Less than three months after Hamas started the war with its bloody terror attacks of October 7th, Israel somehow finds itself cast in the role of villain and increasingly isolated on the world stage. Its enemies loudly condemn Israel as a terrorist colonial state, guilty of ‘genocide’ in Gaza. And even Israel’s traditional allies are wobbling and deserting it as the war against Hamas continues.
This makes supporting Israel now more important than ever. For Europe and the West to shun the Israelis would not only mean deserting the only democratic state in the Middle East. It would also mean abandoning our own civilised values. Because far from being, as the Islamoleft claims, a rogue state, Israel is really showing itself to be a model of democracy in action.
Israel’s determined response to the genocidal assaults of October 7th demonstrates what it means when citizens with a stake in a democracy stand together in the face of an existential threat to their society. Israeli politics, as in many modern democracies, was bitterly divided before the Hamas massacres; the coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu was widely unpopular. Those divisions have not disappeared. But they have been put aside as Israelis stand together to demand the defeat of Hamas and the return of their hostages.
Israel’s demonstration of democracy in action, of popular engagement with a fight for national sovereignty, contrasts sharply with the deadbeat system that passes for democracy in Europe today. Here, the EU elites will abuse the D-word to mean whatever is in their interests. Far from shunning the Israelis, we should reject those Western leaders and stand with the people actually fighting to keep democracy alive.
The pressing need to stand up for Israel was brought home by the recent vote in the United Nations General Assembly. The big resolution called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—effectively a demand that Israel gives up—without any mention of Hamas or its antisemitic massacres. It passed overwhelmingly.
The 152 states who voted for the anti-Israeli resolution included France and Spain, alongside smaller EU members from Ireland and Portugal through Croatia and Greece to Sweden and Poland. The 23 who abstained in the vote included Germany and Italy as well as five other EU member states, and the UK. Alongside Israel and the United States, only eight other UN members voted against the resolution, among them Austria and the Czech Republic.
Israel’s old Western friends look less and less friendly. The foreign ministers of Germany and the UK wrote a joint article in The Times of London—media equivalent of a sermon from the pulpit—calling for a “sustainable ceasefire” because “too many civilians have been killed” in Gaza. The French foreign minister went further still, demanding an “immediate and durable truce.”
‘Ceasefire’ and ‘truce’ might sound like people-friendly solutions. But let’s be clear, for the Israeli people, an imposed ceasefire would mean surrender. It would only stop the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) completing their mission to defeat Hamas. On the other side, the death cult of Hamas has no interest in a durable or ‘sustainable’ ceasefire with Israel.
Hamas leaders have made clear that they want to repeat the bloodbath of October 7th “again and again and again.” Last week’s discovery of a Hamas terror plot in Germany and Denmark confirmed that they are also intent on spreading their antisemitic pogrom to the streets of Europe. In the face of those genocidal threats, to demand a ceasefire is a flagrant betrayal of Israel, of the world’s Jewish communities, and of everything we in the West are supposed to hold dear.
Don’t be persuaded otherwise by the hysteria over Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Shrill leftists are protesting about Israel being ‘uniquely murderous,’ while the mainstream media uncritically echoes the casualty figures provided by Hamas propagandists, and even the UK’s former Tory defence minister claims that the IDF is in “a killing rage,” carrying out “indiscriminate” assaults on civilian targets. This sort of slander could be enough to put anybody in a rage.
I’m with former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, who dismissed that Tory minister’s IDF-bashing as “untrue and unfair to an army that surpasses all others in its ability to attack an enemy while doing everything possible to minimise civilian casualties.” Uniquely for a state fighting a war of self-defence, Israel’s every action is being subject to forensic probing unheard of in any other current warzone from Yemen to Ukraine. Once again, the world’s only Jewish state is being held to a higher ‘ethical’ standard than any other. Why on earth might that be?
Of course, despite the IDF’s efforts to target its attacks, many civilians have been killed. But as Colonel Kemp continued, that is largely because, “Hamas plans all of its operations with one overriding aim: to force Israel to kill civilians in Gaza,” thus “achieving their objective of delegitimising, vilifying and isolating Israel.” European and Western leaders denouncing the Israelis are effectively dancing to Hamas’ tune (although the Islamists are not too keen on their own people singing and dancing).
Nor should we allow anybody to forget how this all began, with the Hamas terror attacks of October 7th in Israel which left more than 1,200 dead—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Nazi Holocaust. There has been a huge international outcry over the tragic incident where the IDF in Gaza mistakenly shot dead three Israeli hostages. It almost seemed as if the world media had forgotten why those hostages were there in the first place: because they were among more than 200 Jewish people who were gleefully kidnapped, brutalised, and raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.
