Now More Than Ever, We Should Stand With Israel

If, as the old saying goes, “every picture tells a story,” then the recent pictures coming out of Gaza tell a terrible tale. A story of just how far Europe and the West have now gone in abandoning the Israelis and effectively siding with Islamists in the war between civilisation and barbarism. 

A picture of a starving Palestinian baby in Gaza becomes the biggest news story on earth, thanks to the efforts of the ‘fact-checked’ Western liberal media led by the BBC and the New York Times. They didn’t bother checking—or anyway they didn’t report—that the child was really suffering from a terrible congenital disease, or that his rather chubbily healthy little brother had been cropped out of the picture.

Then Hamas proudly release a video of an emaciated Israeli hostage, Evyatar David, whom they have held captive in a tunnel under Gaza for 22 months, digging his own grave—just as the Nazis made Jews dig the trenches into which their bodies were tossed at the start of the Holocaust. No splashed breaking global news headlines from the likes of the BBC or the NYT this time, nothing to see here, move along, let’s get outraged about a blonde woman wearing jeans in an advert instead.

Then the US media institution Time Magazine publishes an instantly-famous front-page image of desperate Palestinian women begging for food with empty cooking pots, under the headline ‘The Gaza Tragedy.’ But this time, the German tabloid newspaper Bild does some actual journalism and graphically exposes how the photographer Anas Zayed Fatiyeh—a favourite of the Western media, with a documented history of anti-Israeli postings—staged the picture and directed the women to depict what the paper rightly calls “Palestinian suffering in service of Hamas and its propaganda.” That is indeed a tragedy, if not necessarily the tragic story that Time tried to feed us.

Since the Islamist terrorists of Hamas started the war with the antisemitic pogrom of October 7, I have written about the “Gaza-through-the-looking-glass” version of events presented by our media and political elites. From the start, many turned the truth and moral judgement on its head to accuse Israel of committing genocide by waging war against the genuinely genocidal death cult of Hamas.

Nearly two years later, that looking glass has grown into an entire circus-style hall of mirrors, whose reflections distort the realities of Gaza beyond recognition. 

Everything is now twisted to cast Israel in the role of bloodthirsty aggressor. Every lie broadcast by Hamas (aka “the Gaza health ministry”) is repeated. Supposedly serious commentators even repeat blatant blood libels about Israel deliberately shooting Palestinians queuing for food and “using starvation as a weapon of war.”

There is plenty of evidence to show that, in fact, Israel has done more than any army in history to limit civilian casualties, that Israel is probably the first nation at war to try to feed rather than starve its enemies, and that Hamas (aided by its stooges in the United Nations) is ultimately to blame for all the suffering in Gaza. Indeed, unlike the Israelis, the Islamists really do have a policy of deliberately causing—and celebrating—the death of Palestinian civilians.

But repeating this makes no difference to the narrative in the West, because it is not about facts. It is about an all-consuming, blindness-inducing Israelophobia, a hatred of the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state on earth. As in all political show trials, Israel has already been found guilty regardless of the evidence.

And the moral sickness goes way beyond media images. It is reshaping the realities of Western politics. The UK’s Labour prime minister Keir Starmer and France’s President Macron do not have much support at home these days, but they have won plaudits from Hamas for their moves to recognise the fictional state of Palestine. 

One Hamas leader even felt able to boast that they had successfully brought about this momentous policy change in the heart of Europe by murdering more Jews than on any one day since the Holocaust. As Razi Hamad put it, “The initiative of several countries to recognise a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7th.”

There could be no starker example of Gaza-through-the-looking-glass than this: those who started the war with the slaughter of families and festival goers are being rewarded for it by supposed leaders of Western civilisation. Because whatever happens, in that distorted reflection Israel must always be the aggressor and the Palestinians always the victims. 

Thus Macron, Starmer and the rest are giving Hamas a prize for launching a pogrom, a reward for mass rapes, a bouquet for butchering Jews. Little wonder that Hamas announced soon afterwards that it has no interest in discussing any peace deal until Israel surrenders. Yet, such is the strength of the looking glass that the self-deluded Alices of the European elites can still convince themselves that they are on ‘the right side of history’ by aiding Hamas in its jihad to reduce the number of Jewish states to nil. 

Because let’s remind ourselves, that is what the Islamists and their supporters want. Whatever Western leaders might imagine, Islamists are not interested in any dream of a peaceful ‘two-state solution.’ Palestinian and Arab leaders have rejected every historical offer of a homeland. The current leadership, Hamas, spells out why. Because they demand one state, an Islamic caliphate, “from the river to the sea.” That means wiping the Israeli state off the map, and driving the Jews into the Mediterranean.

Yet the practice of turning the truth on its head reaches deep into European politics, too. Thus, at a moment when most Western leaders are abandoning Israeli democracy as never before, the Islamoleft here and their mouthpieces in the media persist in spreading the myth that the UK and EU are really “complicit in genocide” in Gaza. 

The reality today is that the anti-Israeli crusade has brought together everything that is rotten in Western society. The old Islamist antisemitism has formed a toxic cocktail with the new identity politics of the left, which teaches that Jews are the princes of “white privilege” and therefore always the oppressors, while the non-white Palestinians—whatever they do—will always be the oppressed. The result is a rising and increasingly violent flood of Jew hatred across our societies.

This unholy alliance is facilitated by self-loathing elites who despise our own Western civilisation, history and democracy. Israel is their hate figure because it dares to stand up and fight for its national sovereignty and people, and defend to the end the principles that the West has abandoned.

In one sense, the posturing of the European leaders on the ‘Palestinian question’ is of course irrelevant, since they are now impotent on the global stage. But it matters because it is increasing Israel’s political isolation in the face of the forces of darkness—and it has also opened a new front in the war to defend European civilisation against the woke culture warriors at home.

Now more than ever, we should make clear that, in the real world rather than Gaza-through-the-looking-glass, we stand foursquare with the Israelis. Not only in their demand for the return of the remaining hostages, but in their determination to do what is necessary to defeat Hamas. It is the Israeli people who deserve to hear that Europe fully supports their fight for a free, safe and sovereign nation state.