Why is the SNP silencing supporters of Israel?

Challenging the hyperbolic claim that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians can apparently now get you cast out of the Scottish National Party (SNP).

This was the fate that befell MSP John Mason earlier this month. He tweeted back in August that ‘if Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed 10 times as many’. It was a crass tweet, but Mason was surely within his rights to challenge the characterisation of Israel as a ‘genocidal’ state. As he later explained in a radio interview, ‘there is a difference between war and genocide and to say that every war is genocide is not the way we use that word’. It’s a fair point.

But SNP higher-ups were not prepared to tolerate any deviation from their script on the war in Gaza, and promptly suspended him. A spokesman declared, without any hint of irony, that ‘there can be no room in the SNP for this kind of intolerance’. Then, in mid-October, the SNP announced that it was expelling Mason.

Nobody should be surprised that the SNP refuses to tolerate debate. After all, this has long been a party with strong authoritarian tendencies, policing the speech and lifestyles of Scottish citizens while marginalising internal critics of its policies, especially around gender self-ID. As Mason himself put it last week, the SNP ‘does seem to have become less tolerant and narrower over the years and is not as inclusive as it used to be’.

But it is still shocking to see the SNP taking issue with one of its own MSPs for challenging the anti-Semitic implications of the genocide charge. After all, this absurd use of the term ‘genocide’ to describe Israel’s war against Hamas is an attempt to find the Jews guilty of precisely what was done to them by the Nazis, and to devalue the unique horror of the Holocaust itself.

So why is the SNP enforcing a myopically anti-Israel line? As strange as it may sound, there is a certain type of Scottish nationalist who believes that the Scottish people are just like the Palestinians. In their eyes, both are suffering under colonial rule. It’s a comparison that I’m sure would be lost on the civilians of Gaza.

The SNP’s expulsion of Mason provides another grim reminder of the two-tier racism that has been dominant across Britain since 7 October. While agitating against Jews and Israel is seen as ‘progressive’, any criticism of Islamist extremists like Hamas will have you attacked as Islamophobic. Indeed, it now seems that just questioning the official Hamas line, that Israel is guilty of ‘genocide’, can have you thrown out of a mainstream political party.

The treatment of John Mason is merely among the more dramatic examples of a deep intolerance in supposedly progressive, ‘anti-imperialist’ circles. On both sides of the border, the demonisation of Israel is green-lighting the censorship of much-needed dissent and debate.

Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.