The pathological chutzpah of Israel’s critics

Israel’s in trouble now. For none other than Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the two cheeks of the bony arse of British centrism, have done an ‘emergency podcast’ on its bombing of Hamas leaders in Qatar yesterday. I bet the Jewish nation is quaking. It might have faced off against the neo-fascists of Hamas and Hezbollah but now it faces a far more formidable foe: an army of turbo-smug centrist dads in Next cardigans nodding vigorously as the two perfumed ponces of The Rest is Politics give it what-for on an impromptu pod. It’s curtains for you now, Israel!

Have you ever, in your life, heard of anything as hubristic and ridiculous as an ‘emergency podcast’? These are hitherto untapped depths of human vanity, as if the world and its dog are just sitting around waiting to hear what a cranky old spin doctor and failed Tory have to say about Israel’s wars. It was Campbell who announced it. ‘We will be doing an emergency podcast [at] 4.15pm’, he said, ‘on the catastrophic events in Qatar’. It’s hard to know what’s more batshit: telling us the weirdly specific time at which they’ll be recording their prattle, or thinking it’s ‘catastrophic’ that some Hamas cunts got blown up.

Actually, here’s what’s most batshit: the idea that Alastair Campbell has the moral authority to wag a finger at a nation at war. The Qatar strike proves we live in a world where ‘strongman leaders think they can do what they want where they want with impunity’, he said. That sound you can hear is a hundred thousand Iraqis rolling in their graves. This is the man whose bollocks and bluster when he was Tony Blair’s spin doctor helped to justify a truly ‘catastrophic’ war against a nation that hadn’t even attacked us. And he thinks he can hold forth on Israel’s targeting of the anti-Semitic freaks who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its citizens? These are industrial-strength levels of brass neck.

The Campbell / Stewart wang-fest on Israel’s ‘catastrophic’ bombing of Islamofascists really does sum up the imperious conceit of Israelophobia. Here we have a propagandist for one of the bloodiest wars of modern times (Campbell), and the man who served as a colonial-style governor in Iraq once it had been violently subdued by the West (Stewart), badgering Israel for firing a few missiles at the terror army that invaded its territory and murdered its people. It’s like being lectured about misogyny by Fred West.

Israel’s strike on the Hamas leaders holed up in Doha really has exposed the pathological chutzpah, the cavernous gall, of its preening critics in the West. No sooner had it fired its missiles at the assembled militants than a chorus of condemnation was ringing out in the West’s corridors of power and our haughty media. This was a ‘flagrant violation of Qatar’s sovereignty’, yelped useless Keir Starmer. Oh, so Mr Second Referendum, that implacable old foe of Brexit, suddenly gives a shit about sovereignty? Good to know.

To be clear, Israel’s whack on Doha is a striking development. This is the first time Israel has fired at a Western-backed Gulf state. Qatar had long considered itself immune to the Middle East’s waves of violence, not least because it is close to mighty America and home to Al Udeid, the largest US airbase in the Middle East. It seems Britain had no advance warning of Israel’s attack but America did, and apparently America is not best pleased. Trump reportedly feels ‘very badly’ about it. And it’s unclear if the strike was a success: Hamas says five of its members were killed but its leaders survived.

So this is a comment-worthy event, for sure. It hints at strains in the US-Israel alliance, though my feeling is that this is overstated. It speaks to a renewed military bravado – muppets on X call it ‘recklessness’ – within the Jewish State. It is possible, says Jake Wallis Simons, that Israel is indicating to the world that it has fully embraced the policy of deterrence and rejected that ‘nexus of cowardice, confusion and complacency’ that the lost West stews in. So let’s talk about Doha. Let’s have some analysis. But having centrist dullards and grey-faced PMs and Israelophobic loons on X damn Israel’s actions as mad and criminal? Nope. That reeks to the high heavens of cant and even bigotry.

The depiction of Qatar as a poor little victim of the Zionist monster is preposterous beyond description. Qatar hosts the leaders of the army of anti-Semites that savagely attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. It’s been hosting Hamas for 10 years. That is an innately hostile act. There are untold instances in history of nations going to war with those who harbour their enemies, from Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland for hosting his Royalist opponents in the English Civil War to America’s own invasion of Afghanistan for providing sanctuary to al-Qaeda. For Israel to fire missiles at the nation in which its murderous foes live it up in five-star luxury is not a war crime – it’s war; perfectly normal war.

Let’s get real: Qatar has given haven to the architects and justifiers of the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. This includes Khalil al-Hayya, the de facto leader of Hamas who crowed that 7 October was ‘a great day’. It has also included Ghazi Hamad, who chillingly said of 7 October: ‘We will do this again… there will be a second, a third, a fourth.’ What’s ‘criminal’ is not Israel’s firing of missiles at Qatar but Qatar’s provision of luxuriant refuge to men promising further massacres of Jews. The question is not how Israel can attack a Western ally – it’s why the West is allied in the first place with a state that happily harbours a racist militia founded with the express intention of annihilating the Jewish State.

The fallout from the Doha strike shines a light on the great moral divide that lurks within the Israel Question. On one side, sheepish Westerners who think nothing is worth a war; on the other, Jewish soldiers determined to finish the war against their anti-Semitic tormentors once and for all. Over here, privileged windbags who’ve never faced an existential threat essentially saying ‘Lay down your arms, Israel’ – over there, Israel essentially saying ‘Screw you’. That’s what Doha speaks to: that Israel now cares as little for the opinion of its pompous haters in the West as it does for the lives of the terrorists who want to destroy it. Though who knows, maybe it will change its mind when it hears that emergency podcast.

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 latest 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