Angus Robertson's error was treating Israel as a normal country while it does abnormal things

The SNP are in an 'interesting' place in respect of Israel.  I don't in any way celebrate the withdrawal of the whip from John Mason, because we've seen in the past that throwing seats away can have serious consequences.  However it sounds like it will be for a limited period only, and it sends out a powerful signal because it suggests that at least as far as the SNP are concerned, the genocide in Gaza is an established enough fact that denying it has taken place is just as unacceptable as denying the extermination of the Jews in the 1940s.  That is absolutely not the position of some political parties - indeed we've seen leading figures from other parties suggest that it is unacceptable to accuse Israel of genocide for the very reason Mason gave, ie. that 'not enough' Palestinians have been killed.  The German government even take the extreme view that admitting the reality of genocide in Gaza in itself an extension of Holocaust denial or of anti-semitism.

So it's principled and in some ways brave for the SNP to suspend Mason on the basis that they have, but it surely leaves them in a hopelessly contradictory position in defending Angus Robertson for meeting the Deputy Ambassador of Israel and being photographed with her.  If Israel's committing of genocide is so undeniable, you surely don't offer tacit approval or acceptance of that genocide by holding business-as-usual meetings with Israeli officials.

When I was younger, I took up penpalling for a spell, and I had penpals in many different countries.  It finally demonstrated to me that I have a northern European temperament, because in spite of the language barrier I found I connected far more easily with people from Scandinavia, France and Germany than with people from the USA or Australia (although my typically brash Aussie penpal from Brisbane did very kindly offer to send me some vegemite, once she had explained what it was). I very briefly had a penpal from Israel, and she was totally different from all the others, because she wasn't interested in talking about herself - all she wanted to do was talk about Israel and educate me about it.  She wasn't being overtly political, it was more like a one-to-one tourism advert, but I realised years later what she was doing. There seems to be a deep-seated insecurity among some Israelis, rooted in the idea that people elsewhere don't see them as a 'proper country'. This leaks out sometimes even among the most seasoned propagandists - one of them blurted out on social media recently "what these people cannot come to terms with is that Israel is a real country!"  I don't think all that many people don't regard Israel as a real country - their issue is that it's a real country committing genocide.

There was an American article recently referring to the protests at Hampden when the Israeli women's team played Scotland, and it suggested that the value of an international  football ban on Israel would be to deprive Israelis of what they really do crave - the respectability of being seen as a normal country on a par with any other. Or more specifically, they crave that normality even while doing abnormal things like genocide, and that's what shouldn't be acceptable and what they must be deprived of.  If they want to be treated as a normal country, they must earn it by acting like one.  They can't have their cake and eat it. That's what Angus Robertson allowed them to do, albeit in a very small way.  Whether that's a sacking offence, I don't know, but it certainly must never happen again.

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