“Repeat after me!” he calls, and the crowd of students — there are at least a hundred of them — begin to chant as instructed.

“We have Zionists!”
“We have Zionists!”

“Who have entered the camp!”
“Who have entered the camp!”

“We are going to create a human chain—”
“We are going to create a human chain—”

“Where I am standing—”
“Where I am standing—”

“So that—”
“So that—”

“They do not pass this point!”
“They do not pass this point!”

“And infringe upon our privacy!”
“And infringe upon our privacy!”

“And try to disrupt our community!”
“And try to disrupt our community!”

The students link arms, moving as one. “One step forward!” the leader calls, and they duly obey as a hundred voices echo: “One step forward!”

I have no normative judgement to hand down on the protests themselves. This is America, the students are engaged in the protected exercise of their first amendment rights, and it is their prerogative to continue doing it within the parameters of the law, whether or not this will have any impact whatsoever on the thing they’re protesting. (It won’t.) I certainly don’t agree with Columbia’s president’s decision to send in the NYPD to arrest participants; this was excessive, and also wildly counterproductive, given how it has obviously fuelled the group’s sense of heroic victimhood and caused their ranks to swell exponentially.

But the video is worth discussing. The robotic chanting, the lockstep conformity, the way the ringleader in the pink Crocs simpers and giggles as his group advances on the two students who he’s identified, for reasons unknown, as Zionists. “Have you got enough video?” he coos. “Cause I look very pretty.”

It is, of course, the position of those sympathetic to the protests that videos like the above are non-representative of the general tenor of things — as well as a foolish distraction from the true issue at hand. Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was suspended from Columbia for her participation in the protests, posted on X, “Throughout history, protests were co-opted and made to look bad so police and public leaders would shut them down. That’s what we are seeing now at Columbia University… Public officials and media making this about anything else are inflaming the situation and need to bring calmness and sanity back.” Meanwhile, the protestors themselves released a statement complaining that their activism was being unfairly conflated with the acts of a few malicious idiots: “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us…Our members have been misidentified by a politically motivated mob.”

There’s something a bit odd about this no-true-Scotsmanning, given the tendency of these same protestors to treat any Jewish-appearing person who is not sporting a keffiyeh and chanting for intifada as a proxy for the Netanyahu regime. It’s also a bizarre form of special pleading; I certainly don’t remember anyone taking seriously the notion that, for instance, the 100 or so tiki torch-wielding protestors shouting “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in 2017 were not representative of the cause to which they’d attached themselves.

But either way, I doubt it matters. If you’re being screamed at, spat on, and told to “go back to Poland” on the streets of the Upper West Side, how much do you really care whether the people doing this are certified Ivy League-pedigreed assholes or just the regular kind? The only difference this could possibly make is to Columbia itself, and then only because if these are students, the school might be expected to do something about it.

It’s also an unavoidable and unfortunate feature of this and other campus protests that they do tend to attract a sizeable contingent who are not so much pro-Palestinian as anti-Israel — and, more specifically, anti-whichever-Jewish-person has the misfortune to be within shouting distance. For while Columbia’s activists may believe that this is not the true soul of their protest, the video linked above indicates otherwise. If the point of protesting the war in Gaza is to protest the war in Gaza, why is one of the movement’s leaders squandering even an iota of energy on intimidating two random, completely unconnected people off a public lawn for the crime of supporting Israel’s continued existence? The chanting, the linked arms, the singular focus: this is not a distraction from the regularly scheduled program. It is the program.

And for at least some of these people — certainly for the ones in the video — I strongly suspect that it is the entire point.

This is not to say that the students captured here are antisemites, even if they are engaged in what is arguably antisemitic harassment. In all likelihood, most of them had never thought much about Jews or Palestinians or Israel at all before the war in Gaza became the cause du jour; I’m not sure many of them have thought about it much since, either. Whatever else these demonstrations may be, they are the biggest social event on campus — in a world where campus social events have been basically nonexistent for the past three years.