Alongside ‘ceasefire’ the other quisling code we are hearing a lot now is ‘two-state solution,’ endorsed again by the U.S. and UK governments and the EU. The reality is that Israel is engaged in a life-and-death struggle against an enemy that has no interest in any two-state arrangement. When Hamas supporters chant ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ they are demanding that Israel be destroyed and the Jews driven into Mediterranean.
And who will govern this fantasy Palestine state living peacefully alongside Israel? According to the West, it will be the Palestinian Authority that currently governs in the West Bank; the same Islamist PA that first celebrated the October 7th massacres, then tried to claim that Israel had staged them and killed its own citizens, and is now talking about a post-war reunion with their fellow Islamists of Hamas. Little wonder the Israeli government gets upset about ‘two states’ talk that is really a demand for one state, Israel, to take the knee.
The pro-Palestinian crusade in Europe and America has brought together all that is worst in our politics, from Western self-loathing to the merger of old-fashioned Islamic antisemitism with the new version of that prejudice spread by woke identity politics. Deserting Israel now means abandoning our own societies’ democratic values, and siding with barbarism against civilisation.
By contrast, Israel at war stands out as a beacon for the kind of democracy we should defend. The people of Israel, as citizens with an historic, hard-fought stake in their society, have risen to the challenge despite their deep divisions. Polls show that a big majority still support the war to smash Hamas—but contrary to the ‘colonial’ narrative, have no interest in reoccupying Gaza afterwards.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu said in face of this week’s criticism that, “We will fight until the end, we will achieve all of our aims—eliminating Hamas, freeing all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will not again become a centre for terrorism,” he had widespread popular support. That does not mean most Israelis now support his government. There will still be a settling of political accounts, preferably through the democratic process. But that will have to wait until democracy itself has been secured.
The common cause which the Israeli people have made in this war has clearly given the IDF the will to fight on, apparently with more military success than many experts expected. The link between popular engagement with a war and military success has been a feature of history, ever since the poor sailors of ancient Athens, the ‘birthplace of democracy,’ defeated the mighty Persian empire at the naval Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Israelis are showing it once more.
Let us hope that they continue to resist the pressure to concede. But let’s not just hope for the best—we should take a public stand with the Israelis fighting for “all of [their] aims” and our Western values.
Why Israel’s War Is Democracy in Action
Less than three months after Hamas started the war with its bloody terror attacks of October 7th, Israel somehow finds itself cast in the role of villain and increasingly isolated on the world stage. Its enemies loudly condemn Israel as a terrorist colonial state, guilty of ‘genocide’ in Gaza. And even Israel’s traditional allies are wobbling and deserting it as the war against Hamas continues.
This makes supporting Israel now more important than ever. For Europe and the West to shun the Israelis would not only mean deserting the only democratic state in the Middle East. It would also mean abandoning our own civilised values. Because far from being, as the Islamoleft claims, a rogue state, Israel is really showing itself to be a model of democracy in action.
Israel’s determined response to the genocidal assaults of October 7th demonstrates what it means when citizens with a stake in a democracy stand together in the face of an existential threat to their society. Israeli politics, as in many modern democracies, was bitterly divided before the Hamas massacres; the coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu was widely unpopular. Those divisions have not disappeared. But they have been put aside as Israelis stand together to demand the defeat of Hamas and the return of their hostages.
Israel’s demonstration of democracy in action, of popular engagement with a fight for national sovereignty, contrasts sharply with the deadbeat system that passes for democracy in Europe today. Here, the EU elites will abuse the D-word to mean whatever is in their interests. Far from shunning the Israelis, we should reject those Western leaders and stand with the people actually fighting to keep democracy alive.
The pressing need to stand up for Israel was brought home by the recent vote in the United Nations General Assembly. The big resolution called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—effectively a demand that Israel gives up—without any mention of Hamas or its antisemitic massacres. It passed overwhelmingly.
The 152 states who voted for the anti-Israeli resolution included France and Spain, alongside smaller EU members from Ireland and Portugal through Croatia and Greece to Sweden and Poland. The 23 who abstained in the vote included Germany and Italy as well as five other EU member states, and the UK. Alongside Israel and the United States, only eight other UN members voted against the resolution, among them Austria and the Czech Republic.
Israel’s old Western friends look less and less friendly. The foreign ministers of Germany and the UK wrote a joint article in The Times of London—media equivalent of a sermon from the pulpit—calling for a “sustainable ceasefire” because “too many civilians have been killed” in Gaza. The French foreign minister went further still, demanding an “immediate and durable truce.”
