Posh Twats for Palestine
How Israelophobia became the favoured hobby of the filthy rich.
I knew it. As soon as I saw that cast member of the Royal Opera House smugly unfurl his Palestine flag, I knew he’d be some privileged they / them with either blue blood or blue hair. And I was right. His name’s Daniel Perry, he’s a they / them, he was educated at a £48,000-a-year high school, and he calls himself a ‘queer dance artist’. Now all we need to discover is that he has ADHD and he really will be a walking checklist of middle-class twattishness.
Mr Perry has got the pro-Palestine set salivating with infantile glee after he whipped out his flag during the curtain call for Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Saturday evening. A stage manager tried to snatch it from him but Perry yanked it back with all the wild-eyed frenzy of a bloke determined to trend online. He got his way. He’s being gushed over by the internet’s Sun-starved army of armchair Israelophobes. ‘Hero!’, they yelp from their bedrooms, the unbelievably sad bastards.
The Telegraph has Perry’s backstory. He attended an eye-wateringly expensive school in leafy Hertfordshire. He’s nonbinary – sorry, they’re nonbinary. He’s a self-styled ‘queer’ dancer. He seems blissfully unaware that if he ever set foot in Gaza the only pirouette he’d be doing is a mid-air one as Hamas hurled him off a tall building. He recently wore a ‘Free Palestine’ t-shirt to a performance of Cabaret, the musical about the Weimar Republic that foreshadows the rise of the Nazis and the burning of the Jews.
It didn’t take any special insight on my part to guess that this flag-waving irritant would turn out to be a knob of the most insufferably bourgeois variety. Because they’re all like that. Perry belongs to that most vexing clique of preening ‘activists’ – let’s call them Posh Twats for Palestine.
They’re everywhere. Venture into London on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll soon be swarmed by affluent tits in keffiyehs talking rubbish about Israel. Our leafier campuses have been all but colonised by plummy youths screaming the new lie (‘Israel is committing genocide!’) with the same demented fervour with which they once hollered the old lie (‘Transwomen are women!’). The am-dram arseholes of Palestine Action loved to splash around their red paint while wanging on in cut-glass tones about the unholy wickedness of Israel. The government calls them terrorists but they’re something far worse: rich theatre kids.
Some are surprised – and of course cock-a-hoop – that the audience at the Royal Opera House cheered Perry’s self-regarding stunt. ‘Crowds cheered for Perry’s protest’, swooned Novara Media – lifetime members of Posh Twats for Palestine – as if a few hundred dickie-bowed opera-lovers clinking their champagne glasses against Israel were akin to the Chartist march on St Peter’s Field. I’m not surprised at all that the rich and cultured of London rattled their jewellery in agreement with the ‘Free Palestine’ schtick, because hating Israel really has become the moral glue of that section of society. You’re no one in polite society these days unless you have keffiyeh in the closet, a book of poetry by Mohammed el-Kurd and a rosy-cheeked daughter who’s been arrested for saying ‘Fuck the Jewish State’.
The daughters of the elite were once ‘presented to society’ at a formal ball – now they’re more likely to come of age by donning a keffiyeh and joining their fellow poshos on one of those soulless weekly trudges against the Jewish nation. Some do both: I audibly gagged when I read that one of Palestine Action’s press officers once wore a £6,000 gown to ‘the world’s most glamorous debutante ball’ where she rubbed bejewelled shoulders with Princess Diana’s niece. I told you: Posh Twats for Palestine.
Meanwhile, all those brats with names like Edred and Indigo seem to have swapped their Extinction Rebellion eco-lunacy for the Israel-hating mania. Where once they blocked roads and ruined the snooker and chained themselves to goalposts to try to prise open the eyes of the oiks to the ‘climate emergency’, now they wear keffiyehs like pashminas and glue themselves to the gates of weapons factories to remind the dim, uncaring throng about ‘GENOCIDE’. That they could move so seamlessly from prattling on about End Times to frothing like loons over Israel’s war with Hamas is telling – theirs is a curiously parasitical ‘virtue’ forever looking for a new host to attach itself to so that the world might see how good and holy they are.
This isn’t about raising awareness of Gaza – it’s about raising awareness of one’s own bloated sense of righteousness. That’s what the Palestine flag has become in the era of Posh Twats for Palestine: less a statement of support for the wretched of Gaza than a public declaration of one’s own moral fitness for high society. The keffiyeh on the neck, the flag round the shoulders: these are now sartorial signifiers of upper-class decency. Daniel Perry was sending a message to his fellow privileged moralists when he held up that flag – he was saying ‘I’m one of you, let me on your moral plane’.
Among the leisured elites on both sides of the Atlantic, Israelophobia has become the chief means of conspicuous compassion. It’s the ideology through which you make a spectacle of your ethical rectitude. Consider last week’s report that found anti-Israel sentiment is rife in the bourgeois institutions of Britain, or look at any Ivy League campus across the pond where hating Israel is the social currency du jour. This mania should horrify us all. For, truly, nothing good can come from the ceaseless demonisation of the world’s only Jewish nation by the rich, smug and tragically influential of the West.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy