The SNP has a unique capacity for indulging unnecessary and self-lacerating rows about issues that have very little to do with independence or with the cost of living crisis. The current row over Israel’s alleged “genocide” is a case in point. The Scottish government has precisely zero influence on the state of the war in Gaza and yet the SNP has spent the week rowing over whether the party’s External Affairs Secretary, Angus Robertson, should resign for having had a meeting with the deputy Israeli ambassador, Daniela Grudsky. The SNP MSP Ruth Maguire accused him of “appearing to legitimise a genocidal regime”.
Robertson delivered a grovelling apology on Monday for doing what any sensible foreign minister would do, which is use a meeting with a foreign diplomat to express discontent at that government’s conduct of a nasty civil war. Robertson told Grudsky that there should be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, increased humanitarian aid and the resumption of talks on a two state solution to Palestinian conflict. He also discussed cooperation with Israel on issues like climate change and, ironically, hate crime. For this he was hounded by the SNP’s vociferous pro-Palestinian supporters and urged to resign by a number of prominent nationalists including the former SNP minister, Alex Neil.
This was somewhat embarrassing for the First Minister, John Swinney, since he authorised Robertson’s meeting with Grudsky. The SNP leader was therefore also guilty of tacitly condoning Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes. Swinney was heckled off stage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday by pro-Palestine protesters accusing him of having “blood on his hands”.
But instead of standing firm and backing his minister, as a level-headed leader should have, Swinney opted for a cack-handed capitulation to his critics. He ordered a zoom call with Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, and said there would be no more contacts with Israel. The Scottish government is thus allied with Turkey as the only country in the European orbit to have severed relations with one of the West’s longest-standing allies in the Middle East. Britain and America have not withdrawn their ambassadors and neither have Norway and Germany. Yet the joke on the SNP is, of course, that Scotland, not being a state, does not have an ambassador to withdraw.
John Swinney has now effectively condemned the only functioning democracy in the Middle East as a pariah state equivalent to North Korea. This is a pointless act of performative outrage that achieves nothing in diplomatic terms and certainly doesn’t bring peace in Gaza. The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities pointed out, rather reasonably, that you cannot pursue a “two state solution”, as the Scottish government claims to be doing, by only talking to one side.
What this boycott does do is create anxiety for many Jews in Scotland, and the rest of the UK, who now feel that they are now regarded as adjacent to war criminals. Some feel that the Scottish government has put a target on their backs. Hearing demonstrators calling for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea” sounds to many Jews a bit like, well, genocide - something about which they know a thing or two.
The party need never have arrived in this bizarre diplomatic space had it not been for the attempt to rid itself of a conservative MSP called John Mason. Progressives in the SNP have been trying to get rid of their Shettleston MSP for years over his evangelical attitude to issues like abortion. Mason finally had the whip withdrawn on Saturday for refusing to accuse the Israeli government of genocide in Gaza. “I personally do not believe that Israel has tried to commit, has committed, or is committing genocide,” he said last week. SNP Twitter went into meltdown as only it can.
“You glorify killing and murder with your obtuse comment,” erupted Ian Blackford, the former SNP Westminster leader. “You make me sick!” added the SNP MSP for Glasgow Kelvin, Sandra White. “To flippantly dismiss the death of more than 40,000 Palestinians is completely unacceptable.” said a spokesman for the SNP chief whip when expelling Mason for genocide-denial, “There can be no room in the SNP for this kind of intolerance.”
In fact, Mason did not flippantly dismiss the death of Palestinians. In a Facebook statement he acknowledged that “far too many had died” and that "many people feel that Israel has moved from a position of self-defence to seeking revenge”. You don’t have to accuse Israel of genocide to be appalled by the scale of the civilian casualties.
As I explained in my Times column, this also happens to be the view of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, neither of which has found Israel guilty of actual genocide. Saying the occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank is “unlawful”, as the International Court of Justice did last week, is not the same. United Nations commissioners have been highly critical of Israel's conduct in Gaza, condemning “apparent breaches of international law" and “potentially genocidal acts”. But that falls far short of accusing Israel of genocide.
