The suicidal vanity of Palestine Action

Last night in London, four days after the slaughter of Jews in our cousin nation of Australia, radical leftists held a vigil. For the dead Jews? Don’t be daft. It was for the Palestine Action hunger strikers. It was for those silver-spooned self-harmers, those preening, plummy food-dodgers who think they can do to the nation what they once did to mummy and daddy: stomp their feet until they get what they want. And there you have it: self-styled anti-fascists weeping not for the Jews murdered by fascists, but for vain, posh Brits whose torment is wholly self-inflicted.

It’s not just in London. In Cambridge too, and outside the Dáil in Dublin, the keffiyeh classes have mournfully assembled in recent days to lament the agonies of the hunger strikers. Let history record this. Let it record that following one of the worst acts of anti-Semitic barbarism of modern times, ‘anti-racists’ gathered not to offer solidarity to Jews but to wang on about their fellow narcissists in the cult of Palestinianism. As Aussie Jews fall victim to the West’s swirling pox of Israelophobia, leftists pay tribute to the activist class that helped spread that deadly pox. Shameful doesn’t cover it.

I’ve always thought the Palestine Action hunger strike was preposterous – am-dram self-destruction designed less to shift the dial in the Middle East than to make a spectacle of the strikers’ own depthless self-regard. But after Bondi, after that merciless slaying of Jews by suspected adherents to the death cult of ISIS, the strike feels callous, too. Anyone who distracts public attention from the anti-Semitism crisis by droning on about five hungry twats in British jails has forfeited the right to be considered a decent person.

Seven Palestine Action activists joined the hunger strike in recent weeks. Two dropped out last night, leaving just five food-avoiders. Their demands include immediate bail for all Palestine Action activists being held on remand, the lifting of the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, and the shutting down of all Elbit Systems sites in the UK. Elbit is one of the main producers of military equipment for Israel. It employs close to 700 people in the UK, including many veterans. It is hubris of historic proportions that five smug activists are saying they won’t eat until 700 Brits are thrown on to the dole queue. Rarely has the conceitedness of the lily-handed left been on such stark display.

Let’s be clear about what this is: moral blackmail. These activists are the political equivalent of the scumbag husband who tells his wife he’ll harm himself if she ever leaves. Their hunger strike is a staggeringly elitist stunt. In the past, hunger strikes tended to be one small part of a larger democratic movement. Think of Gandhi’s hunger strike during the Quit India uprising of the 1940s. The Palestine Action hunger strike is the precise opposite – this is about circumventing democracy.

What we have here is a miniscule gang of the privileged holding the nation to ransom. This is the bourgeois left taking politics itself hostage. It is a tantrum masquerading as a protest. The entitled brats who make up the bulk of the 21st-century left are so used to getting their own way that they even think they can change the law and lay waste to hundreds of jobs by turning down their dinners for four weeks. Their hunger strike is born less from a democratic thirst for change than from a seething contempt for the British masses and our refusal to take the knee to the cult of Israel hate. It is the haughtiest, most ridiculous hunger strike in history.

We have been treated over the past 24 hours to some truly mirth-inducing sights. Fisher-Price revolutionary Zarah Sultana has been standing in the cold outside HMP Bronzefield like Viz’s Millie Tant in a keffiyeh. Activists have opined in cut-glass tones about the ‘cruel conditions’ being inflicted on their ‘comrades’. Yeah, by themselves. The overeducated wimps have jostled with screws. Imagine you’re a knackered prison officer turning up for another day of graft and you find yourself being shoved by arseholes who’ve never done a day’s work in their lives.

One of the strikers is only refusing food on alternate days – that’s not a hunger strike, it’s intermittent fasting. A councillor in Islington has undertaken a 24-hour hunger strike in solidarity with the Palestine Action activists. Twenty-four hours? It’s less Bobby Sands than a body detox. Let’s call it the Gaza Diet. Want to shift some weight ahead of all that Christmas gorging? Easy – refuse food for a day and say you’re doing it for Palestine. Drop some pounds and advertise your virtue all in one go!

Let us not forget what Palestine Action activists are suspected of doing. They’re suspected of breaking into an Elbit Systems site and causing great damage. They’re suspected of invading RAF Brize Norton and causing £7million worth of damage. They’re suspected of smashing up Jewish-owned businesses in Stamford Hill in London and striking fear into the hearts of the Hasidic Jews there. None of this is proven yet. All the activists are innocent until proven guilty, absolutely. But let’s get real – these are serious charges for which being held on remand is a perfectly normal thing.

The suicidal vanity of Palestine Action speaks to how all-consuming the Palestine mania has become. Allen Ginsberg saw the ‘best minds’ of his generation be ‘destroyed by madness’. We are watching the minds of the graduate left be destroyed by Israelophobia. The hunger strike confirms that the affluent youths of the faux-virtuous left have wholly folded their lives into the anti-Israel derangement. Palestine mania represents the subjugation of the complex conflicts of the Middle East to the psychosocial needs of privileged Westerners. They’re so vain they think this war is about them.

It’s becoming a serious situation. I don’t want any of these people to die. What a futile waste of life to sacrifice oneself to a cause that is never going to succeed – the erasure of Israel. All those politicians and commentators who are essentially spurring the hunger strikers on by making them the cause célèbre of leafy society should be ashamed of themselves. Last week, two drips in keffiyehs were wailing on a London street. ‘Our friends are starving to death in UK prisons!’, one cried. Two passing workmen had a word. ‘Have a fucking sandwich, then’, said one. That’s what everyone should be saying to these famished narcissists – have a fucking sandwich.

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 latest 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.