‘Ceasefire’ and ‘truce’ might sound like people-friendly solutions. But let’s be clear, for the Israeli people, an imposed ceasefire would mean surrender. It would only stop the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) completing their mission to defeat Hamas. On the other side, the death cult of Hamas has no interest in a durable or ‘sustainable’ ceasefire with Israel.
Hamas leaders have made clear that they want to repeat the bloodbath of October 7th “again and again and again.” Last week’s discovery of a Hamas terror plot in Germany and Denmark confirmed that they are also intent on spreading their antisemitic pogrom to the streets of Europe. In the face of those genocidal threats, to demand a ceasefire is a flagrant betrayal of Israel, of the world’s Jewish communities, and of everything we in the West are supposed to hold dear.
Don’t be persuaded otherwise by the hysteria over Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Shrill leftists are protesting about Israel being ‘uniquely murderous,’ while the mainstream media uncritically echoes the casualty figures provided by Hamas propagandists, and even the UK’s former Tory defence minister claims that the IDF is in “a killing rage,” carrying out “indiscriminate” assaults on civilian targets. This sort of slander could be enough to put anybody in a rage.
I’m with former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, who dismissed that Tory minister’s IDF-bashing as “untrue and unfair to an army that surpasses all others in its ability to attack an enemy while doing everything possible to minimise civilian casualties.” Uniquely for a state fighting a war of self-defence, Israel’s every action is being subject to forensic probing unheard of in any other current warzone from Yemen to Ukraine. Once again, the world’s only Jewish state is being held to a higher ‘ethical’ standard than any other. Why on earth might that be?
Of course, despite the IDF’s efforts to target its attacks, many civilians have been killed. But as Colonel Kemp continued, that is largely because, “Hamas plans all of its operations with one overriding aim: to force Israel to kill civilians in Gaza,” thus “achieving their objective of delegitimising, vilifying and isolating Israel.” European and Western leaders denouncing the Israelis are effectively dancing to Hamas’ tune (although the Islamists are not too keen on their own people singing and dancing).
Nor should we allow anybody to forget how this all began, with the Hamas terror attacks of October 7th in Israel which left more than 1,200 dead—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Nazi Holocaust. There has been a huge international outcry over the tragic incident where the IDF in Gaza mistakenly shot dead three Israeli hostages. It almost seemed as if the world media had forgotten why those hostages were there in the first place: because they were among more than 200 Jewish people who were gleefully kidnapped, brutalised, and raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.
Alongside ‘ceasefire’ the other quisling code we are hearing a lot now is ‘two-state solution,’ endorsed again by the U.S. and UK governments and the EU. The reality is that Israel is engaged in a life-and-death struggle against an enemy that has no interest in any two-state arrangement. When Hamas supporters chant ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ they are demanding that Israel be destroyed and the Jews driven into Mediterranean.
And who will govern this fantasy Palestine state living peacefully alongside Israel? According to the West, it will be the Palestinian Authority that currently governs in the West Bank; the same Islamist PA that first celebrated the October 7th massacres, then tried to claim that Israel had staged them and killed its own citizens, and is now talking about a post-war reunion with their fellow Islamists of Hamas. Little wonder the Israeli government gets upset about ‘two states’ talk that is really a demand for one state, Israel, to take the knee.
The pro-Palestinian crusade in Europe and America has brought together all that is worst in our politics, from Western self-loathing to the merger of old-fashioned Islamic antisemitism with the new version of that prejudice spread by woke identity politics. Deserting Israel now means abandoning our own societies’ democratic values, and siding with barbarism against civilisation.
By contrast, Israel at war stands out as a beacon for the kind of democracy we should defend. The people of Israel, as citizens with an historic, hard-fought stake in their society, have risen to the challenge despite their deep divisions. Polls show that a big majority still support the war to smash Hamas—but contrary to the ‘colonial’ narrative, have no interest in reoccupying Gaza afterwards.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu said in face of this week’s criticism that, “We will fight until the end, we will achieve all of our aims—eliminating Hamas, freeing all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will not again become a centre for terrorism,” he had widespread popular support. That does not mean most Israelis now support his government. There will still be a settling of political accounts, preferably through the democratic process. But that will have to wait until democracy itself has been secured.
The common cause which the Israeli people have made in this war has clearly given the IDF the will to fight on, apparently with more military success than many experts expected. The link between popular engagement with a war and military success has been a feature of history, ever since the poor sailors of ancient Athens, the ‘birthplace of democracy,’ defeated the mighty Persian empire at the naval Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Israelis are showing it once more.
Let us hope that they continue to resist the pressure to concede. But let’s not just hope for the best—we should take a public stand with the Israelis fighting for “all of [their] aims” and our Western values.
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