Mindless on Gaza

If you get the literary allusion in the title, congratulations. You are a man of learning and discernment.

Therefore you don’t need me to tell you why Hamas launched that infernal raid on 7 October and why it was conducted with such savage cruelty. But some people, notably many commentators on the war, seem to need help to sort things out.

Discounting professional anti-Semites and Israel-haters, many well-meaning commentators are incapable of following the logic of the event. They regret the inhuman cruelty of Hamas’s action while displaying compassionate understanding of its motives.

I’d call such a pundit a Hamasversteher, by analogy with Putinversteher, someone who feels Vlad’s pain while bemoaning the pain he inflicts on millions of Ukrainians. Yes, says such a commentator, those Hamas lads went way over the top with their throat-slitting machetes and dismembering hoes.

But if I, the commentator, had to live my whole life under an occupation authority in miserable conditions and without any prospects of advancement, why, I’d feel the same way. I too would want to whip my machete out… no, not quite that. I am a civilised man, after all. But I understand how those youngsters feel. (This is a verbally loose but substantively accurate rendition of Max Hastings’s article).

The overall tone of commentary in our liberal (which is to say illiberal) press is that Hamas’s cause is just and it remains so in spite of the regrettable excesses committed on 7 October. Those excesses may explain but in no way justify Israel’s response that has already produced greater casualties in Gaza than those impetuous youngsters inflicted on Israeli babies.

Digging through such a pile of mental manure is an ungrateful task, but someone has to do it. So let’s construct a logical chain that will strangulate such crepuscular musings.

For our starting point, let’s use Golda Meir’s saying: “We want to live. Our enemies want us dead. Not much room for compromise there.”

Ever since the founding of Israel in 1948, the entire Arab world has been baying for the blood of every Israeli. Arab states have ganged up to launch three major wars on Israel with the explicit purpose of “driving her into the sea”. It was understood that such a marine excursion would leave no Israelis alive.

Israel won those three wars, the first one, paradoxically, with the Soviet Union’s help, the next two, predictably, with America’s. All that unfolded to the accompaniment of the liberal (which is to say illiberal) world railing again Israel’s “unlawful occupation” of the small patch of land that rightfully belongs to Muslims.

Appeals to history fell on deaf, and biased, ears. Yes, Jews had been living in Palestine for at least 2,000 years before Mohammed robbed his first caravan. And at no point in history had the population of Jerusalem been less than half-Jewish.

That’s not the point. The point is that some Arabs were displaced when Jewish settlers finally got their state in 1948, a guarantee that another Holocaust wouldn’t happen or, if it did, at least the Jews would go down fighting.

Hence the Golda Meir juxtaposition: we want to live, they want us dead. The experience of those three wars has taught the Arabs that a military defeat of Israel isn’t on the cards, especially since the country has a nuclear bomb up her sleeve, to be used as the last resort.

Also, Israel enjoys the support of the civilised world that correctly sees her as its outpost in its 1,400-year struggle against Islamic aggression. Back to logic then: what can the Arabs do to achieve their laudable aim of turning all of Israel into a bloodbath similar to that of 7 October?

Correct. They have to turn the civilised world against Israel, forcing it to withdraw its support and leave the tiny country one on one with the vast Muslim world. And what’s the best way of accomplishing that? Correct again: by portraying Israel as the heartless aggressor and the Arabs as her helpless victims.

To that end, each terrorist attack on Israel, with rockets, AKs or machetes, must be hailed as the crying out of wounded souls. At the same time, each Israeli response to such attacks must be decried as flagrant, unprovoked aggression with genocidal intent.

This little stratagem has worked a treat. As a result, Israel is the only one of the world’s 196 states whose legitimacy is denied by most UN members. That august organisation, born at roughly the same time as Israel, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country. A visitor from another planet would be justified in believing that Israel is the main, not to say only, source of evil in the world.

Knowing all that, Israel has learned to fight with one hand behind her back. The Israelis know that their support even in civilised countries is by no means guaranteed. Large swathes of Western liberal (which is to say illiberal) opinion are against them, and the balance can be tipped the other way at any moment.

That’s why they have been responding to hails of rockets fired at their villages and towns with restraint no other country would show. Just imagine thousands of rockets being fired at Texas and California from Mexico day in, day out. I sincerely doubt Mexico City would look considerably better than Dresden, circa 1945.

Israel can’t afford the luxury of just retribution for monstrous attacks on her civilians. The world is keeping a watchful eye on her military responses, hoping for a pretext to gang up on Israel and leave her at the mercy of her savage enemies.

The latter, however, know exactly what to do. If Israel won’t oblige to unleash hell on her attackers, she must be forced to. Should such an undertaking succeed, the liberal (which is to say illiberal) champions of the Third World will join forces with rank anti-Semites and have another go at leaving Israel friendless and defenceless. Keep doing that long enough and at some point you’ll succeed.

The links of the logical chain have clasped together. We now understand why Hamas had to launch that raid and why it had to be conducted with such savage brutality. Israel had to be deprived of any option of showing restraint. A massive military response became the only option on the table.

Even Israel’s attempts to limit non-combatant losses had to be nipped in the bud. Hamas and all other Arab enemies of Israel have a vested interest in maximising their own civilian casualties. To that end, they place their command centres and missile sites in bunkers built under hospitals and schools, leaving the Israelis no option but to hit them. And when that doesn’t work, the Arabs simply lie about a hospital being bombed, as they did on the first day of Israel’s response.

Meanwhile, liberal (which is to say illiberal) opinion used all the best methods of rabble-rousing to marshal its forces around the civilised world — before the Israelis launched their counter-attack. Millions have been driven out into the streets demanding a “Palestine free, from the river to the sea.” Allow me to translate: that means annihilating Israel and murdering every Israeli.

If that isn’t incitement to terrorism, I don’t know what is. And yet our authorities are helpless to stop that Walpurgisnacht. They’ve meekly begged the scum to postpone their march until after 11 November, to make it possible for us to remember our fallen soldiers in peace. The scum refused, and the attack on the Cenotaph is on.

There are rumours that football lovers, Tommy Robinson types and assorted faschisoid extremists will come out to turn London streets into battlegrounds. The situation may resemble the 1930s, when fascists and communists fought their bloody battles in the East End.

Public order is in peril, and the fault lies with our government’s vacillating policies, both foreign and domestic. HMG should state unequivocally that supporting Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel (“from the river to the sea”) is tantamount to inciting terrorism. The Terrorism Act 2000, Section 2, provides for rewarding that activity with imprisonment of up to 15 years.

The next step would be putting enough police, possible even troops, on the streets to enforce that law and preserve public order. It’s time we realised that what is under way isn’t a conflict between Israel and her enemies, but what Samuel P. Huntington correctly identified as the clash of civilisations.

Having said that, I’m almost certain today’s governments, including ours, are incapable of understanding such simple logic and acting accordingly. Mindless toing and froing is their lot.

P.S. The other day several people filmed the act of vandalism at the National Gallery, but not a single one tried to stop it. Have the English become a nation of voyeurs?