If the West abandons Israel, we all lose

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We can agree with the genocidal Islamists of Hamas about one thing, at least. After the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution on Monday calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the head of the Hamas death cult gloated that Israel is now experiencing ‘unprecedented political isolation’.

The terrible truth is that the terrorist-in-chief is right. That resolution was backed by 14 of the 15 UNSC members, including four of the five permanent members who have the right of veto – the UK, France, Russia and China.

The fifth permanent member, the US, nominally Israel’s most important ally, for the first time abstained on a demand for a ceasefire, rather than use its veto, allowing the resolution to pass. In the UN General Assembly, where all members vote, several ceasefire motions condemning Israel – and not mentioning Hamas’s pogrom – have been passed overwhelmingly.

There is more than the usual UN posturing and virtue-signalling going on here. Since anti-Semitic terrorists massacred more than 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 200 on 7 October, it has been clear that supporting Israel in its war to destroy Hamas is vital for the future of democracy and freedom not only in the Middle East, but also in the West.

Yet, almost six months later, with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) still advancing in Gaza, our Western political elites are close to full retreat in the face of the Islamist threat.

Israeli intelligence sources told the Telegraph this week that the withdrawal of US and Western support means the IDF may no longer be able to achieve its aim of destroying Hamas. The terrorist group had already been encouraged by the rejection last week of a US-led resolution for a ceasefire, which would have included a hostage deal. Evidently, Hamas believes that international opinion is on its side. Does the world now seriously believe that Hamas is on ‘the right side of history’?

Let us be clear what is at stake here. Why should we object to calls for an immediate ceasefire? Surely everybody wants peace? Well, Hamas does not. The terrorists could end the conflict now by releasing all of the remaining Israeli hostages they kidnapped on 7 October and withdrawing from Gaza. Instead, Hamas leaders have openly sworn to repeat the 7 October pogrom – the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Nazi Holocaust – ‘again and again’.

Calling for an immediate ceasefire is effectively demanding that Israel must surrender and commit suicide. Hamas is not fighting for an independent Palestinian homeland, as the West’s naïve talk of a ‘two-state solution’ suggests. It wants to destroy the state of Israel as part of its jihad to create a global Islamist caliphate.

That is the true meaning of the chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, which has rung through the streets of Western cities, and even been projected on to the UK Houses of Parliament, by anti-Semitic Islamists and their allies on the Islamo-left. It is a call for the state of Israel to be wiped off the map, and for the Jews of Israel to be driven into the Mediterranean.

For all the talk of an Israeli ‘genocide’ in Gaza, the only genocidal force in this conflict is Hamas, whose terrorists butchered and brutalised Jews for being Jews on 7 October, recorded the slaughter and broadcast it across social media in celebration. They are not only genocidal, but gleeful with it, too.

The Israelis are guilty only of waging war against genocide. Of course, war is not cricket and thousands of civilians will have been killed in Gaza during the IDF offensive – though, as Daniel Ben-Ami recently analysed for spiked, almost certainly fewer than the figures claimed by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health and accepted by much of the Western media. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and glories in each death as a ‘martyrdom’. By contrast, under Western pressure, the IDF has been remarkably restrained and selective in its war in Gaza, particularly in its limited use of air power.

Yet somehow it is Israel that now stands accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and has already been declared guilty of genocide by international governments and agencies from the UN downwards. This is an inversion of reality that deserves the title Hamas in Wonderland, or Gaza Through the Looking Glass.

The West’s abandonment of Israel is becoming blatant. Here in Britain, Tory foreign secretary Lord Cameron is a frequent critic of Israel’s war and has reportedly threatened the government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a ‘Europe-wide’ arms embargo. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, widely expected to be in government soon, is now calling for an ‘immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, in a desperate bid to appease its Muslim and leftist supporters after the victory of ‘Gaza George’ Galloway in the Rochdale by-election last month.

Leading Labour MP Wes Streeting justified this change of position by insisting that: ‘I think, objectively, yes, Israel has gone too far. And we have seen that with a disproportionate loss of innocent civilian life.’ Leave aside for a moment the fact that nobody knows exactly how many Hamas fighters or Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza. What would have been a ‘proportionate’ response to the 7 October massacre? What exact death toll would Mr Streeting have found ‘objectively’ acceptable? If Israel had somehow sought to match the precise numbers of young festival-goers, grandmothers and babies killed by Hamas, would the Labour Party then accept that it had gone just far enough? Of course not. It seems again that the world’s only Jewish state must apparently be held to higher ‘humanitarian’ standards than anybody else in times of war.

In one sense, of course, the posturing by European and American politicians makes no difference to the war, since the Israeli government and people have so far shown little inclination to buckle, despite the international opprobrium. When Starmer declared that the fighting must ‘stop now’ in February, he might as well have said ‘stop the world, I want to get off’. But such political posturing does increase Israel’s isolation in a hostile world.

More immediately, the impending abandonment of Israel really does matter here in the UK, Europe and the West. It signals that our leaders are giving up on the fight to defend democracy and freedom at home, and to resist the rising tide of anti-Semitism.

In the immediate aftermath of 7 October, the British Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard issued a cautionary warning that: ‘Before we take up a position on what’s happening now, we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism.’

Six months later, that is even more true. This remains a fundamental struggle between civilisation and barbarism. Not a ‘fight over territory’ or any two-state solutions. It is an existential battle about the survival of the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East – and the ability of Western society to defend its values against Islamist and allied barbarians who are not only within the gates of the citadel, but also projecting their pro-genocide message on to the Palace of Westminster. The unholy alliance of Islamist and left-wing anti-Semitism, united by their hatred for Western society, is the threat we face at home.

Anybody who wants to defend our democratic civilisation, warts and all, needs to stand foursquare with the Israeli people, and to remind the world of who they are fighting against and what they are fighting for. As spineless Western leaders risk losing the life-and-death war over there, and the struggle for democratic values at home, our message needs to be: No Surrender.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist. The concise and abridged edition of his book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, is published by William Collins.