Between the chanting, the dancing, and the… well, whatever this is, it’s hard to blame the kids for wanting to join what is, for all intents and purposes, a party. It’s also hard to blame them for being somewhat bewildered when the party ends with their own university calling the cops, who in turn force them to disperse with a fire hose. It’s not just the brutality; it feels like a breach of contract. As writer and academic Tyler Austin Harper has noted, Columbia and others like it explicitly highlight their histories as incubators of political activism with the express purpose of attracting a particular type of young person, the kind for whom protesting and partying seem like one and the same thing.

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I suspect that this is why these events have the feeling of performance, or even parody: a photogenic, vibes-based facsimile of radical activism instead of the thing itself. It’s not just that their ostensible goal of “divestment” — in this case, from ETFs that include shares in businesses with ties to Israel — is a categorical impossibility; a number of the campus demonstrators will openly admit that they neither know nor care what specific policies they’re demonstrating against. What matters is, they’re part of something, a tradition of campus activism that dates back a hundred years. For the students who are drawn to Columbia’s “Social Justice university” branding, protesting is less about results than participation, a sort of institutionally-sanctioned Larp, like one of those interactive team-building exercises where you get to solve a murder, or escape from prison — or, in this case, hunt a witch.

Which brings me back to the video from the quad and the chants of “One step forward!”, which some have compared with Children of the Corn — the 1984 slasher film in which a maniacal child preacher orchestrates the massacre of every adult in town. Others have noted that a group of people linking arms to push Jews out of public spaces has, uh, particular connotations. To me, though, this scene was most reminiscent not of horror movies or history books, but of high school. The socially approving smirks that the kids in the video flash at each other are the same ones that would ripple across the faces of my school’s resident mean girls as they chased some less popular kid from a lunch table, a bus seat, a bathroom. It was bullying, yes, but more important, it was a bonding exercise. Nothing brings a group of people together like pushing another one out.

And the kids in the video, with their linked arms, their self-satisfied grins? You can see what animates them in this moment, and it isn’t the cause. It’s the camaraderie. The connections. The cameras. This was the college experience they were promised — and it’s everything they hoped it would be.

According to the late political theorist Charles W. Mills, Kant’s oeuvre contains the resources to establish a variety of “Black radical Kantianism”. Numerous others have presented him as a proto-feminist, with a recent monograph by US-based philosopher Helga Varden claiming that “despite his austere and even anti-sex, cisist, sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant’s writings … yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore … abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity”.  All of this is quite unexpected for a 18th-century Prussian bachelor of Lutheran upbringing, of the opinion that sex should occur only within Christian marriage, black people were natural slaves, and women unfit to have a vote.

Also surprising, at least initially, is the fascination Kant’s systematic philosophy still exerts over many in academia, despite the famed dullness of his prose. In an unusually striking phrase, he once wrote of “the miserly provision of a step-motherly nature” — and indeed, step-motherly nature doesn’t seem to have been liberally doling out the bantz the day young Immanuel was born. According to one biographer, he was “extremely stern with himself from his early youth”: determined to be economically independent, “because he saw in it a condition for the self-sufficiency of his mind and character”. Throughout his life, he never left his home city of Königsberg; later on, his neighbours there would set their watches by his exactly timed daily constitutional walks.

Valiant attempts of hagiographers to make him seem like a fascinating demimondaine only reinforce the impression of squareness. “He was a very social type who often went to parties and sometimes drank too much,” protested one fellow German author to the Guardian 20 years ago, a little too insistently.  “At times Kant could not find the street where he lived because he was so inebriated.” There were also “amorous interests” in at least two women, it was reported, though no evidence the relationships were consummated.

If not his innate charisma or worldliness then, what explains the lingering attraction of Kant’s elaborate philosophical system to today’s thinkers? For many, it is surely the ingenuity with which he dealt with a number of disquieting sceptical challenges that emerged during the Enlightenment. Over the course of several mature works, Kant built an intricate cathedral of interlocking justifications, providing support for certain traditional assumptions that new scientific discoveries and encroaching atheism would otherwise seem to leave dangling in mid-air.

For instance: answering to David Hume’s worry that humans could neither directly observe nor otherwise prove the existence of fundamental natural laws such as the connection between cause and effect, Kant got rid of the underpinning assumption that the human mind and the natural world were wholly separate. Instead, in a reversal he likened to Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round, he wove an understanding of such laws into the fabric of sensory experience, so that allegedly it now made no sense to seriously doubt them.

