Not the 1930s, but the 1230s: How medieval blood libels returned to poison our age

And as then, so now, the Jews are accused of sadistically targeting children. In Norwich or Trent, the tale was of Jews murdering Christian boys in secret rituals. Today the charge is that Israel deliberately kills children or starves infants. No claim is too fantastical, too gruesome, to go hysterically reported as fact. The most basic journalistic standards are routinely abandoned if the target is the Jewish state. We look back at those “primitive” centuries and wonder how people could have believed such nonsense as ritual slaughter. Yet in our own enlightened information age, almost identical charges are swallowed whole.

The incentives are also the same. Then, libels produced confiscated Jewish property, cancelled debts and pilgrimage revenues. Now they generate donations, grants, political leverage and attention. Outrage is a currency, and supply rises to meet demand.

So too the legal theatre. In Trent or Lincoln, Jews were dragged into courts where guilt was scripted in advance. Today, we have Corbyn’s Gaza tribunal, UN commissions, and Oxford show-debates: morality plays in legal, academic costume, every bit as preordained.

And the British government? The problem is not that it lacks evidence to refute these libels but the will to use it. The work of dismantling many of the accusations thrown at the Jewish state has already been done. Scholars of “genocide studies” have been exposed as including activists masquerading as academics, twisting both law and fact. The IPC report has been credibly shown to have manipulated data and standards. Children allegedly starved by Israel and paraded for Western consumption have later been revealed to suffer from severe pre-existing conditions. Even Hamas’s own health ministry has not dared to claim the over 3,000 deaths from hunger that a genuine famine, as declared by the IPC in northern Gaza on August 22, would by now have produced. It would take only a modicum of political leadership to raise these legitimate questions instead of parroting the libels.

On the day she moved from the Home to the Foreign Office, Yvette Cooper mentioned two international conflicts: “Russian aggression”, in just those two words, and, “the horrendous famine and conflict in Gaza”. No mention of Hamas or the hostages.

It is true that David Lammy’s letter, written just before he was shuffled out of the Foreign Office, finally states plainly that Israel is not committing genocide. That is welcome. Until now the government had refused to answer that question, hiding behind the claim that only a competent court could decide it. But even now, instead of shouting the conclusion from the rooftops, the government allowed it to seep into the press as if by accident – almost shamefully burying its own verdict that the central blood libel of our time is false.

Worse still, even in the act of acquitting Israel, the letter indulges in fresh indictments: calling Israel’s actions “utterly appalling” because of civilian casualties and destruction. Of course the suffering is appalling; war always is. But the letter ignores the essential fact that Israel is making extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian harm – while Hamas works methodically to maximise it, using its own people as shields in the all-too justified hope that Western governments will blame Israel for the misery Hamas caused.

Meanwhile, Health Secretary Wes Streeting apparently didn’t get the government memo and said visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog has to “answer the allegations of war crimes, of ethnic cleansing and of genocide”.

The failure to stand up to a self-evidently libellous campaign against Israel, and worse still, to echo it, is, in the end, a failure to stand up to antisemitism itself. For in its latest mutation, antisemitism on both far left and far right justifies itself almost entirely through Israel’s supposed crimes: starvation, genocide, unique malevolence. And if Israel is indeed guilty of such crimes – if Israel is indeed uniquely evil – then British Jews, who are overwhelmingly Zionists, must be guilty by association. It is impossible to claim to fight antisemitism while indulging or ignoring the demonisation of the Jewish state.

Sunday’s rally should not have been necessary. Jews should not have to march against a prejudice that poisons whole societies. Medieval blood libels corroded Christendom for generations. Our modern ones corrode largely post-Christian democracies just as surely.