Gaza is all that matters. It pulsates in their brains like a tumour. Every worldly event is hammered into yet another sermon on the devilishness of Israel. Including the World Cup. The frazzle-eyed Gazaholics insisted the final between Argentina and Spain was a shadow war between Israel and Palestine. Argentina’s ‘anarcho-capitalist’ president, Javier Milei, is pro-Israel, you see, while Spain’s president, Pedro Sánchez, has become the pin-up of every bourgeois arse in Europe with his neo-Inquistition against the Jewish State. Even global sport finds itself drained of joy and swept up in the fever dreams of the Gaza-brained.

The final felt like a ‘proxy for Israel vs Palestine’, said that most sodden of Gazaholics, Mehdi Hasan. His interlocutor – Spanish actor Javier Bardem, whose whole soul seems to have been hoovered out by Israelophobia – agreed. Milei, he said, ‘openly’ supports a ‘person who is a war criminal… Netanyahu’. And that made people want to ‘support the other team’, the team that is ‘not supporting a war criminal’. You sad, sad bastards. Can the Gaza goggles not come off for 90 poxy minutes? Trust the Zio-addled to turn a game of footie into a neo-Nuremberg.

Theft of joy is the bread and butter of anti-Zionism. Even sport cannot prick the pomposity of the keffiyeh classes. One author said he was supporting Spain because Gaza is the ‘moral prism’ through which many of us ‘see the world’. That’s the problem, mate. The cold, dead fingers of Israelophobia wrapped themselves round the neck of the World Cup, like when a French ref was branded a ‘Jew’ and a ‘Zionist’ following Egypt’s loss to Argentina. As one headline said: ‘Israel didn’t play in this World Cup. It dominated the games anyway.’ It’s a malady. It’s a moral fetish. They spy the Zio-menace everywhere.

Even the ascension of Andy Burnham to Downing St has been clouded by the deathly wail of ‘What about Gaza?!’. Activists demand to know when he will call the war in Gaza a ‘genocide’. That’s the great moral test of the 21st-century wankerati. Admission to the sacred circle of cultural influence is granted only to those who accuse the Jewish nation of genocide. The keffiyeh is the uniform of the anti-Zio depressive, the genocide libel his holy tenet.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is hitting the streets to call on Burnham to condemn ‘Israel’s genocide’. When Zohran Mamdani said ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal’, the Your Party MP, Zarah Sultana, tweeted: ‘Your turn, Andy Burnham.’ She tweeted that at 3.27am. Behold the wild-eyed sleeplessness of the anti-Zio monomaniac. As for Mamdani, his theatrical, turbo-smug screed against the Jewish State may have worked as red meat for the one-eyed anti-Zios of his class of over-privileged Third Worldists, but it will have left most New Yorkers wondering: ‘What the fuck does this have to do with us?’

At its worst, anti-Zionism can cause such severe moral and mental atrophy that normal life becomes near impossible. ‘I always think of Gaza’, said one writer. ‘I get up, go out, and do my things, but I always think of Gaza.’ Get a hobby? Academics madly fret about their ‘work-genocide balance’. A writer for the Guardian tells of friends who ‘can’t sleep’, whose daily existence is ‘tinged with a sort of queasy guilt’. They ‘feel they are going mad’, she says. They are. Allen Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. We’re seeing the most mediocre minds of our generation destroyed by anti-Zionism.

There’s vanity alongside insanity in the bourgeois brain fog of Israel-hate. Sally Rooney, famed chronicler of the neuroses of the overeducated middle classes, says Gaza is the great cause of our time because ‘what else… can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair?’. Standing with Palestine is the one thing that can ‘make our lives endurable’, she said. What a staggering admission – that ‘Palestine’ is now little more than a moral prop in the hollowed-out lives of bored millennials. They’re so vain they think this war is about them.

They’re caught in a moral death spiral. One moment they feel puffed up by the white-saviour delusion that they might just ‘Save Gaza’, the next they can’t get out of bed because their ‘work-genocide balance’ is out of whack. Self-regard mingles with self-loathing in the bottomless vortex of anti-Zionism. And looming over it all, always, is the demonic object of their self-flattering passions and unhinged fury: Israel. They blame it for killing Palestine, for corrupting the West, for swinging World Cup games. In their minds, the defeat of the Jewish State is the prerequisite to the liberation of humanity. As Rooney says, ‘The liberation of Palestine really does represent the liberation of the world’.

And there it is, the true motor of the anti-Zio frenzy – the rancid notion that the Jewish State burdens and threatens the whole of humanity. They love to talk about Israel’s occupation. But what Israel truly occupies is them. It squats in their hearts and minds – a Satan for the godless, against which they might measure their own virtue. They accuse others of being ‘Israel First’ but it’s far truer of them – Israel is their first thought when they awake, and their last when they finally retire at 3.27am.

Earlier generations blamed the Jews for the miseries of the human race. A new generation of activists blames the Jewish State. ‘The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith’, said Sartre. Anti-Zionism is a hate faith, too: swirling, all-consuming and immune to the thankless endeavours of reason. It, too, robs its adherents of joy. The world doesn’t need to be liberated from Zionism, but from anti-Zionism. For the good of both world Jewry and those Western minds colonised by Israelophobia.

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