Faced with the creeping fear that there could be no free will in Newton’s mechanistic universe, Kant then leaned upon his own picture of the physical world as a realm of partly mind-constructed appearances, and placed the free, unmoved-yet-moving self safely in a separate realm beyond it. To the increasingly urgent complaint that without God as a foundation, traditional Christian precepts must surely lose their authority, he responded by instead putting free will and autonomous human reason at the heart of objective moral decision-making, conveniently preserving many austerely Protestant-looking practical conclusions as he did so.

In all of this Kant gave the cognitive faculties a crucial role, painting the mind not just as a discoverer but also as a partial inventor of our universe and its fundamental rules — a suggestion flattering to susceptible brainboxes in universities, secretly pining for a superhero role in life befitting of their intellectual talents. And despite the often flatfooted and prosaic presentation, there is also a thrilling intimation of spookiness to the metaphysical picture Kant ultimately offers readers: on the one hand, the world of knowable appearances, and on the other, a supernatural realm of things-in-themselves, whose existence humans cannot apprehend directly but only infer.

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But perhaps the aspect of Kant’s thought most attractive to today’s professional academic is that — like many of them — he is an intellectual conservative of sorts. Though he rearranges the metaphysical furniture, sometimes fairly radically, he usually leaves his fellow citizens sitting almost exactly where they were beforehand. The structure of the universe is still predictable; humans continue to have free will; it is still the case that one shouldn’t kill, break promises, or lie. Effectively, Kant often starts with conclusions he wants to preserve and then works backwards.

To some extent, this is also the strategy of some of his modern interpreters, beginning with a particular set of now-fashionable political conclusions, then casting about in Kant’s writing for the resources to prop them up (usually, by making extensive use of his emphasis upon the importance of freedom and self-governance). Though in his ethics Kant railed against using another person instrumentally as a “mere means” to your own personal ends, in practice commentators don’t seem to pay much attention to that bit, as they haul him off down the gender clinic or to the BLM march. Superficially, it may look sexily avant-garde to employ the ideas of a thinker as buttoned-up as Kant, in order to underpin arguments for the rights of people to have polyamorous orgies or to cut body parts off at will. In reality, though, these anachronistic uses of his thought would never have escaped the seminar room and made it out into the wider world alive, had society not already rendered it perfectly permissible or even profitable to pursue such endpoints.

Of course, there are also differences between Kant and the new crop of academic apologists for contemporary mores. Perhaps the most obvious is that, over the last 300 years, hundreds and thousands of people from many walks of elite life have read and responded to Kant’s works; a trend helped along by the assumption, popular until relatively recently, that a grasp of the central figures in Western philosophy was a requirement upon any decent education. But these days, almost nobody who isn’t already studying or researching philosophy reads academics like Mills and Varden. So who or what are they doing it for, exactly? It would be madly grandiose to think that, in the 21st century, anyone has ever been converted to black radical politics or pansexual people’s rights by reading opaque monographs from academic presses priced at £25 a pop.

A more charitable take, perhaps, is that both Kant and those modern thinkers loosely inspired by him are each using reason to perform a kind of sense check upon certain key presuppositions of their time. They start off with some folk-conclusions that are believed by many, though with no clear idea of why; next, they ask themselves whether there are convincing rational arguments available that might support those conclusions, and so lend them extra weight. In other words: can philosophers, with all their specialist technical skills in argument construction, produce a solid-enough rational scaffolding for some of the important-looking things that people already think?

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But if this is the strategy, it is a risky one. The more byzantine the layers of argument offered for the truth of a particular set of presuppositions, the more keenly the suspicion grows that it might have been just as easy — or certainly, no more difficult — to offer neat and ingenious arguments that seemed to show exactly the opposite. Kant’s sprawling system, with its host of interwoven technical assumptions ranging across metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and politics, already invites this worry; by the time commentators start to lean upon that system in order to justify social-justice mantras about abortion or cis privilege, the edifice looks in danger of collapsing.

