The West Is Helping Hamas Blackmail Israel

The hostages-for-a-humanitarian-pause deal between Israel and Hamas has been cheered as an important step towards peace. But is there really much to celebrate about a deal, accepted by Israel under Western pressure, which in wider terms can only benefit the genocidal Islamists in their war to wipe out the world’s sole Jewish state?

Hamas is supposed to release 50 of the more than 200 hostages they have held in Gaza since their October 7th terror attacks on Israel, in return for Israel accepting a four-day ‘humanitarian pause’ of their war in Gaza. That will obviously be good news for those hostages eventually released and their desperate families. It could be good news too for any Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza who are able (and willing) to escape the war zone.

Yet it doesn’t look like such good news for the Israeli people as a whole, in their existential struggle with Islamism. Or to those of us who support them and recognise what is stake for the rest of the democratic world. The deal represents a diplomatic coup for the terrorists. And one, let’s face it, that has been engineered through pressure on Israel from its supposed allies in the West.

In pressing Israel hard to make concessions, the U.S. and EU have effectively helped Hamas to blackmail the Israelis and hold the hostages to ransom.

Hamas has no interest in a lasting ceasefire. Having been hammered by the Israeli Defence Forces for six weeks, the terrorists will use any four-day pause in Israeli military and surveillance operations to regroup and resupply their forces (using whatever they want from the humanitarian supply convoys entering Gaza). Hamas commanders have pledged, lest we forget, to stage repeats of the October 7th antisemitic massacres “again and again and again.”

As for the supposed ‘hostage exchange’ bargain: the 150 Palestinian prisoners that Hamas will get back from Israel as part of the deal will almost all be young men of prime fighting age, convicted of terror offences up to attempted murder. By contrast, the 50 hostages that Hamas eventually release will all be innocent Jewish civilians, brutally kidnapped from Israel on October 7th.

Israel’s beleaguered prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that, after the four-day truce, “The war is continuing. The war is continuing. We will continue it until we achieve all our goals.” However, hidden away from the headlines, the Israeli government has apparently also agreed to stop fighting for another day in exchange for every extra 10 hostages Hamas release. That would seem to allow the terrorists to call the shots on when the war starts and stops, blackmailing Israel to dance to their tune.

And when we hear pious talk of ‘both sides’ needing to show their peaceful intentions, let’s recall where all this started. Until October 7th, there was a ‘ceasefire’ of sorts. Then Hamas terrorists attacked Israel and slaughtered more than 1,200 people, the worst Jewish death doll in a day since the Nazi Holocaust.

We must keep reminding the world of those grisly facts because, mad as it might seem, there are now persistent attempts to downplay the importance or even deny the existence of the Hamas pogrom. Instead, our leftist political, media, and academic elites seek to focus global attention on what one U.S. professor calls the “text-book genocide” allegedly being carried out by Israel in Gaza.

In fact the IDF have been targeting their attacks in an attempt to reduce civilian casualties, while the genocidal maniacs of Hamas not only butcher Jews for being Jewish but are also happy to see Palestinian civilians die as ‘martyrs.’ But that does not matter to those in the Western media and around the world who always assume Israeli guilt first and ask questions later, if at all.

The rhetoric of the once-fringe Left seems to have colonised mainstream public debate in much of Europe and the U.S., so that it is now widely assumed that Israelis are ‘the real terrorists’ while the death cult of Hamas is depicted as a resistance movement. It is in this Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass world that pressure has been mounting on an increasingly isolated Israel to make concessions and agree a truce.

President Joe Biden’s public stance of support for Israel has become increasingly strained. Meanwhile, his administration pushed Israel hard to make concessions and accept the deal. In his recent landmark Washington Post article, Biden repeated that “We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas.” But he also lectured the Israelis about their conduct of the war, as if he were teaching errant grandchildren how to behave. (Anybody who still believes the nonsense about the ‘Jewish lobby’ running U.S. foreign policy, take note.)

President Biden emphasised that “a two-state solution is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.” That might sound hopeful to some. Yet what can talk of ‘a two-state solution’ really mean now? Israel is fighting an existential war against enemies who want to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean (the real meaning of that ‘from the river to the sea’ chant), and create, not just one Islamic state, but a global caliphate. On the other side, Biden’s talk of ‘two states’ can only mean that Israel has to hold back.

