“The Israeli forces are happy to kill children” - BBC News Presenter Anjana Gadjil, July 5, 2023.
The above sentence deserves to be added straightaway to the substantial page of Wikipedia that is devoted to the blood libel against Jews and entered into any research books on the subject forthwith.
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I won’t go into the long history of the blood libel, starting with the ancient Greeks, to medieval England and continental Europe, to the Kielce pogroms in 1946, and modern Arab countries today where the blood libel is habitually brought up.
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BBC News Presenter Anjana Gadjil said IDF troops were 'happy to kill children' in Jenin
(Photo: IDF Spokespersons Unit)
And now the BBC has pushed it to a potential audience of millions when news presenter Anjana Gadjil made the disgusting assertion to former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
We know how the story goes. We liked nothing more than to fatten a Greek person up to sacrifice – Christian Children and Muslim Children too – whose blood we need for our Passover matzot.
The ignorance was always astounding. The insult to those who are commanded not to consume blood at all was always a complete one. The results of the blood libel were always dangerous and as intended: pogroms, murders, dead Jews.
Bennett, to his immense credit, kept his nerve. Also, and to their lesser credit, after I wrote to the BBC director general I received a prompt response in which they apologized “that the language used in this line of questioning was not phrased well and was inappropriate.” This was understatement in the extreme, but at least the director general’s office recognized the error and were contrite.
As part of our advocacy work here across Europe, we regularly engage with journalists on Israel. As I write this today, we have just concluded a briefing with over 40 senior journalists from across the continent with experts Ron Ben-Yishai and Ruth Wasserman-Lande about Jenin.
The relationship with journalists is never an easy one, but we never shy away from tough questions.
It is a running joke here in Europe that any reporter or commentor who makes an assertion about the Israel-Palestinian conflict tends to hide behind a sofa immediately after making it due to the sensitivities involved and the risk of provoking the ire of one side, or sometimes both.
This is the nature and risks that come with rigorous, thoughtful and thorough journalism. And it’s a healthy and important part of the democratic process. Unlike despotic regimes where media freedom is either illusory or simply non-existent, Israel is fully open to scrutiny, just as Belgium or Spain is.
But our relationship with the media only works if some basic rules are respected: Assertions can and must be held up to scrutiny, agreed with or rebutted in a proper way with experts or politicians.
“Israeli forces are happy to kill children” is so far beyond the pale, so utterly bereft of logic and reasoning and so insulting that it falls into the category - as Ron Ben Yishai noted before the briefing began - of the famously impossible question “So when did you stop beating your wife?”
You may well ask why do we bother? In fact, many Israelis think that Europe is lost and that the bias against Israel runs ever deeper. Certainly ‘journalists’ like Anjana Gadjil simply reinforce that perception.
The short answer is because we must. And because for every Anjana Gadjil that pops up with an outrageously disgusting and dangerous antisemitic trope from time to time, there are many diligent journalists in Europe that seek to get to the heart of the matter, who seek to reflect the nuance, and who want their audience to better understand and be better informed.
But above all, we do it because antizionism is the new antisemitism. My friend in the Netherlands, Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, is frequently shouted at about Palestine. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut is branded a dirty Zionist at the yellow vest protests. And Jews everywhere in Europe are regularly harassed with “Israel=Assasin” or branded as colonialists or supporters of apartheid.
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Rabbi Menachem Margolin is chairman of the European Jewish Association
(Photo: Yoav Dudkovich)
Let’s be clear here. Thanks to rigorous laws and societal change in Europe an antisemite can be immediately arrested for calling someone a ‘dirty Jew’. But it’s open season to call us a ‘dirty Zionist.' You see, an antisemite will remain an antisemite no matter what. And the cover of Israel offers them the opportunity to continue with impunity. By simply replacing Jew with Israeli or Zionist you can repeat a blood libel. And in this topsy-turvy logic an armed 17- or 18-year-old terrorist shooting at a Jewish soldier or civilian is now a child. A man who drives a car into innocent Jews sitting in a café in Tel Aviv is doing so out of protest, and so it goes on.
Antizionism is the ‘new’ antisemitism. Israel is the new Kielce. And Anjana Gadjil is just the latest incarnation of Thomas Monmouth, who falsely claimed that every year there is an international council of Jews at which they choose the country in which a child will be killed.
We leave Anjana Gadjil to Wikipedia as she joins the pantheon of the ignorant, and we continue our work. Because antizionism cannot win.
Because Jews in Europe and our brothers and sisters in Israel are not different and no terrorist ever makes this distinction. And because the ultimate irony of the blood libel is that it is always our blood that ends up being spilled.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin is chairman of the European Jewish Association