Or perhaps these present-day commentators assume that the only way to redeem Kant from his intermittent episodes of racism and sexism — to cleanse him of those everyday 18th-century sins — is to demonstrate that, despite appearances, his philosophical system has the potential to generate a progressive position on those very matters about which he was so reactionary. For some academics, this may well be the best explanation: attempting an absolution of sorts for their hero.

Either way, it’s hard not to conclude that in thinking about Kant’s legacy, we are better off going back to the extremely rich source material directly, and trying to see it in its proper historical context — for better or worse. There is no need to mess around with any quasi-religious new adaptions. It is a strange irony that, in the 300 years since Kant was born, those working in universities only seem to have got more puritanical.

The Manual spooked Western intelligence agencies. Did this mean that terrorists were being trained to operate like MI6 agents? And if so, how could they be defeated? It’s a paranoia that has only grown in the past two decades. From terrorist groups to semiconductor companies, non-state actors increasingly have access to highly sensitive information of national importance. Espionage is now anyone’s game; the need for security everywhere. Only this week, two men in the UK — including a former parliamentary aide — were charged under the Official Secrets Act with spying on behalf of China. And while this might seem a throwback to a Le Carré world of inter-state espionage, the reality is that any modern spy worth their salt would be as interested in Britain’s private sector as it is in our government.

The British state has begun to realise this. In 2022, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum and FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a joint address to business and academic leaders. When it came to the threat of Chinese espionage and cyberattacks, they said: “most of what is at risk from the Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It’s yours.” Nowadays, private companies developing products in areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotech have access to such sensitive information that, if it got into the wrong hands, it would be a national security issue.

Far from the Cold War era of stealing nuclear secrets — think Aldrich Ames and the Rosenbergs — spies today are more likely to want to nick your PowerPoint. In January last year, a Chinese spy named Zheng Xiaoqing stole a data file from General Electric Power, which related to the design and manufacturing of gas and steam turbines. The IP was thought to be worth several million. He attempted to hide the file within the code of another file — a picture of a sunset — using a technique called steganography. The choice of target is instructive: it is increasingly the Nvidias and ASMLs of the world (both semiconductor companies), and not the CIA or MI5, which have access to secret information of national importance.

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This diffusion of knowledge and power away from the state and intelligence agencies, and towards private companies, marks a stark shift from the Cold War era. Back then, there was no confusion: the British and American intelligence communities had a monopoly over secrets. In fact, the Cold War was in many ways a war of intelligence, and its Manichean nature — an existential competition between the US and the Soviet Union — was far more stable than our current multipolar system. As Tom King, chair of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee in the Nineties, lamented in 1998: “Was not the Cold War, in its awful way, a form of rigid security system that has now collapsed?”

Ironically, globalisation was initially seen as the panacea for Cold War tension. The Marshall Plan of 1948 was President Truman’s attempt to induce Europe not to turn red with a large injection of cash. And four decades later, it was the desire for American blue jeans which helped bring down the Berlin Wall. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of terrorism, that the West figured out that globalisation and interdependency was a threat, not a cure. Today, in an interconnected world where we rely upon one Taiwanese company (TSMC) for all of our smartphones, economic and national security have become one and the same.

Well-aware that it cannot afford to turn a blind eye, the UK Government has overseen an influx of national security legislation in the past few years all designed to tighten scrutiny. The National Security & Investment Act, introduced in 2022, is designed to protect the UK’s critical infrastructure — from telecommunications to AI — against foreign acquisition. More recently the new National Security Bill, introduced in December 2023, is the most significant espionage law since the Official Secrets Act of 1911. And a new arm of MI5 — the National Protective Security Authority — was established in 2023 to advise private UK companies on how to combat cybersecurity. “Economic security” has also become a significant issue. In a speech last week Oliver Dowden laid out plans for export controls and tighter regulation of sensitive research projects in British academic institutions, arguing that “our economic and security interests are intertwined as never before”.

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What this wave of legislation suggests is that national security has become so all-encompassing and diverse that it can no longer be separated from the rest of government. Legislation, not secret agents, is being used to counter security threats. In a globalised world, the politician’s pen is replacing the agent’s pistol.

