Melanie Phillips gets to the heart of the matter at the very start of her new book, The Builder’s Stone:
Western civilization is at a crucial inflection point. The Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on October 7 2023, which resulted in the largest and most barbaric single slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, presented the West with a clear choice. Would it support civilization or barbarism?
“Why do you in the West not understand that we in Israel are fighting not just to defend ourselves, but to defend the whole of civilization?” This was a similar question an Israeli intelligence officer put to me last year just after we had visited the site of the Nova music festival massacre, one part of the Hamas-led pogrom against Jews in Israel on October 7 2023.
Some in the West did respond to Phillips’ question by answering in favour of civilization and Israel. Tragically it soon became clear that this view was not shared by many of the political and cultural elites in Europe and America. The sheer scale of the October 7 atrocity, the murders, rape and kidnapping, was shocking in itself. But many of the responses around the world made it even worse. Since October 7, the West has seen big and vociferous demonstrations opposing Israel’s war of self-defence. Israel has also suffered increasing global isolation both diplomatically and in the court of public opinion.
British journalist and author Melanie Phillips, a longstanding newspaper columnist who these days writes in The Times, is one of most ardent and eloquent exponents of the Israeli cause. The great virtue of her latest book is that it clearly explains why many in Europe and America either do not understand why Israel’s fight against Hamas is so crucial in the defence of Western civilization, or are unequivocally hostile to it.
Phillips’s book begins with a survey of the history of Judaism and its nemesis, Jew-hatred. Antisemitism has existed in Western societies for nearly two millennia. Historically Jew-hatred sees the Jews as all-powerful and manipulative and at the same time less than human. It takes the peculiar form, as Phillips says, of treating “the Jewish people as a conspiracy against the rest of the world, as both global puppeteers and lower than vermin”.
Given that the Jews are the only people in human history to have suffered a Holocaust, an industrialised extinction event, the claims of their supposed power and influence are absurd. As Phillips says:
The idea that the most persecuted people in the history of humanity could be at the same time the most powerful people in the history of humanity is demonstrably ridiculous.
Phillips explains how traditional Jew-hatred has transmuted into a more modern form via a crisis in self-belief amongst Western elites and the consequent emergence of the ‘woke’ cultural movements of recent decades.
She argues that wokeism (for want of a better word) is a corrupted attempt to create a new worldview to replace what many now see as the historically bankrupt Judeo-Christian values of the West. Young people in particular are looking for meaning and in the process have developed a kind of religion without God, in which there is good and evil as defined by them. As Phillips says, they have come “to revive some idea of good and evil, to erect taboos and restrictions, and impose a new moral order.”
The dominant ideology has become individualism and the elevation of self-expression above any sense of community. All boundaries which stand in the way of this extreme individualism, even scientific ones such as the difference between men and women, are threatened with dissolution. This new identity politics has meant, amongst other things, that democratic rights such as free speech have come under attack from those crying offence because their self-beliefs feel threatened.
A hierarchy of “identities” has emerged, in which white “colonialist” men are at the top and beneath them are other ethnicities, races and sexual minorities claiming they are oppressed by “whiteness” and various kinds of colonialism. The modern tragedy for Jews is that, for these wokeists, Israel and its Jewish supporters are top of the tree for whiteness and colonialism. For them, Israel is the embodiment of everything they oppose and they want to see destroyed.
(I recommend Brendan O’Neill’s brilliant takedown of the wokeists’ approach to Israel in his 2024 book After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.)
The woke Left then found natural allies in Islamists (who being non-white and Muslim are automatically oppressed, get it?), to create the anti-Israel movement—O’Neill calls it “Islamo-fascism”—that we have seen on our campuses and our streets. They then turned the world upside down. As Phillips puts it, “The Palestinian attempt at the genocide of the Jews was labelled resistance while Israel’s resistance to being annihilated was labelled genocide”.
Even given the butchery of 7/10, these wokeists cannot accept that Israel is a victim of Islamist savagery. Seeing Israelis as victims would involve questioning these radicals’ worldview. Hence the ferocity of anti ‘Zionist’ hatred on the pro-Palestine marches, the tearing down of hostage posters, the silencing on campus of Israeli and Jewish speakers and in some cases actual denial that 7/10 happened at all.
Phillips argues that the resilience of Israel is built on Jewish religious morality. Israel’s resistance in the face of overwhelming aggression and hostility is extraordinary, and the fact that it is mainly culturally and religiously Jewish helps to forge that resilience. However, as she herself acknowledges, the sheer fight for survival itself plays a key role. For Israel the fight is existential, there really is nowhere else for Israelis to go.
For this reason, the current culture war in Israel is very dangerous. Phillips explains how sections of Israeli society want to be less like traditional Israelis and more like the youth and intelligentsia of the West. As she says, if the culture warriors win inside Israel, it could be fatal because,
A culture that despises itself and wants to erase its particular and historic identity will die while a culture that understands and values what it is will live.
Phillips’s book ends with a call to arms: for those of us who wish to defend Western civilization to join the battle in defence of individual responsibility, nation-states and family. Phillips explains very well how some conservatives have failed to understand how important the war against woke is in combatting the offensive against Western civilization. As she says, too many of them thought “the culture war was a distraction from the important things like the economy”.
These conservatives also fail to grasp how central the defence of Israel is to defending Western values. Instead, they
believed that a murderous and antisemitic war of extermination by the Palestinian Arabs against the Jewish state could be ended by treating it as a dispute over land boundaries between two sides with legitimate claims to the same land.
Some commentators argue that there is an equivalence between Israel and Hamas. There is not much that can be done to challenge the warped worldview of those who see Hamas as liberators and Israel as oppressors. But Phillips argues powerfully against those who by equivocating, by failing to confront the Islamo-fascists of the West, not only put the state of Israel at risk and fuel Jew-hatred, but also increase the threat to us all. This failure to understand what is at stake in the Israel/Hamas war can only give comfort to Islamists and other enemies of Western civilization.
Thankfully, as Phillips recognizes, we can now see in the rise of national populist parties across the West an increased willingness to fight the culture war, to defend national boundaries and to protect democratic rights in the face of threats from the wokeists. Some leaders of these parties, such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban who has challenged the vilification of Israeli prime minister Netanyahu in the international courts, also understand how important it is to defend Israel. New U.S. president Donald Trump has now turned on the International Criminal Court for its persecution of Israel. There is an increased willingness to confront the Islamists and their woke supporters in Western societies. Within that, there is hope that Israel can become less isolated and we can win our fight for civilization against barbarism.