Biden even said that, after the war, there must be a Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank ruled by a “revitalised Palestinian Authority.” The U.S. president thus told Israel to entrust its security to the PA that praised the Hamas attacks on October 7th as a “source of pride” for the Palestinian people. With ‘firm’ friends like this, who needs enemies?

Europe’s leaders have largely been worse in their abandonment of Israel. Just this week, as reported by The European Conservative, EU Commissioners opted to continue sending millions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. They are seemingly either unaware or unconcerned that, just days before their funding decision, the same PA blamed Israel for allegedly staging those October 7th massacres of its own people. Then again, the EU’s apparent ignorance is perhaps unsurprising, given that almost none of the Western media saw fit to highlight that outrageous lie from the ‘respectable’ face of Palestinian Islamism.

The top EU diplomat, Joseph Borrell , has just been on a tour of Arab capitals and announced that Europe must show ‘more empathy’ with the Palestinian cause in order to keep the Arab world onside over the war in Ukraine, and to assuage the angry Muslim populations in our cities. That inevitably means less ‘empathy’ and support for the embattled Israelis and the besieged Jews of Europe.

France exemplifies the vacillation of European governments. After President Macron told the BBC that Israel should “stop bombing babies,” he tried to ‘clarify’ (i.e., cover up) what he meant and calm the diplomatic storm. In case there was any doubt about where France really stands, however, Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna weighed in against Israel this week. She told French radio that the Israel Hamas deal was “a real moment of hope” and hailed “particularly the work of Qatar” in making it happen—heaping praise on the Arab emirate that hosts exiled Hamas leaders. Then she spelled out that Israel is causing “too many deaths” and that this is “unacceptable and unworthy of a democracy.”

As we often cover in Democracy Watch, Europe’s leaders will use the D-word to mean whatever they want. (See, for example, the Netherland elites’ vow this week to ‘defend democracy’—against the populist politician who actually won their election, and the millions of Dutch voters who backed him.)

In the hands of European and American leaders, ‘democracy’ has now been turned into a stick with which to beat Israel into making concessions to Hamas. Israel in indeed the only democratic nation state in the Middle East, which is one reason why we should give it our unstinting support.

Instead, Israeli democracy is recast as a burden, something that should restrain Israel from defending itself in a life-and-death-struggle in ways that the West (no stranger to bloody wars itself) now piously deems ‘unworthy of a democracy.’ It sounds as if we are telling the Israelis to obey the rules and etiquette of a dinner party in the middle of a knife fight.

Being a democracy needn’t mean being a soft touch. It should mean defending the demos, your people, and their liberties. The Israelis are fighting to preserve their democracy against barbarism. Without democracy, there can be no chance of freedom or civilisation—see Hamas-dominated Gaza for proof.

Israel is under terrible external pressure, and internally Israelis are divided over how best to handle the war and the hostage crisis. As Jake Wallis Simons, British editor of the Jewish Chronicle, wrote this week, questioning the ceasefire deal, “The awful reality is that—as has been the case so often in Jewish history—there is no route that does not involve unbearable heartbreak.” But he also concluded that, faced with Hamas’ determination to repeat the horrors of October 7th,

However intense the outrage from the complacent idiots in the international community, and however much pain lies along the way, only one option lies before the country. Victory.

The IDF has made impressive military progress towards that end in recent weeks. The relative weakness of Hamas today is reflected in the fact that they are now able only to demand the release of three prisoners for every Jewish hostage; in 2011, Hamas secured the release of more than 1,000 prisoners in exchange for one captured Israeli soldier. (Those released by Israel included many convicted terrorist murders, some of whom organised the October 7th massacres.)

Yet despite this military success, Israel finds itself politically isolated and under pressure to make further concessions to the Islamists. All the more important, then, that we should come out and show our full-throated support for the Israeli people, the hostages, and Jewish people everywhere. As we have argued throughout, and have all seen on our streets in recent weeks, we are in a political and cultural battle for civilised democratic values here, too.

Everybody is in favour of peace. But in the end, a just peace has to be won. As the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote more than 150 years ago, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.”