Some fear that the government’s increasing role in dealing with national security may lead to its politicisation. Just last month, the UK banned foreign state ownership of newspapers, responding to the attempted acquisition of the Telegraph by the UAE conglomerate RedBird. Prior to the ban itself, the acquisition was seen to “represent a very real potential national security threat” by a group of 18 Tory MPs. The problem is that, although the concerns over the Telegraph instance were well-founded, the broader notion of “national security” remains undefined and ambiguous — even in a major piece of legislation like the National Security & Investment Act. The risk is that, with the ever-widening scope of “national security”, it becomes a political issue, defined and redefined by politicians at any given moment.

Across the Atlantic, earlier this week Congress approved a bill to ban TikTok unless the the Chinese company ByteDance sells the US platform. The concerns stem from two issues. The first is the fact that for many people TikTok acts as a de facto source of news: its ownership by a Chinese company therefore essentially translates into a foreign-held media company. Second, there is the issue of TikTok’s vast pool of data — and fears that the CCP has access to it. The danger is that TikTok could be used for surveillance, Chinese-sanctioned propaganda, and ultimately to undermine American democracy. In the run-up to an already potentially toxic presidential election, those worries are not unfounded. Nonetheless, the forced sale of TikTok is yet another example of Western governments feeling compelled to use a blunt instrument (legislation) to tackle issues of national and economic security.

Pressure has mounted on the UK to follow suit. And the UK has in general very much followed (or been lent on by) the US to toughen its national security legislation in recent years. Just think back to Trump’s row with Johnson over Huawei in 2020, when Britain was on the cusp of allowing a Chinese company to dominate the UK’s 5G network. But we also have less weight to throw around in the global economy than America. The US can easily absorb the shock of any unintended consequences inflicted by heavy-handed legislation. The UK, on the other hand, has to walk a finer line between national security and staying open for business. There can be no such thing today, economically speaking, of an isolationist Britain.

This collaboration (and, in some cases, confrontation) between the state and private companies who hold IP and technology of national importance is not necessarily a bad thing. But as the lines between economic and national security blur, the trade-off may well be a politicisation (and bureaucratisation) of national security by those in Whitehall. And this does represent a fundamental break with the past. As the intelligence academics Antonio Díaz Fernández and Ruben Arcos put it, the days of the Cold War “secret state” are giving way to the 21st-century “protecting state”, in which national security seeps into everyday life.

Since the Cold War “national security” has expanded from the narrow realm of military power and deterrence to include terrorism, environmental security, migration, cybersecurity and now economic security. Of course, parliamentary bills will never replace the world of James Bond entirely. But, as Bond’s own Chief of Intelligence put it a little over a decade ago: “Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they aren’t nations… It’s in the shadows — that’s where we must do battle.”

In 1986, a year before The Last of England was released, Jarman purchased a home by the sea. Prospect Cottage is a small wooden house clinging to the shingle ribbon at Dungeness. The walls are black, the door and window frames gorse yellow. An excerpt from John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” is picked out on one wall: “Sawcy Pedantique wretch, goe chide / late schoole boyes and sore prentices…” Today the cottage has become something of a meme. Its neat proportions and stark location do well on Instagram, and you can buy a Prospect Cottage model kit for the aspiring hermit in your life. Jarman, always suspicious of the heritage industry, would laugh.

Dungeness is a place for fishermen and ascetics. Stone, sky, sea. The place is bound by water, with the English Channel to one side and the flat weirdness of Romney Marsh to the other. Dungeness is England stripped naked. Everything is on show. The little cottages crouch in the lee of a defunct nuclear power station and the horizon is swagged with power lines. Migrants arrive in rubber dinghies every summer now. What do they make of it? Relics of industry, toy houses, the click and shift of shingle beneath their feet. Is this what they expected?

The Last of England was a response to the paint-by-numbers neoliberalism of Britain in the late Eighties. It was also the record of a personal apocalypse. Jarman was dying from Aids and so were most of his friends. He feared that England’s memory was being wiped, just as the collective memory of his own generation was erased by death. And what was left? Cold hearths and dead oaks. Some scenes, in which balaclava-clad men brutalise emaciated prisoners, could be spliced into a nuclear war film like Threads with ease. The departure of the household gods is not an end, but a chilling new start.

