AA Gill: wide of the mark?

On 11 January, AA Gill reviewed the BBC’s dramatisation of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’. He ended his review:

“With the violins of irony, The Diary of Anne Frank played all week against the background news of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza. The comparison between the Franks, forced into hiding, and the Palestinians, proscribed, trapped and hopeless in this sliver of land that is the Middle East’s attic, was inescapable.”

On 23 January, Marilyn Booth (Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Edinburgh) reviewed Bahaa Taber’s novel, ‘Love in Exile’ in the TLS. She began her review by saying that she read the book “as the Israeli Air Force began bombarding Gaza.” They are moved to write this, of course,  because they are moved by human suffering. However, only by certain kinds of human suffering…

Booth, of course, did not read the book as Hamas was firing missiles at Israeli civilians, just as Gill would not have heard ‘the violins of ‘irony’ playing as Hamas attacked Israeli civilians. Booth did not think it worth mentioning that she read Taber’s novel as civilians were endangered in Sri Lanka or slaughtered in terrible numbers in the Congo. Gill did not need to point out any comparisons with the tens of thousands of innocent civilians ‘trapped and hopeless’, facing starvation in Zimbabwe.

Such comparisons are inconceivable because for a certain kind of British academic or journalist the only crimes that matter are Israel’s. For them, the only people in the world who suffer are the victims of Israel. Their editors find nothing strange about this, presumably because they agree.