Genocide means the deliberate, systematic elimination of an entire race. The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer,r in 1944 and first used by prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Their Final Solution was an exercise in ‘racial purification’ conducted with brutal efficiency following the Wannsee Conference of Nazi leaders in 1942. It involved the identification, transportation and extermination of six million Jews on the basis of their perceived race. That is genocide.
It would be extraordinary for the United Nations or anyone else to accuse Jews, who have been the greatest victims of genocide in the last century, to be guilty of perpetrating it. Israel is not seeking the elimination of the Palestinians as a race, or if it is, it’s going a very odd way about it. The Israeli Defence Force invariably gives warnings to civilians to remove themselves from areas targeted for bombing or terrorist seizures. Nor has it blocked aid to deny sustenance. These warnings may be insufficient and the humanitarian aid too meagre, but this does not measure up to a Final Solution in Gaza, even if you take as true the Hamas claim that 40,000 have died there. If Israel wanted to eliminate the Palestinians in Gaza they could do so tomorrow, as John Mason pointed out in his own defence.
Israel is not constructing gas ovens for the systematic elimination of the Palestinian race. Indeed, accusing Israel of such genocide is classed as “anti-semitism” by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Nicola Sturgeon signed Scotland up to the IHRA in 2018. The Scottish government has thus accepted that it is antisemitic to “draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as the IHRA declaration puts it. This means that, by accusing Israel of genocide, the SNP is technically anti-semitic on its own definition. The party leadership seems unaware of this contradiction in its approach to the Gaza conflict.
Actually, this is rather typical of the SNP leadership, which tends to leap to support the latest moral crusade without seriously reflecting on what it’s signing up to. In 2018 it was all about embarrassing the Labour Party over the allegedly anti-semitic conduct of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. That’s why Nicola Sturgeon was so keen to adopt the IHRA definition of Jew-hate. Did her government not read the and understand the documentation? Apparently not. I have heard no SNP figure in the past week refer to it, or question say whether it still supports that definition of anti-semitism.
Yet, I suspect that the SNP external affairs secretary, Angus Robertson, was fully aware of the IHRA when he agreed to hold talks with the Israeli diplomat last week. Ms Grudsky also met with John Mason shortly afterwards. Robertson was accused of bringing the party into disrepute in a motion from Dalkeith branch which also called for the minister to be suspended, pending an investigation. The SNP MP Brendan O’Hara said Robertson had “lent legitimacy” to Benjamin Netanyahu. “In the midst of a genocide it is unconscionable” tweeted the SNP national secretary, Lorna Finn, clearly unaware of the significance of the “g” word.
Once again the SNP is demonstrating a rather conspicuous absence of marbles over a moral issue of little direct interest to Scottish voters. Of course, many, probably most Scots are appalled by the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. They surely want an immediate ceasefire. Many accuse Benjamin Netanyahu, the right wing Israeli leader, of being a war criminal - much as many people accused Tony Blair of being war criminal the Iraq war But no one seriously talked about breaking off diplomatic relations with the UK.
The SNP conference next month was always going to be a fraught affair given the SNP’s disastrous general election performance when it lost 39 MPs. That is what they should really be discussing. That and how to revive the moribund independence campaign a decade on from the 2014 referendum. Yet this UNdiplomatic farce, largely of John Swinney’s own making, threatens to dominate proceedings, certainly in the Q and A event that precedes the First Minister’s address to conference a week on Sunday. The lesson is to remember that words have meanings and that accusing Jews of genocide betrays a wilful ignorance of history.
Excellent article, Iain, and why I subscribe to your Substack.
Some good points, but it would be better to start this discussion with a clearer definition of genocide, e.g. see the BBC's 2022 article on 'How do you define genocide?' (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11108059). Doing this more carefully would make it difficult to argue that there has only been a single instance of genocide in modern human history. Where the threshold should exactly lie remains up for debate, of course, but both extreme ends of the spectrum of positions seem rather unpersuasive.