When Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations this week told UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, that she was a ”witch” with a “spell book”, it raised many eyebrows. But I for one am grateful to him.
Danny Danon might have the name and gravitas of the heir to a European yoghurt empire, but this week he tried to channel his inner Spanish Grand Inquisitor at the UN as he denounced Albanese and her report on Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza.
”Every time you try to curse Israel with falsehood and libel,” he intoned, ”your curses fail. Miss Albanese, you are a witch, and this report is another page in your spell book.”
It goes without saying that Danon is not an intellectual, and a moment later he somewhat deflated his own claims by adding that ”every page of this report is an empty spell, every accusation a charm that does not work because you are a failed witch”.
Albanese took Danon’s babble in her stride.
At the very least, he carries with him those ancient, fantastically backward hatreds and superstitions that men have weaponised against women for centuries, accusing them of witchcraft when they feel their own power challenged.
”So be it,” she replied later. ”You’re the one accused of genocide: if the worst thing you can accuse me of is witchcraft I’ll take it. But rest assured that if I had the power to make spells I would use it to stop your crimes once and for all.”
She has a point. It was Danon, not Albanese, who publicly called for Israel to ”delete” one civilian neighbourhood in Gaza for every rocket launched by Hamas and who, in 2014, insisted that if a certain Israeli solider wasn’t returned within a few hours ”we should start levelling Gaza”.
(That’s not a typo, by the way. This happened in 2014. Because, for the millionth time, none of this started on October 7.)
To be fair to Danon, he’s not the first to suggest that women and children be killed, or at least be left homeless, because their husbands, fathers and brothers are resisting an occupation: history is full of reprisals against the civilian populations of occupied territories, most notably featuring the Nazis in World War 2.
In other words, I understand why people are disgusted by Danon. But as I said at the start, I think we can be grateful to him in one respect, because he has reminded us of something that’s too easy to forget.
All day, every day, powerful men with appallingly advanced technology at their fingertips tell us that they are on the bleeding edge of modernity and that their ideas are therefore worth listening to.
What Danon reminds us, however, is that just becomes someone wears a suit and uses the rhetoric of modern right-wing politics, he can still be a primitive, superstitious throwback to a far older and far more stupid world.
Danon could have chosen any one of dozens of slurs to fling at Albanese. But of all the words at his speechwriter’s disposal, he went with ”witch”, and in so doing revealed far more than his politics or his psycho-sexual neuroses.
What he revealed is that he is a creature from before the Enlightenment, a superstitious, fearful, ignorant man of the ancient world still locked in a deep, completely unexamined terror of strong women.
At this point his supporters will insist that it was just a figure of speech. And yet anyone who’s ever flung an insult at someone knows that you reach for the heavy ammunition, not fairy-tale characters. It’s why you’ve never got into a shouting match that ended with you calling someone Galadriel, Queen of the Elves.
No, when you condemn or insult you use words that you hope will hit your target with the weight and power you believe those words possess. Which means that, on some level, Danon believes that witches and spells are real.
At the very least, he carries with him those ancient, fantastically backward hatreds and superstitions that men have weaponised against women for centuries, accusing them of witchcraft when they feel their own power challenged.
Israel is once again raining modern weaponry down on Gaza, enabled by modern geopolitics, but as Danon has reminded us: there is absolutely nothing modern about barbarism.
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