It’s been a long time since I last did a ‘Wings-Watch’ fact-checking post, and I can’t deny I’m surprised to find myself doing one about a Wings post full of pro-Israeli government talking points in the midst of the ongoing genocide, but then Mr Campbell is often the champion of unpopular causes (most notably the Conservative party, the anti-Gaelic lobby and the people who think Liverpool fans were to blame for the Hillsborough disaster).
Basically what he’s trying to claim this time is that Ross Greer is an antisemite who seeks the total destruction of Israel because he used the words “Victory to Palestine”. This requires several stages of convoluted logical gymnastics, and some of them are rooted in outright factual inaccuracies.
Campbell claims that Greer’s support for Palestine must mean that he’s siding with Hamas, because “Palestine has no traditional armed forces, and in so far as it has a government, that government is also Hamas”. Not true. If he was referring only to Gaza he’d have a point, but Gaza is only one part of the Palestinian territories. The other part is the West Bank, which is slightly bigger in population terms and much bigger geographically. The autonomous parts of the West Bank are governed by Fatah, not Hamas.
Campbell goes on to make a variant of the same false claim when he says: “What else could “Victory to Palestine” possibly entail? The closest thing it has to a legitimate government is Hamas”. Rubbish. The most obvious way in which ‘legitimacy’ is conferred is by international recognition, and Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah is universally recognised as the President of the Palestinian National Authority. Around two-thirds of the world’s countries also recognise him as President of the sovereign State of Palestine. If Campbell is talking about democratic legitimacy, it’s a score draw between Fatah and Hamas, because Fatah won the last presidential election and Hamas won the last parliamentary election. But both of those elections were an eternity ago, and the terms of office have long since expired. So neither government can really claim to be ‘elected’ as of right now.
Having tried and completely failed to establish that Greer’s support for Palestine must mean support for Hamas, Campbell ploughs on regardless by claiming that the supposed support for Hamas must also mean that Greer wants the destruction of Israel, because “Hamas’ policy is unambiguous and unequivocal: the only acceptable resolution to the conflict is the complete obliteration of Israel”. Curiously, though, the screenshot Campbell offers in support of this claim doesn’t explicitly say any such thing, and if you read Wikipedia’s article about Hamas, you’ll find that there is scholarly disagreement over whether they still want to destroy Israel or whether their goal is now a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 boundaries.
Campbell further claims (and I think this is probably getting to the point where his words may be ‘actionable’) that Greer must regard the Jewish people of Israel as “sub-human”, with a strong implication that he does so in a similar way that the Nazis looked upon the Jewish peoples within Europe. The justification here is that Greer said a victory for Palestine would be a “victory to humanity”, which Campbell claims must be placing Israelis outside the concept of humanity, because he cannot conceive of any victory for Palestine that doesn’t entail Israel’s annihilation. But as I’ve demonstrated, one and possibly both of Palestine’s governments support the continued existence of Israel within a two-state framework, so “victory to Palestine” could very well just mean the ending of the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, thus leaving plenty of room for Israelis within the concept of humanity.
Campbell’s blogpost really is a dire and wretched thing, and I suspect some of his regular readers are going to be dismayed and bewildered that he seems to be calling into question the appropriateness of referring to Israel’s actions as “genocide”, even after the International Court of Justice ruled that genocide may plausibly be happening. They will also be disturbed that Campbell shares the Netanyahu view that it is impossible to support Palestine without supporting Hamas, and that expressing support for Palestine should therefore be illegal (he specifically calls for Greer to be prosecuted). I suspect there might be a touch of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” in all of this, but when your disdain for the unimportant Green MSP Ross Greer (which I share, incidentally) leads you to offer a degree of support for the worldview of the genocidal Netanyahu regime, it’s just possible you may have lost a touch of perspective somewhere along the way.
