The only consolation is that he's Somerset's shame, not Scotland's: Campbell intensifies his "let's reduce the pressure on Netanyahu to stop starving children" campaign by spending hundreds of pounds of his readers' money on an Israel-friendly propaganda polling question

A couple of weeks ago, the controversial and increasingly far-right "Stew" blogger ran an utterly meaningless self-selecting Twitter poll of his readers that was carefully framed to produce a "both sides are to blame for the situation in Gaza" response, and to reinforce his propaganda narrative that what is happening is an incomprehensible far-off quarrel that we should all just forget about so we can concentrate totally and without reservation or distraction on the all-important women-with-beards issue.  Rather than, you know, actually ratcheting up the pressure on our pro-Israel government in London to do something to stop the ongoing genocide and to prevent tens of thousands of children from literally starving to death in the near future.  

Others may be determined to give the Pied Piper of Bath a free pass on this, but I have no intention of doing so.  Campbell is pro-passivity on Gaza and he is therefore pro-starvation.  He and other pro-passivity "both sides" commentators know exactly what they're doing, and they are fully aware that the public opinion environment they are trying to engineer is one in which far more children (and of course adults) are likely to die needlessly.  What his underlying motivation might be for doing this is more open to debate, although plenty of us have our suspicions. He presumably knew from early on in the genocide that he would harm his own case and whatever is left of his reputation if he backed Israel without qualification, and then realised he didn't even need to bother doing that, because "both sidesing" the issue has exactly the same practical effect - impunity for Israel and ongoing slaughter and starvation in Gaza.

When the remarkable Norstat/Sunday Times poll on independence was published at the weekend, Campbell announced that he had "hitched a lift" by paying to have at least one of his own questions added to the poll, and insisted that his own results were of far more interest than the independence numbers.  Readers naturally assumed that this meant his question would be yet another vitally important passive-aggressive effort about Kezia Dugdale's time as Director of the John Smith Centre, and would of course in no way be motivated by the Longest Sulk in History after Campbell was predictably defeated in his loopy defamation court action against Dugdale.  Alas, though, it turns out there is no Dugdale involvement at all in the question, which is instead simply a repeat of Stew's Twitter question about Israel, albeit this time asked of a representative sample of the Scottish population.

Paradoxically, the main thing he's achieved by doing this (whether he realises it or not) is to demonstrate that those who pointed out his Twitter poll was worthless were absolutely correct.  Although there's a narrow plurality in the poll for "both sides" being to blame, the percentage choosing that option is much lower than it was in the Twitter poll, thus underscoring once again that self-selecting polls of one guy's followers on social media have no statistical validity.

The question Campbell had Norstat ask was "Who do you think is responsible for the current conflict in Gaza?"  Which begs the obvious question: what is this "conflict" of which you speak, Stew?  A "conflict" or "war" normally implies that there are two or more sides slugging it out, which may have been the case eighteen long months ago but is certainly not the case now.  All we have at the moment is a single actor, the State of Israel, systematically exterminating the utterly defenceless population of a neighbouring country.  To the extent that there's a second belligerent, it consists of a civilian population simply trying to evade the bombs and the bullets, and its "war aims" can be summed up in just one word: survival.

Who do you think is responsible for the current conflict in Gaza?  (Norstat / Stew, 27th-30th May 2025):

Both Sides™: 35%

Mostly Israel: 28%

Mostly Hamas: 23%

Bearing in mind the leading nature of both the question wording and the options provided (if the third option had been "mostly Palestine" or "mostly the Palestinians", the result would have been radically different), it's pretty impressive that more people selected Israel as the culprit than Hamas.  Remember that almost the entire mainstream media in this country were pumping out relentless and largely unchallenged pro-Israel propaganda from October 2023 until very recently, and even now Israel is still being protected from much of the condemnation that is warranted.  For a very long time the public were being brainwashed with the brick wall message that "Hamas started this on October 7th" and "Israel has the right to defend itself" and "Israel strenuously denies that it is committing genocide or war crimes and you will kindly not use those words when being interviewed by me ever again".  After so long being practically instructed to think Hamas are the only baddies, it's extremely difficult for people not to cop out of saying "mostly Israel" by seeking sanctuary in the "both sides" option.  But it says something really quite powerful about the way in which social media is successfully breaking through the narratives of the establishment media that almost as many people chose "mostly Israel" as chose "both sides".  

