Israel’s war for survival is only just beginning
The Jewish State has never been so isolated and demonised.
This was always a war that Israel could not afford to lose but could never decisively win. It remains to be seen whether the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas represents a successful outcome for the Jewish State or a Pyrrhic victory.
Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, was right to say yesterday that ‘the world is witnessing a historic moment’. But his claim that the deal opens ‘a door of hope for the peoples of the region for a future defined by justice and stability’ sounds like wishful thinking.
The war that broke out on 7 October 2023, following Hamas’s massacre of hundreds of civilians, should be seen as the latest phase of a conflict that first erupted in November 1947 – that is, when the United Nations voted for the creation of an Israeli state. Since then, Israel has had to fight three significant wars with its neighbours. These conflicts may have had different causes and raised particular issues, but what they all had in common is that they directly and indirectly called into question the very existence of Israel as a nation. Hamas’s barbaric invasion two years ago was no different. Its overriding terroristic objective was to strike a blow at the integrity of the Israeli nation state.
The war with Hamas is distinct in one important way. In its previous wars of defence, Israel has faced clearly defined nation-state enemies, such as the Egypt-led Arab-state coalition in the Six-Day War of 1967. This time, Israel did not face a state with a government capable of agreeing to surrender. As a result, it was always difficult to see what victory would look like. Even if Israel destroyed Hamas’s military capability, it could regroup elsewhere in the Middle East to plot its return. Hamas could abandon the whole of Gaza if it chose to, without having to concede defeat. The best that Israel could hope to achieve was to prevent Hamas from constituting a security threat in the short and medium term.
Wars, especially ones that are as consequential as this, have a habit of accelerating and reinforcing geopolitical and cultural trends that were already in play beforehand. The Israel-Hamas war has highlighted and reinforced Israel’s political and cultural isolation from Western societies. The speed with which Israel lost the propaganda war had little to do with what actually happened on the battlefields of Gaza. Almost from the moment Hamas launched the 7 October pogrom, Western cultural elites directed their hostility against Israel. Pro-Gaza initiatives, led by well-organised activists, swiftly mutated into a mass movement. This in turn encouraged officialdom to fall in line with the anti-Israel consensus.
Over the past two years, anti-Zionism, coupled with an irrational, emotional attachment to Palestine, has become a prominent feature of youth culture. The keffiyeh has become a must-have for self-styled ‘progressives’. To be for Palestine is a way to affirm one’s virtuous anti-Western identity.
In many cases, anti-Zionism in the West has served as a medium for expressing anti-Jewish sentiments. Too often the explosion of these sentiments has been misleadingly blamed on Israel’s conduct in its war with Hamas. Yet the current wave of anti-Jewish hatred is rooted in trends that predate 7 October. The war has merely given anti-Semites a chance to publicly give vent to their prejudices. Indeed, in the form of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism has even been endowed with respectability.
The very public surge in anti-Zionism has furthered the demonisation and isolation of Israel. Numerous Western governments have felt the need to show that they too are now on the ‘right side of history’ by distancing themselves from Israel. Various tactics have been deployed to this effect, from sanctions and boycotts to the recognition of a Palestinian state. Israel today is far more isolated diplomatically than at any time in its history.
The hostility directed at Israel by Western activists and their supporters among the cultural and political elites is not simply a response to Israel’s war conduct. With Israel treated as the embodiment of all that is rotten about the West, anti-Zionism expresses a sense of estrangement from Western civilisation itself. That is why some of Israel’s most zealous and ideologically committed enemies are to be found on the streets of the capital cities of Western Europe.
Looking back over the past two years, it becomes clear that Israel was always having to wage a war on two fronts: first, against Hamas, and second, against the Western self-loathing that now prevails in Europe and America. For those under the influence of this anti-Western zeitgeist, Palestine represents the moral antithesis of the West. History shows that this profound cultural self-loathing can easily lead to outbursts of frenzied irrationalism. That is why young people who know next to nothing about the Middle East can so spontaneously come under the spell of anti-Israeli hysteria.
Whatever the outcome of the current peace negotiations, the spirit of this anti-Western, anti-Zionist zeitgeist will continue to haunt the Western world. Its power and influence represent a threat to Israel and the West that is no less dangerous than that posed by Hamas and other Islamist groups. Long after this phase of the war is over, Israel will have to fight an existential, cultural and diplomatic war against its anti-Western detractors.
Israel now has no choice but to prepare for war on two fronts. The cultural battlefield in the West is no less important than the military battlefield of the Middle East.
Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.