Lluís Bassets is a renowned Catalan journalist. He works for El País, Spain’s paper of record. He writes.

If Gaza ceases to exist as a Palestinian territory inhabited by Palestinians, Israel will also cease to exist as a secular idea of a Zionist and democratic state. Israel will not be a benchmark for anyone, neither for democrats nor for Jews all over the world.

The Palestinians are not going to be expelled from Gaza because no one wants to receive them, especially not their Arab brothers, and because Hamas, in spite of the terrible punishment it has taken, is still in the field and doesn’t want its key strategic asset going anywhere. But that’s not what I want to focus on here.

Bassets is concerned about Israel and what, in his view, it has become. I’ve translated “referente” as “benchmark” but I could also have chosen “model” or “exemplar”. Thus, it seems that up to now Israel was a state diaspora Jews and democrats all over the world looked up to but that it’s in danger of losing that status.

Most diaspora Jews have family connections with Israel and however much some despise its present government they are glad that it exists because they know their history.

But democrats all over the world? I don’t think so. Apart from leftists and progressives the world over and evangelicals in the US, how much do democrats in other parts of the world think about Israel, never mind thinking of it as an example to follow? I’d suggest the answer is “Not much, they’ve got their own problems to worry about”.

Writing in another leading Spanish newspaper Daniel Fernández says that Israel in Gaza is “also murdering our conscience”. Israel’s conduct in Gaza is worthy of fierce criticism but there’s something else going on here that exceeds that.

To give an example, the British army murdered Afghan civilians in significant numbers. Elite soldiers shot them dead at close range because they could and because they felt like it. It was a habitual practice. Their Australian comrades did likewise. As more details leak out this intolerable behaviour is being rightly criticised but no one would say that democrats throughout the world were no longer looking up to Britain or Australia or that their exemplary reputation was being tarnished. Anyone who did so would be thought quite deranged.

Different standards apply to Jews and they have since the start of the present conflict, indeed since long before. Last year I wrote about how Fintan O’Toole sees Israel as dragging down the West. Here they are seen as killing our consciences and no longer being globally admired by democrats, as if they ever were. They are criticised not just for their real and imagined crimes but for the moral damage they supposedly do to themselves and which they infect others with. And people who pretend to be concerned about their behaviour out of interest for their moral and spiritual welfare have never seemed equally concerned with their remaining alive.

Prebuttals:

1. Yes, 54,000 dead is a terrible figure. War is terrible. Maybe one day we’ll be able to estimate how many of them were combatants, for now it’s not an issue Western commentators concern themselves much with, an implicit acceptance of Hamas’s line.

2. Yes, Israel has surely committed war crimes. As did your nation the last time it was involved in a major war. Wars produce war crimes in the same way business activity produces fraud and medicine produces malpractice. Hamas has also committed numerous war crimes, not that that seems to bother many people.

3. We support many foul regimes whose behaviour towards minorities and colonised peoples is as bad or worse than Israel’s. To give one example, Morocco enjoys excellent relations with the US, the UK and the EU. If you don’t see any problem there then maybe think of why that might be.

4. As I mentioned in the body of the text, half the world’s Jews live in Israel, most of the rest have at least some attachment to Israel. And their local enemies refer to them as such. So, yes, it’s about attitudes to Jews.