“Ceasefire Now”: The Left’s Outrage Over Gaza Is an Old Trick 

“What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that’s the point,” wrote Thomas Mann sometime between 1913 and 1924, when he was working on his great novel The Magic Mountain. Yet these words, written a century ago, seem to speak directly and meaningfully to everyone living in Europe today. There’s something particularly foul about the leftist voices that are speaking up in our times, especially since October 7th, 2023. The call for ‘Ceasefire Now!’ presents itself as eminently human, practical to the exclusion of all sophistry. ‘Just stop the killing,’ the slogan insists, ‘Don’t get complicated with subtle explanations’—even the not-so-complicated explanation that Israel is responding to the unprovoked massacre of its people. So deeply does the raw concern for human life run, apparently, that we need thousands of people taking over city spaces in order to illustrate its urgency. People’s daily routines need to be disrupted. ‘Wake up to reality!’ and ‘Remember the children!’ are the sorts of messages the world needs to hear, and ever more vividly and loudly as the weeks go by.

But when this is all someone has to say—not a coherent view on a deeply complex issue, but a furious condemnation—things start to look suspicious. We know this from the Bible, where Joseph is accused by Potiphar’s wife of philandering with her after he steadfastly refused her advances upon him for months. If someone seems particularly enthused about vilifying somebody else on account of some unforgivable crime, it’s likely they themselves are guilty of it. Even Potiphar sensed his wife was lying, which is why he chose to imprison Joseph rather than execute him.

In our case, it’s clear that anyone who chants the slogan “Ceasefire Now!” masks a very real insecurity about his own willingness to engage with the complex dynamics that give the world we live in now its particular shapes and colours, not to mention with the real perpetrators of the violence that needs to cease. If it’s the killing of innocent people they can’t bear, why did they not alter their weekend plans upon hearing about Basher Al-Assad’s murder of 300,000 Syrians? Indeed, the louder the protestors chant, the louder the irony rings behind their carefully tailored cry, revealing the gesture for what it really is: a pose.

What we have on our hands are thousands of people all over the world striking the pose of the afflicted, the persecuted. In some strange way, the citizens of Madrid and Milan fancy themselves so intimate with what it means to be a Gazan, that they find themselves unable to hold back either the bitter tears or the burning rage for even one more minute. They must devote entire weekends to the task of publicising their outrage, and at the expense of taking their children out to the park or to get some ice cream. They would have us believe that, somehow, the enormous gap dividing Spaniards and Gazans has just dissolved away and we are all, suddenly, one unified body, suffering through the same things together.

This dramatic posturing for the purpose of ‘showing solidarity’ is a way people have of masking a deep-seated insecurity on precisely the same score: their inability to empathise with other people’s experiences. Doing so requires a quiet mind that thinks, not a loud mouth that shouts. The truth is that, while it is beyond these people to feel solidarity with Israelis, this is equally so with respect to Gazans, whose political class has been known throw people off rooftops when they disagree with them. The basis for establishing peace with a foreign people lies in the human intellect, in its power to understand that what makes sense to someone else might well differ from what makes sense to me. This understanding results either in the desire to draw the foreigners closer to oneself and one’s family, or the desire to push them further away. On the other hand, prostrating oneself full-bodied before a strange culture doesn’t bridge any gaps at all.

You can see this at its best in Rudyard Kipling’s astonishing short story, Quiquern, in which a palpable empathy with the Inuit people is enabled by the narrator’s steady, knowing contextualization of all the exotic details of their lives within a human story of survival. Within only the first couple of paragraphs, the reader feels at home sharing an igloo with a society of people whose lives revolve around seal blubber. By contrast, minds devoid of subtlety are not known for their record of establishing peace and understanding among different groups of men. Take, for instance, Anthony Blinken rebuking Israel for not being careful enough when they’re protecting their children against heartless killers. Or, if you prefer, look at the gorillas, who still, after all these millennia, address disputes over bananas by beating their chests and clobbering each other over the head.

After tramping the streets of London for hours on end, our outraged friends go home and spend at least 180 minutes on social media platforms before the day is out. When they do so, what confronts them is a steady stream of requests to classify themselves on one side of some binary opposition: like or dislike; pro-Trump or anti-Trump; Republican or Democrat; pro-life or pro-choice. This sort of thing puts ‘taking a position’ on an issue in the place of building an understanding of it. It also fosters the attitude of ‘it’s us against them.’

These marchers, and much of the political Left in our time, are viciously anti-intellectual. Once again, the frenzied insistence on intellectualising the obvious—declaring that things should not be stated naturally but in ‘correct’ terminology—smells fishy. The pointed gesture of standing up for political correctness over and against the way people actually feel and think masks a cold unwillingness to use the intellect for its intended purpose: improving our lives. Behind the endless offence the Left takes at incorrect pronouns is a taste for the brutish, for placing the human mind on par with the baboon’s.

