The Resurrection of the Blood Libel in a Humanitarian Disguise

Let us, for a moment, imagine the headlines: “14,000 Babies to Die in 48 Hours”. Not from disease, nor natural disaster, nor famine — but, by implication, at the hands of the Jewish state.

This was not tabloid hysteria. This was not war propaganda from the seventh-century stylings of Iran’s Supreme Leader. This was a claim made by none other than a senior United Nations humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, during a BBC interview. And though the figure was later clarified — the actual number referring to children at risk of malnutrition over the course of a year — the damage, alas, had already taken root, like bindweed through brickwork.

Now, we could treat this as merely another UN blunder, a case of emotional hyperbole leaping ahead of fact. But to do so would be to miss the deeper, darker current swirling beneath.

This was not just misinformation. It was a refined, modernised resurrection of that ancient evil: the blood libel.

In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of stealing Christian children and draining their blood for Passover matzos. Preposterous, yes. But the results were not. Pogroms. Expulsions. Massacres. Entire Jewish communities razed, based on the fever dream that Jews kill children for ritual gain.

Fast forward a few centuries and the motif persists — though the script has been updated for contemporary tastes.

Gone are the candles and basins of blood in shadowy basements. Today, it is “Israeli bombs targeting babies”, “starvation as policy”, or the calculated cruelty of the “Zionist war machine”. The images are different. The myth is the same.

Whereas the medieval imagination required ropes and daggers, the modern mind requires only hashtags and UN press briefings. The idea that Jews — especially those with state power — are uniquely capable of infanticide has not died. It has merely evolved, shaved its beard, donned a lanyard, and found a desk in Turtle Bay.

What makes the libel so enduring is that it functions independently of evidence. Once seeded, it metastasises. By the time facts arrive with their sober shoes and careful nuance, the mob — online or offline — has already chosen its villain.

In the case of the now-debunked “14,000 babies” claim, no one paused to ask: How was such a number calculated? Where are the projections? What is Israel actually doing to mitigate harm? The reality — that Israel coordinates humanitarian corridors, warns civilians before airstrikes, and delivers aid in concert with the very UN agencies now undermining it — is tedious, bureaucratic, and unhelpfully humane.

It lacks punch. It doesn’t go viral. And most importantly, it doesn’t feed the fantasy.

Because the blood libel today is not a relic — it is a narrative structure. A mythological template into which modern anxieties can be poured. What could be more viscerally effective than accusing Jews of child murder once more?

This modern libel dresses itself in respectability. It is not chanted by drunk peasants at the town gate, but by activists in university auditoriums, by journalists with furrowed brows, and — increasingly — by senior officials in supranational institutions.

And unlike its medieval predecessor, which targeted Jews as a religious curiosity, the modern libel targets Israel as a national embodiment of Jewish sovereignty. If the blood libel of old accused individual Jews of unthinkable acts, the new version accuses the Jewish state — and by extension its defenders — of systematised barbarity.

But Why Now?

This resurgence is not accidental. In the fog of war, when facts are scarce and emotion abundant, there is no more powerful propaganda than to suggest your enemy is a baby-killer. And when that enemy is Israel, the world’s one Jewish state, the moral calculus becomes chillingly familiar: Not only are Jews guilty — they are guilty of the oldest crime imaginable.

Worse still, the refinement of this libel now extends to demonising Jewish defence itself. When Israelis rescue their hostages, they are aggressors. When they feed the very civilians Hamas holds hostage, they are colonisers. When they weep, they are manipulative. When they bleed, they are blamed.

In such a universe, no act is innocent and no truth is exculpatory.

Let us not be misled. The children of Gaza are suffering. This is tragic. But the reason they suffer — the exploitation of humanitarian infrastructure by Hamas, the weaponisation of civilian life, the embedding of military command centres beneath hospitals — must not be erased by the libel.

And yet, that is exactly what this narrative does. It removes agency from the perpetrators and redirects guilt onto the eternal scapegoat. It is the ultimate sleight of hand — a propaganda magic trick centuries in the making.

There is no theatre more grotesque than the repeated moral inversion we now witness — where Jews, historically the victims of infanticide libels, are recast as its perpetrators. And all under the indifferent gaze of the international institutions that were supposed to protect against such slanders ever taking root again.

It is not simply untrue. It is unconscionable.

The world should be better than this. And Jews — whether in Jerusalem, Manchester, or Melbourne — should not have to relive medieval nightmares under modern flags, in modern tongues, with modern institutions giving ancient hatreds new respectability.

If we are to have any moral clarity at all, let it begin with this: accusing the Jewish state of mass infanticide without proof is not advocacy. It is libel — cruel, cowardly, and catastrophically familiar.