Nevertheless, it has to be said that it's an objective fact that the combined total of 58% who believe the main culprit is either Hamas or "both sides" are simply wrong.  There are a number of reasons for that - 

1) The starting point for the violence was not 7th October 2023, but the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 in which the Israelis used extreme force (including mass killings) to establish a Jewish state comprising 80% of the territory of Palestine, of which they made up only around a third of the population.

2) It makes no difference that the Israelis had previously accepted the UN partition plan and that the Palestinians had rejected it, because the Palestinians were entirely within their rights to argue that the whole of Palestine was a single coherent territory with the right to self-determination and the clear majority of its population was opposed to partition.

3) Having driven massive numbers of Palestinians away from their homes in 1948, Israel have since and to this very day illegally refused to allow them the right to return, which has left many of them crammed into the tiny space of the Gaza Strip, effectively a glorified refugee camp.  That created the perfect breeding ground for radicalised groups such as Hamas to come into being and to thrive.

4) Those conditions were exacerbated by the Israeli conquest of the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967, meaning that refugees were still crammed into appalling conditions but without even being masters of the 20% that remained of their house after 1948.

5) Having by the 1990s reluctantly reconciled themselves to the injustice of being permanently pushed back to the West Bank and Gaza, the moderate Palestinian leadership have for the most part not had any partner for peace on the Israeli side.  Almost all Israeli governments of the 21st century have consciously pursued a policy of trashing any peace process and throwing every conceivable practical obstacle in the way of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

6) Benjamin Netanyahu is far more responsible than the Palestinian people for the fact that Gaza is currently ruled by Hamas.  Although Hamas were democratically elected to a parliamentary majority in 2006, they have outstayed their term of office by around a decade and a half, and in any case they were never elected to the role of the presidency, which they effectively usurped in Gaza.  Netanyahu has funnelled millions of dollars to Hamas as a strategy to keep the leadership of the Palestinian territories divided and to make the formation of a state less likely.  Even right now, Netanyahu and the US are refusing to allow Hamas to add a clause to any ceasefire deal that would see political control of Gaza pass from Hamas to a technocratic Palestinian leadership.  Israel needs the Hamas bogey-man to survive, not only to thwart a Palestinian state but also to justify the continuation of the genocide.

For all of these reasons and more, and notwithstanding the horrors of 7th October, Israel unquestionably bears the overwhelming responsibility and blame for the last few decades of violence, and self-evidently for the one-way mass extermination event that is occurring at the moment.

I gather that Neil Sinclair, who made an extraordinary attempt to dictate the content of this blog a couple of days ago, and specifically to force me to allow his friend Gordon Millar to openly post justifications of genocidal beliefs here, was largely motivated by very similar views to the ones that drive Campbell.  Sinclair's attitude to those in Scotland campaigning loudly to stop the starvation of babies is, like Campbell's, one of irritation and vexation.  He regards them as "piggy-backing" onto the independence cause in the same way that trans activists have allegedly done in recent years.  He believes they should either be silenced or that their views should be placed into a sort of sealed antechamber where they cannot sully the independence cause.  Quite apart from the fact that his interpretation is simply wrong (I cannot see any evidence of piggy-backing or entryism going on), the worldview it betrays is grotesque and morally bankrupt.   Essentially we're supposed to sacrifice the people of Gaza on the altar of our own homegrown political preoccupations - which yes, are very important, but right at this moment cannot possibly outweigh the absolute imperative of stopping a genocide that is occurring *now*.  I'll have more to say about this in a future post.