The ‘Forever War’ we should really be worried about

Two big things happened on Sunday. First, America’s airforce pummelled nuclear sites in Iran. Using B-2 stealth bombers, they spirited bombs weighing 30,000lbs into Iranian airspace and unloaded them over Iran’s three most important uranium-enrichment facilities. The second event was less explosive. It didn’t bother the front pages of the papers nearly as much as America’s strike did. But to my mind it was just as important, certainly for anyone who yearns for a true understanding of what is happening in the Middle East. It was the IDF’s announcement that it had recovered the body of Ofra Kedar from Gaza.

Ofra Kedar was one of the oldest victims of the Hamas-led pogrom of 7 October 2023. She was 70 years old. She was taking her usual morning walk in Kibbutz Be’eri when she happened upon men from the 6,000-strong army of Islamo-fascists that invaded Israel that day. In the moment they drew their guns, ready to slay in cold blood this elderly Jew, Ofra’s daughter-in-law phoned her. She later recounted Ofra’s last words. ‘Why are you shooting at me? What did I do?’, she pleaded with her killers. The call ended. Ofra’s body was dragged to Gaza to be used as a bargaining chip by Hamas in its sick game of torment with the Jewish State.

It matters that Mrs Kedar’s body – along with the bodies of two other hostages – was recovered just as the US clashed with Iran. For the cruel demise of this good woman at the hands of an invading army of anti-Jewish bigots reminds us that this war started 625 days ago. Mrs Kedar’s long life and brutal death stand as a fierce and human rebuke to the moral infantilism of those who accuse Israel – and now the US – of launching an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran. From beyond the grave, this Jew who perished along with 1,200 others in a pogrom of the like we hadn’t seen since the Nazis pleads with us to do what is right and just and think honestly about the origins of this war swirling through the Middle East.

The Smart Set’s depiction of Iran as the victim of unjust violence represents a sickening erasure of Jews like Ofra Kedar who were put to death by a neo-fascist militia sponsored by Iran. The army that butchered her and more than a thousand others had received military training, logistical help and millions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the Iranian regime. To scrub the fascist stain of 7 October from the historical record, and haughtily accuse Israel and its allies of ‘unprovoked’ aggression against Iran, is to engage in a memory-holing of Jewish suffering.

Irish novelist Sally Rooney has got the bourgeois left rattling their jewellery in moral elation with a column in the Guardian in which she accuses Israel and the US of launching ‘a series of unprovoked and illegal’ attacks on Iran. Was the murder of Ofra Kedar not a provocation, Ms Rooney? Was her posthumous desecration as a cadaverous tool of moral blackmail not a provocation? Was the Iranian-approved invasion of Israel by land, sea and air for the purposes of raping and murdering a thousand Jews not a provocation? To say the strikes on Iran are ‘unprovoked’ is to say the mass murder of Jews is not an especially important event. It’s not worth avenging. A 70-year-old woman shot to death on account of her race? Big deal.

The absolution of Iran by both leftists and rightists speaks to the wholesale evacuation of moral principle from the ‘anti-war’ position. What poses as ‘anti-imperialism’ today is often just anti-Westernism: a politics of grating historical guilt and showy self-loathing that views the wicked West as the author of every global calamity and nations like Iran as the hapless NPCs of world affairs. Ironically, there’s the pungent whiff of racial infantilism in these hot takes. Non-Western nations are reduced to child-like entities, so morally primitive that they lack the capacity to take responsibility for what they do. There is nothing ‘progressive’ in this imperious paternalism that feverishly demonises the nations of the West and acquits the Jew-killers of the East.

Handwringing abounds over Trump’s strikes on Iran and the possibility that this is yet another ‘Forever War’. It remains to be seen whether America’s strikes turn into something bigger, something more destabilising. But what worries me right now is the blindness of political actors across the West to the true Forever War, the Forever War that started this current war. That is, the war of Iran against the Jewish nation; the war of Islamism against the Jews; the war of tyrannical theocracy against democracy.

For the 46 years of its existence, the Islamic Republic has been devoted to the destruction of the Jewish State. Its military policy, education system and annual Quds Day are infused with this grim dream of annihilating the ‘Zionist regime’. Iranian children are taught to hate Israel. The Israeli flag is set alight on official parades. The proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are funded and trained to the end of attacking Israel and slaughtering its people. Iran backed Hamas throughout the Second Intifada when it vaporised young Israelis in discotheques and pizza restaurants, and in the run-up to 7 October when it visited such fascist horrors upon southern Israel. There’s your Forever War – not Trump’s 18-hour mission against Iran’s nuclear sites but Iran’s almost 50-year mission to lay apocalyptic waste to the world’s only Jewish nation.

It’s not clear whether America’s strikes will temper hostilities in the Middle East or destabilise things further. But, at this moment, there are other morally pressing questions to ask. Why do so many in the West fail to take seriously the threat posed by Iranian tyranny? Why are they so blasé about the ceaseless targeting of Israel by Jew-hating militias? Why do so many of our educated seem to sympathise more with the bigots of Tehran than with the Jews of those kibbutzim decimated by Tehran’s barbarous emissaries? That some in the West have shed more tears over the destruction of Iranian infrastructure than they did over the destruction of the 70-year-old Jew Ofra Kedar shines the harshest light on our moral crisis.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy