds of attacks on schools. All 19 of Gaza’s universities have been attacked, and at least 80% are in ruins. Huge numbers of teachers and students are dead. Those who live have struggled to maintain their education, as a symbol of faith in the future.
Fears now centre on widespread and systematic starvation, a crisis worsening by the day and hour. Having forced UN aid providers out the strip – not least by killing UN staff – the Israeli state has now brought in the heavily armed US ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ that is really part of the architecture of terror. Over a thousand Palestinians have been massacred, and thousands more wounded, at aid distribution centres which are shooting ranges, where riflemen and drones gun-down the starving and desperate.
Meanwhile, the Middle East is ablaze from one end to the other. Many of the region’s most important cities have been repeatedly bombed and vast numbers displaced as Israel has escalated a regional war. The IDF has repeatedly invaded neighbouring countries. It has heavily bombarded Syria and seized that country’s territory – a crime we are told is the special reserve of Russia in Ukraine. In these aggressions, Israel has been defended by its western allies.
Israeli leaders have been clear from the start about the nature of what they are doing. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence Minister who is now wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, launched his crusade by stating: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” He added: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” It is one of dozens of statements of intent from Israeli politicians and soldiers. They announced their crimes before and while they committed them.
The final point that must be made is a simple and startling: none of this would have been possible without the assistance of the western powers. Without the political, diplomatic, economic and military aid of especially the United States but also the UK and European powers, Israel simply could not have conducted this years-long campaign. Keir Starmer notably endorsed the illegal conditions of siege imposed on Gaza early in the conflict, when expressly asked about the withholding of life essentials. This is a crime made in the west, for which western journalists have a special responsibility of critical and in-depth reportage. It is an imperative to hold accountable those western politicians who are involved, which is the cardinal duty of the journalistic profession.
In the telling of all this, it is natural that the mind reaches for some nuance, some balance to make sense of events. Surely it cannot be so explicit? Surely a western ally, armed, funded, protected in word and deed by the US and UK, cannot simply be declaring the Palestinians to be their racial inferiors, deserving of death, and then killing them?
The unquestionable facts of these years jar, not with some body of counter-evidence, but with the official ideology and self-perception of our own society. In the latter decades of the 20th century the idea consolidated that killing people for their race was the ultimate crime. If the century had stripped millions of traditional religious practice and tested many secular ideologies to destruction, it had nonetheless given us the strong impression of what can happen when a belief in the universal human is discarded for racialist fanaticism.
There has been, it is true, a politically charged and often ill-intentioned debate about whether the Israeli attack on millions in Gaza constitutes genocide. But since then the arguments of a who’s who of world-leading experts, lawyers, law schools and human rights organisation, as well as the inexorable slaughter itself, have forced even many who initially resisted the designation to accept it.
The Response of the Scottish Commentators
Yet Scottish commentators know better. In August 2024, Iain Macwhirter informed us that “[g]enocide means the deliberate, systematic elimination of an entire race” citing for authority Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who coined the word. This is either grave ignorance or knowing misrepresentation of Lemkin’s standard definition, which included many activities short of full elimination, including the “disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national group”. Lemkin’s definition influenced the Genocide Convention, which famously targeted “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. These definitions are specifically tailored to dissuade the impression that genocide only pertains to the total elimination of all members of a group. The Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide had itself already stated that genocide was been taking place in Gaza at the time Macwhirter’s article was published.
The people of Gaza, Macwhirter says, are not experiencing genocide because: “Israel is not constructing gas ovens for the systematic elimination of the Palestinian race”. Macwhirter’s argument is that there has only ever been one genocide – the Holocaust (which he somehow manages to misrepresent). It is an attitude that, of course, renders the concept of genocide meaningless, and disqualifies numerous historical crimes widely accepted as genocidal.
Macwhirter’s argument that the Gazans are not subject to genocide amounts to the case that they are not being totally eliminated (a false criterion as we’ve seen) and that they are not being killed by the alleged means of the Holocaust, specifically the ‘gas oven’. He has engaged here in a distortion of the widely accepted definitions, as well as the historical record, of genocide in order to get the Israeli state off the hook. Laughably, he accuses those who make the allegation of genocide of a “willful ignorance of history”. These would include the leading lights in genocide scholarship.
So, what then is this massive campaign of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, referred to by the Israeli government with racial epithets? What is this orgy of sadism carried out on millions of unarmed non-combatants? It is, according to Macwhirter, “a nasty civil war”. The understatement is designed to stoke outrage – the lingua franca of the culture war.
All this dirty work of apologia is the more peculiar to anyone who knows his background as a one-time standard bearer of Scottish centre-left opinion. He was once not only a writer, but a campaigner against war and austerity. As late as 2019, he was still defending Jeremy Corbyn against allegations of antisemitism, and taking pelters for doing so. What happened in the intervening five years? The answer is that, in 2020, the culture war peaked.
Strange, para-political forces gripped the minds of millions, as Corbynism collapsed, Brexit was enacted, the pandemic seized the world system, and the second wave of Black Lives Matter jostled for attention with surging conspiracism and Trump supporters’ ‘Jan 6’ mobbing of the US Capitol. In Scotland, the languishing nationalist movement was ripped apart in the cross-currents. Macwhirter drifted into what could broadly be called the rightward stream of this phenomenon, and in 2022 his columns were suspended at the centre-left Herald.
Since then, he has ditched most of his erstwhile political commitments. In the way of culture war, trivial and squalid disputes are clumped together with matters of enormous moral and historical importance. If those who cheered Macwhirter’s loss of his Herald work seemed broadly arranged behind the Palestinian cause, then that cause must itself be flawed, and claims made in its name false.
These times have proved equally disorientating for many in the media, a sense of estrangement perhaps amplified by industrial decline. On both left and right some have collapsed into tribal mania, exposing a shallow and changeable worldview.
Kevin McKenna, whose stock-in-trade is now selling bait to the online enraged, is another leftish columnist of long-standing and wide syndication. He now refers to “Gaza-ology”, which he says has distanced the left from the working class. As evidence for this, he presents the poor showing for John Swinney and Anas Sarwar in the recent Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election.
What either men have to do with the Gaza solidarity movement is unclear, and the issue was kept far away from the doorsteps. But the urge to push the culture war button, the one that reads ‘activist concerns are alienating to the good, humble silent majority’ is too strong to permit evidence, analysis or argument. Whoever wrote the title of McKenna’s article ascribes this “Gaza-ology” to…the Labour government. Questioning whether the government, whose leader insisted on Israel’s “right” to commit war crimes, has “the guts to ditch the trans activism and Gaza-ology”. It’s difficult to know how to answer claims so completely detached from reality.
In truth, the British working class are leagues ahead of their supposed political leaders when it comes to rejection of the destructive and failing British foreign policy. The public were right on Iraq as the political class backed war. And they are right today about Palestine. Two thirds of Brits want to see Netanyahu arrested on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges, should he come to the UK. What’s more, the Gaza solidarity movement’s ideas and those of the wider population are marching in the same direction. Between August 2023 and August 2024 (around the time Macwhirter was penning nonsense about the lack of ‘gas oven’ executions in Gaza) net favourability for Israel collapsed in Britain from -27 to -49.
Mandy Rhodes at Holyrood magazine accuses “the hard left” of “collective solidarity with Iran”. In a now ancient smear, Rhodes claims that the left’s opposition to the bombing of Iran means “marching to the drum of regimes where the rights of trans people, and more particularly gay men, lesbians and women in general, are brutally curtailed”.
To repeat something we on the anti-war left have been saying for decades but which should be obvious, one does not have to support the leader or government of any state, or any of its policies, in order to oppose attacks upon it by western states or their allies. And it is notable that the real object of Rhode’s invective is anti-war opinion itself, rather than the Iranian state or any other supposed enemy. She doesn’t even mention the official Israeli and US pretexts for their predatory attacks on Iran, so patently unbelievable are they, let alone provide any justification of her own.
Rhodes is explicit in her motivation: those who espouse anti-war feeling are her old enemies in new guise: “If you are pro-Palestine, you likely believe trans women are women, you probably see prostitution as a valid career choice, that surrogacy is a noble act of goodwill, that Israel is the global pariah and that J.K. Rowling is most definitely the devil incarnate.”
This is an orgy of evidence for the culture war derangement thesis. It invites two obvious responses. First, a moment’s contemplation will tell you it couldn’t be more wrong. The cause of Palestine, much like anti-war politics throughout the last quarter century, has forged the most long-lasting and effective alliance of social liberals and conservatives in our era. You only need to consider the religious and demographic makeup of that movement to know this is true. One of the reasons people like Rhodes, Macwhirter and McKenna resent the anti-war movement is precisely that it proves politics beyond the culture war sandpit is possible and vital.
Secondly, even if this picture of ‘wokies for Palestine’ were true – who cares? If someone opposes genocide in Palestine and dislikes J.K Rowling, then they have a righteous and important stand on one hand, and an irrelevant opinion about celebrity nonsense on the other. The problem for our columnists is that, while they have lots of irrelevant opinions about celebrity nonsense, they have so little to say about the great questions of our time. Worse, they have re-imagined the nonsense as the great questions.
Or perhaps it’s not that the culture war is great, only that we are so small. Rhodes complains that ordinary people have begun to invest themselves in “complex” questions of foreign policy. It’s hard not to feel that for many Scottish journalists, who regard provincialism its own virtue, it is precisely the miniature scale of culture war debates that is so appealing.
How the old Centre Left Died
Former liberal and leftist defectors in the culture war are wont to protest that they did not abandon their old political tribes – they were instead abandoned by the mutation of the left towards the increasingly hysterical tenets of liberal identity politics, or ‘progressivism’. But the reality of modern capitalism has completely destroyed the possibility of the old centre-left creeds. Capitalism minus sustained growth, minus the drive to further globalisation, prostrated by war and geostrategic competition, its moral claims eviscerated by war and now genocide, simply cannot sustain the complacent programmes of the 1990s and 2000s. These required a steadily expanding system in which major global opponents to US power had been defeated.
‘Progressivism’ or ‘wokism’ was one response to the eclipse of the old order. It’s emergence after the 2008 financial crisis, and its hyperventilating peak between around 2016-2020, is clear evidence of these material origins. A political environment characterised by low or negative economic growth and fiscal austerity repressed contests over wealth distribution. But the destabilisation of political systems in the 2010s also forced a re-politicisation of society.
This is an essential but overlooked reason for why the culture war privileges language, aesthetics, personal identity and tribal belonging over the traditional objects of politics. Quite simply, the former items are cheap, and the latter expensive. It’s little wonder that Scotland became one of the global staging posts for this conflict, with its circumscribed public spending, failure to produce a post-industrial growth model and high degree of foreign ownership. Measures such as gender recognition reform were attractive to Scotland’s political leaders precisely because they were seen as offering a patina of progressive change without straining the coffers.
Progressivism’s response to the crumbling of the old order was to launch a demand for moral reform based in the middle classes, particularly those sections struggling to reproduce the living standards of their parent’s generation. From there it bled into parts of the professional and administrative apparatus. The items of its programme could be more or less justified, more or less misconceived and occasionally eccentric and vexatious. But crushed between corporate and financial capital on one hand, and a working class that remained disorganised and politically latent, it was always liable to flicker out and die. In defeat, it usually retreated to the safe harbours of establishment liberalism, such as the Democratic party in the US or the EU in Europe.
While typically younger cohorts joined these crusades for the moral rehabilitation of society, many of the standard bearers of the old centre-left (along with figures on the traditional right) rejected the new ideas, and adapted themselves to fighting against them. Now triumphant, the culture war backlash has become their entire manifesto. The collapse of the 1980s-2000s surge in liberal economic reorganisation, the retreat of US global leadership, the destabilisation of Europe and the disarray of the old party system means there is no way back to their former project. Liberal feminism, left-of-Blairism social democracy, avuncular left-nationalist populism: these old projects are wrecked, leaving our columnists marooned on the culture war. Meanwhile, the breakdown of the old order continues apace.
Our columnists, and the rest of the victorious culture warriors, could free themselves of this trap only by accepting the stricken nature of the existing class relations of society, and demanding they be radically upended. They show no ability whatever to do this. For one thing, the culture war has poisoned the concept of class itself, reducing it to yet another identity rooted in ‘lived experience’ and emotional resonance. Accordingly, to be working class is no longer to be subject to an exploitative relation on which the entire structure of society is based, still less to be a potential agent of change in that society. Now it is to be a passive victim of progressive elites, and a bearer of rooted, authentic values.
More fundamentally, the radical measures the period demands would bring anyone espousing them into a definitive conflict with those who dominate society. With working class incomes at a standstill since 2007, the state pleading penury, and public services and welfare to be pulped to feed remilitarisation, the gradual melioration of inequality and poverty while maintaining existing hierarchies has become implausible. Where once progressive taxation to improve public services was desired, now only the direct redistribution of wealth will suffice. Where once the end of the Cold War meant hopes for a new, perhaps more peaceful order, now only the unilateral suspension of western remilitarisation and aggression is practicable. With the old party and constitutional systems evacuated of meaningful content, only the challenge of popular sovereignty can end the alienation of hundreds of millions from the governance of their societies.
In other words, the times call for a return to hard politics: the struggle over the direction of society itself. Politics is about power, not symbolic differences, recognition or ethics.
This is something the Gaza solidarity movement has demonstrated, and a lesson our columnists fear. There is no ‘moral debate’ to be had about the Gaza genocide. No one is arguing about whether Israel should be able to bomb Beirut, Damascus and Tehran. The actions of the Israeli state are indefensible, and so they are scarcely defended any longer. The moral claims are all on one side. Sheer, violent power speaks with a higher authority.
In the years to come, it will only speak louder. Competition between the US, China and Russia, and between regional powers, will continue the redivision of the world system. Europe is falling deeper under US influence, which extracts ever higher costs. These will be suffered overwhelmingly by the working class in this country and across the continent. When Trump, in his visit to Scotland, forced humiliation on the EU with the terms of a trade deal that amount to imperial tribute, our columnists had nothing to say. They, frankly, seemed to be unaware it was even happening. Rhodes’ Holyrood magazine barely mentioned it, and didn’t register its importance. McKenna blamed the “waves of anti-Semitism” of the Gaza solidarity movement for Netanyahu’s continued rule in Israel. It makes as much sense as anything he says on the topic.
Meanwhile, the destruction of the new wars means massive population displacements towards a European continent suffering ongoing economic failure. Authoritarian political forces are demanding a zero-sum conflict between social groups, increasingly framed in explicitly racial terms. Scotland cannot hide from these forces, and Scots are already poorer for them today. The present disorder is coming for us, regardless to attempts to shut it out. And the indolence of our media is a failing we cannot afford.