A different man might have retreated to postcard England. A Cotswolds bolthole, perhaps, all buttery stone and Britain in Bloom awards. Instead he chose Dungeness. The bleak landscape pulled at him, as did the austere charm of Prospect Cottage. Although he still spent time in London, the city had become a degraded husk. Hampstead Heath seems to have been the only place in London he enjoyed, largely for its Arcadian atmosphere after dark. The rest of the capital was a drab blend of drunks and traffic.

The southern countryside wasn’t much better: “Poor ruined Kent with its ugly commuter towns, there every field and hedgerow is under siege.” Dungeness was different. While the busy-bodies had arrived — Jarman mourned the appearance of unnecessary fences and the replacement of the red phone box with a modern glass version — the place retained its essential character. Like Hampstead Heath, Dungeness had texture. It was still England.

Dungeness seems to have fed his growing apocalypticism. It is a provisional place. Jarman would have been amused by the recent discovery of a Tudor ship’s hull 300 meters inland, evidence of the coastline’s shifting nature. Between 1989-1990, Jarman worked on the journal later published as Modern Nature. The book is full of change and decay. It’s a record of loss in real time. In one passage, he delivers an elegy that would have been familiar to any Anglo-Saxon: “Now throughout the world stand windblown halls, frost-covered ruined buildings; the wine-halls crumble, kings lie dead, deprived of pleasure, all the steadfast band dead by the wall.”

There’s something off about Dungeness. He learns that the drinking water is suffused with lead and aluminium. The death of a grass-snake is an omen. Military exercises wake him in the middle of the night. The nuclear power station is “a 20th century Babylon”, its interior a “shambles of rusting pipe and escaping steam, with little men running hither and thither with spanners and screwdrivers”. Jarman noted that rising sea levels would swamp Dungeness within 100 years. He pictured the power station being washed away in a Ballardian rush.

This strange place has much in common with the world depicted in The Last of England. The film is titled after a painting by Ford Madox Brown. It depicts an emigrating couple taking one last look at England from the deck of a ship. Their gaze is fixed on coastline that we cannot see; perhaps Jarman imagined them watching Dungeness sink into the haze.

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The Ness is blasted and surreal, a settlement cobbled together in the backwash of a great disaster, just as the film is cobbled together from images of despair and anarchy. In one sequence, Jarman filmed Tilda Swinton on the strand. She moans and twirls next to a pyre while the power station sits black behind her. This was the country that he wanted to capture. Not the hay wains and stately homes, but what would be left when England finally lost her memory. A land of cruelty, fire, and Little Chef franchises.

And yet things aren’t quite so neat. The film contradicts itself. In recording England’s mythological drain, it creates symbols that project great mythic force; the cadaver leaps up halfway through the autopsy. The final scene, where robed figures paddle a boat out into a torchlit sea, rocked by waves and the grain of Super 8 film, can be read as weary retreat or bold foundation myth. Even at his most despairing, Jarman was an accidental optimist.

The way he lived at Prospect Cottage also smacks of optimism. Pessimists plant nothing, and Jarman was a great plantsman. Gardens are ephemeral, and so the perfect medium for a place like Dungeness. This was no mean feat on dry shingle bleached by wind and salt. The plants were hardy and low: sempervivum, fennel, santolina, sea kale, rosemary, iris, some hopeful roses. Jarman constructed miniature stone circles and driftwood dolmens, turning the shingle desert into a 20th century Seahenge. These sculptures looked good ­— the shoreline is dominated by horizontals, you need some punchy verticals to frame the view — but there was far more to them than that. Jarman knelt on the ground and sculpted ancient forms as England withered behind him. Perhaps he was trying to tempt the household gods home.

Jarman died 30 years ago. Although his personal apocalypse came to pass, England staggers on for now. The Last of England is a powerful account of a nation’s spiritual decay, but the worst consequences are confined to celluloid — the men in balaclavas aren’t in charge just yet. Prospect Cottage and its garden were lovingly tended by Jarman’s partner, Keith Collins, until 2018. Their little scrap of shingle has been recorded in two handsome volumes and is well worth a visit, if only as a reminder that if you want England back, all you have to do is re-make it.

