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In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal years. So unimaginable was the suffering of kids in the Congo wars of recent years that that benighted nation came to be called “the epicenter of child suffering.”
The echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now
And so it is in the clash between Israel and Hamas. Children in Gaza are dying in this ghastly war Hamas started with its fascistic pogrom against the Jewish state on October 7 last year. Yet there’s something new and strange in the discussion of child suffering in Gaza. In this war, the agony of the guiltless ones is not seen as accidental, as an awful byproduct of the fierce fighting. No, it’s seen as intentional, calculated, an actual war aim of the Jewish nation. Israel, its legion haters cry, is an infanticidal regime.
This is the first war I can remember where there’s been such a feverish urge to prove that kids are not just dying but are being murdered. Israel is “targeting childhood,” its critics insist. Peruse the Israelophobic toilet of social media and you will be confronted by wild cries about Israel exterminating the next generation of Gazans. “Infanticide” is “inherent in Israel’s genocide,” some say. Leftie podcasts bristle with dark chatter about Israel’s bloodlust for innocent life.
This view of the Jewish state as a child-killing machine has even leaked into the mainstream discourse. A high-ranking UNICEF official described Israel’s war as a “war on children.” “They shoot children, don’t they?,” said a headline in Ireland recently.
Even pre-October 7, Israel was talked about as a nation that positively relishes in child death. In July 2023, in an interview with the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, a BBC news anchor put it to him that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children.” Happy. These freaks get a kick from child suffering. The BBC later apologized, but it was too late — the ugly dinner-party belief that Israel loves to kill kids had seeped into public view.
We need to talk about the unusualness of all this. Even the hippies who chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” — referring to Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War — did not think the president was sending troops for the express purpose of bumping off Vietnamese kids. They were simply saying that child death is a bloody repercussion of war. Those of us who opposed the Iraq War may have drawn attention to the misery of the innocents there, but we did not for one minute believe our troops were targeting those wee souls. Our point was that war is reckless.
With Israel, it’s different. Apparently it kills kids not in error but by design. Apparently the little Gazans who have met their end in this hell inflicted on them by Hamas are not “collateral damage” — an awful phrase — but rather are akin to child sacrifices. The view of Israel as uniquely infanticidal was further boosted by a New York Times feature last week in which numerous doctors, nurses and paramedics said they had seen young ones in Gaza who had been shot in the head or the chest.
I don’t want to get into the accuracy or otherwise of the NYT’s report — there is much skepticism about it online, some of which I have found convincing. No, the thing that has struck me most is what has been unleashed by that piece: yet another frothing wave of infanticide talk. Yet more bony fingers pointed in judgement at the Jewish state and its supposed lust for slaying innocents. It is inescapable now; all who venture on to the internet will hear it: the frenzied cry that Israel murders children.
What is driving this obsession? What motors this double standard whereby “we” kill kids by mistake but “they” do it on purpose? To my mind, the echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now. The targeting of the Jewish nation as an infanticidal nation grossly mimics the old singling out of the Jewish people as a child-sacrificing people. It feels to me like that old blood libel has been given a bit of spit and polish for the modern age.
The great Howard Jacobson spoke to this in a column for the Observer last week. The furious conviction that Israel “targets innocent children” brings to mind the “merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians,” he wrote. The piece caused outrage. X went into meltdown. It is my belief that people went nuts because, deep down, somewhere in the recesses of their reason, they know Jacobson has a point. He made them feel the hot flush of shame over their bizarre obsession with “Israeli infanticide.”
Is it antisemitic to point out that children have died in Gaza? Of course not. Is it antisemitic to say the Jewish State, unique among the family of nations, hunts kids down so that it might spill their blood and exterminate their kind? It kind of is. Let’s put it another way. Is it antisemitic to criticize Israel? No. Is it antisemitic to feverishly obsess over Israel, to brand it as uniquely murderous, to judge it by a different standard to every other state, and to hint darkly that it is sacrificing Gazan children at the altar of its demented regional ambitions? Honestly — yes.
Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now. This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