Which is the side that seems in favour of enriching the details of the present with historic context, with rich understanding: the Left or the Right? And which is the side that claims nothing that occurred before October 7th, when Israel responded, has any relevance at all? For whom does it all come down to a few catchy phrases and the delightful practice of pouring fake blood on oneself in public? These people are not promoting a worldview in which ‘correct’ ideology is arrived at through dialogue, thought, and self-searching. On the contrary, judging from slogans like ‘by any means necessary,’ it looks as if violence is to be the guarantor to ensure that people think as they do.

The Left’s linguistic pedantry has been taken far beyond the proportions of real human existence. Using the right terms has been turned into a value in itself, as if it were the right terms that needed protecting and not those of the busy, complicated beings who use them when trying to make sense of their lives. It is for this reason that no one stands up and announces: “We can’t say we’re demonstrating for peace if we’re also calling for the Jews to be gassed.” On the contrary, all proportion, all common sense, is deliberately flouted by the maddening repetition of phrases. The reality we see before us is that leftist professors and lawmakers use pedantry about words to vilify people, to enforce division among them, not to establish understanding and common ground.

The purpose of the protests is not to draw attention to reality but, quite the opposite, to obscure it behind the gesture of making a very self-regarding cry for justice. And it was a gesture that came so naturally and uniformly to all sorts of Europeans! All that was needed was an appropriate set of slogans to turn a blinding and unforeseen reality into one of the familiar terms in the wordplay of a bourgeois society of airheads. We are presented with the spectacle of an entire generation of young people choosing to deny there is such a thing as objective truth. In its stead, there is only my word—as weightless as a feather—and, behind it, my fist. And perhaps the protestors fury is indeed understandable: for just as a guilty child insists on his innocence to the point where he enters into a frenzy, so these protestors insanely insist that their poor words, formulated in minds schooled on video games and pornography, actually correspond with the complex, history-driven reality they’re describing. Deep down, of course, they know it’s not true. What these demonstrations really show is the frightful choice to say, “All there is in the universe, is what I say.”

Indeed, there is much that the vicious condemnation of Israel shares in common with cynicism about God. Judging from appearances, our generation views the question of God as something philosophical, impractical, beside-the-point. By contrast, the entire civilised world until 250 years ago implicitly knew that a relationship with God is the most practical undertaking a person can and should make during their lifetime. And this is not, even in the slightest, meant metaphorically. Europeans knew that life in this world isn’t really about itself; that the death of a child demonstrates, not the chaos of the world, but the inscrutability of its Creator. It was clear that this universe couldn’t just be an eternal rubbish-dump of meaningless suffering, because why should there be one at all? The unstated context of life was God, Who remembers man’s poor deeds in eternity. To search for God was simply to ask: What is the world actually accomplishing, and for Whom?

Similarly, when street marchers keep on yelling “Ceasefire Now!”—as if Israel’s actions shouldn’t be viewed in the context of the brutal attack that preceded them, or the aims the army is pursuing—it’s a renunciation of common sense. It’s a war on the intellect, waged by people whose minds have been reduced to a palette of emojis and who wish, in their bitter frustration, to establish a world controlled by the gorilla’s fist. Besides, we see that much of their behaviour seems aimed at deliberately degrading the emotion of reverence, and here I’m thinking of the defacement of national monuments. This gives us an indication that we could really be seeing a battle against God taking place.

The Left’s instinct to ally itself with terrorism reveals something intimate about it: it sees nothing wrong with murder. The reason is that the Left sees no divinity in man and no sense or order in the universe—nothing that could justify holding a murderer to account. On the contrary, the Left seems anxious to prove before the whole world that terrorist killings are the same thing as freedom fighting, that excusing murderers is the same thing as caring for peace. It refuses to connect the dots and see a narrative. In place of the will to find meaningful, coherent stories that make sense of reality, the Left offers only isolated phrases, repeated until one starts to believe they are oracular.

And when Leftists claim to be outraged by murder, it is to hide the fact that they, in a very literal sense, know they are likely to do the same. The sign they sometimes display at protests that suggests we should ‘Gas the Jews’ doesn’t leave this in much doubt. Their turning a blind eye to the real massacres that have been going on over the last twenty years is revealing enough on its own. It’s not an accident that Rudyard Kipling’s stories, which teem with reverence for the spiritual in life, no less than with gentle affection for foreign peoples, come from a conservative mindset. And when George Orwell flatly labelled the great man a racist bigot, in spite of all the evidence from The Jungle Books and Kim, it wasn’t an accident that his worldview was anything but conservative.