What are we seeing? Are the terrible scenes from Gaza the projections on a bloody screen of one brutal and clumsy man’s baffled obstinacy — the last days of a demented Roman Emperor — or do they show, as anti-Zionists would have it, indeed as anti-Zionists have had it ever since the Jewish longing to return to Zion gave itself a name and the anti-Zionists called it colonialism, that something is rotten in the soul of Israel?

It’s hard right now, if you are a Jew who has always believed the founding of Israel to have been necessary and in many ways miraculous, to hold your nerve. Jews are a contradictory people, at once certain of themselves and faint-hearted. “The Jewish ability to internalise any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves”, said the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in an interview with Philip Roth, “is one of the marvels of human nature”. We can outface so much criticism and then no more. Will the gathering storm of rage be too much for us this time? Or will we feel obliged to go on salvaging the truth from the noise and cacophony of war, even as those who don’t want to hear us — the libellous, the malevolent, the misinformed and now the usually friendly who are running out of patience — grow in number and in volume?

Some truths aren’t hard to save from the moral fog that fell on southern Israel six months ago, a six months that have been like no other, collapsing a half year into a seeming sleepless day and night, not simply because shock unravels time, but because along with the horror of the massacre itself came the horror of its delighted reception. King Duncan’s horses were said to have eaten one another the night Macbeth had their master murdered. It was nature’s way of telling us that something unfathomably horrible had happened. The cries of “Kill Jews!” that were heard around the world in the aftermath of the murder of more than 1,000 Jews on October 7 exceeded in unfathomable horror the cannibalism of Duncan’s horses. Did we know that humans could openly rejoice in the rape and murder of people they did not know? Isn’t dancing in the blood of others itself a species of cannibalism?

To borrow from Macbeth again, tears were meant to drown the wind. But all we heard was cheering. The Hamas massacre inverted the norms of pity.

And here is another of the truths we save from that most terrible event. That we do our humanity a great wrong when we let theories of power rule our politics and politics rule our hearts. Nothing that Zionism had done or ever could do would justify this glorying in the torture of individual Israelis. That so many of those doing the glorying were, on the face of it, highly educated put paid to our sentimental faith in education as our final and most reliable bulwark against the hysteria of race-hatred. Voice for voice, the educated out-sang the ignorant in bigotry and bloodlust. As did the highly principled out-sing the more ideologically easy-going when it came to such causes as the inviolability of a woman’s body.

Hadn’t the teaching of the past half-century warned against even tentative intrusion into a woman’s space? Yet here, confronted by the grossest intrusion of them all, rape — brutal rape — the same preachers against the most micro of microaggressions refused to voice even the faintest disapprobation. Some, high up in the world’s great universities, wanted to “contextualise” what had happened. Others, wary of falling into that absurdity, asked for more proof, though had any woman other than an Israeli Jew so much as cried foul, they would have been believed because the prevailing ideology holds that to doubt a rape is to violate a woman a second time.

Let’s not beat about the bush — Israeli-Jew hate trumped all other academic considerations. When all was said and done, the great absolutes of the gender-playbook turned out to be contingent and crawled under the desks of the committed like dormice.

In the long sleepless day and night following the massacre, in which Jews of different nationalities and political persuasions, orthodox and unorthodox, tried to make sense of what had happened, the terrible realisation, that “Never Again” meant nothing, dawned. There would never be a “Never Again”. Those we imagined would be our allies — the informed, the progressive, the liberal — were not progressive when it came to us.

Ironically, it was Israel — our bolthole, the country that gave us the stability of self-worth, our old, all-embracing home — that now felt insecure. With uncanny prescience, Hamas understood that to make Jews feel unsafe in Israel was to weaken them in their own and in others’ eyes. More than ever now, it seemed to me, was it imperative to reaffirm the founding necessity of Zionism. The more empowered the lettered illiterate felt to trash Zionism, the more important was it to wrest the story back from them. A great lie had been allowed to prevail for too long. The lie that Israel had no legitimate rights or ties to the Holy Land. The lie that Zionists had stolen it from defenceless Palestinians. The lie that Zionists had turned up not as refugees from the pogroms of eastern Europe but as colonist-settlers hell-bent on getting every Palestinian out.

Is that to say I understand nothing of Palestinian forebodings in those early years as Jews continued to arrive? No. And while I think history bears out good and even utopian intentions on the part of the first Zionists, pioneers who wanted only peace and safety, without doubt there were also those who dealt less than even-handedly with their neighbours. Whether in sufficient quantity to justify Palestinian fears that a takeover was imminent, and that their Holy Places were soon to be over-run, history cannot decide. But, with whatever justification, Palestinians could not let the new arrivals live in peace. There were raids and counter-raids, running battles and massacres. The 1929 massacre by Palestinians of pre-Zionist, scholarly Jews, long resident in Hebron, was not a blueprint for the massacre of nearly 100 years later, but it was, by all official accounts, brutal.

I don’t want to be sentimental about Israel, but it’s enjoyed no peace from the beginning. It is a country that has lived under arms since before its declaration of independence. And on the very day independence was granted it was attacked once more. No, no, and no again. No to Jews. Not here. Not ever. No, no, no.

For Israel to have thrived in the face of a hostility with no end is remarkable. But there can be no denying that the fighting, the conscription of almost all its citizens, the having to live cheek by jowl with a people who cannot and will not accept its presence anywhere “between the river and the sea” has been a toughening, not to say desensitising, experience.

In defence of last year’s massacre, it was argued that it could not be understood independently of the circumstances that led to it. Hamas’s attack, its apologists insisted, was the child of the Israeli occupation. I have always resisted the word “occupation” because it suggests a pre-planned policy, rather than — as I see it — the consequence of all the wars between the two people, most of them instigated by the Palestinians, after which Israel found itself with territory it needed to demilitarise for its own safety. But alright — an occupation it became. After which, what were Palestinians expected to do?

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Jerusalem is Israel's future

By Ben Judah

The elusive two-state solution was presented to them several times. Not equitable enough, they said, even when it was the United Nations that had done the divvying up. “Don’t accept,” the cosmopolitan Palestinian writer Edward Said urged from the comfort of his home in North America. “Demand more.” Was he right? Wouldn’t an inequitable divvying up have given Palestinians better if not perfect lives? Well, it’s not for one person to tell another what’s fair. But right or wrong, there was to be no deal.

And so the bloody impasse — a tragedy, as Amos Oz saw it, of two rights. Later, a tragedy of two wrongs. For calling it a tragedy, Oz’s erstwhile Palestinian supporters deserted him. Tragedy meant there was no villain. And the Palestinians needed a villain.

Netanyahu fitted the bill. Netanyahu put his hand out and took. In retaliation for which — though nothing in the history of the two people would ever justify its extreme and twisted violence — the massacre of October 7. But if Israel must take some blame for the massacre, the Palestinians must, by the same token, take some blame for Netanyahu, the lumbering, unsubtle child of unrelenting war, a man hardened in suspicion and fear who does not know the difference between justice and revenge.

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The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

To hold out against the Palestinian narrative of dispossession, while allowing that not all of it is fantasy or self-pity, has necessitated, these last few years, more flexibility of mind than dedicated anti-Zionists are willing to try. That’s how we know they are wrong: they do not attempt to understand their enemy and do not cry for him. Did Gazans — educated in their schoolbooks to loathe Jews — dance in the streets on October 7? Whatever the truth, may Israelis never dance the dance of blood.

The heart breaks, seeing the destruction of Gaza. But seeing the destruction of Tel Aviv will hurt no less. Do I fear that? Yes. I sense a change of mood. The constant chanting on the streets of London and elsewhere has, to a degree, contributed to that change. One lie, endlessly retold, can weaken the cause of truth eventually.

But, all on his own, Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency. Oh, what the hell. Enough of them. So those are swastikas. So what? It’s all just a matter of context.

I fear they — papers and commentators and politicians — are losing interest and sympathy at the same rate. They’ve heard it all before. We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling. We’ve tried losing. We’ve tried winning. I’m not sure what’s left.