The Middle East stands on the brink of all-out war.
Following Iran’s barrage of 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night, the world is holding its breath. How will Israel respond? Will the US and Britain be drawn into a confrontation with the mullahs of Tehran?
Then there is Lebanon. As a vast exodus of civilians from the south of the country continues, the aerial bombardment on both sides of the border with Israel intensifies.
The diplomatic world clamours for a ceasefire, but neither the Iran-backed Islamist terror group nor the Israel Defence Forces show any sign of backing down.
One year after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, things feel more volatile than ever.
One year after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, things feel more volatile than ever
Following Iran’s barrage of 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night, the world is holding its breath
But it is not the only confrontation that is escalating. So is hostility towards Israel, which is increasingly viewed as a pariah state in fashionable progressive circles.
Thanks to the twisted mentality that now prevails in much of the public discourse in the West – as I reveal in my new book about the response to the Hamas atrocity of October 7, After The Pogrom – the overwhelming preponderance of moral opprobrium is reserved for Israel.
How dare they, rail the bien pensants, retaliate against the barrage of Hezbollah rockets that has rained down relentlessly on their territory for months?
The correct-think mob even accuses Israel of provoking Iran’s missile attack this week – overlooking that Iran has been bombing and massacring Israelis for years through its proxy armies of Hezbollah and Hamas. Indeed, this week, Iran’s 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lauded the October 7 atrocity as a legitimate action by the Palestinian people.
The grotesque double standards – where violent, misogynistic racists bent on creating a barbarous theocracy are hailed as freedom fighters, while the only democratic country in the Middle East is denounced as an engine of lethal oppression – have existed for decades.
But they were thrown into sharp relief by Hamas’s assault on Israel last year, the most deadly single strike against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
The Hamas incursion not only triggered the chain of events that led to the present conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, but also unleashed an extraordinary wave of anti-Israeli bigotry and venom across the West.
At times, it felt as if our civilisation had been gripped by insanity. Basic morality had been inverted.
Radical activists who had cried ‘Believe all women’ during the #MeToo tumult, overnight became sceptics about claims of Hamas terrorists raping Jewish women.
Strident diversity officials now began to bleat about ‘the context’ when asked why they were silent about anti-Jewish racist abuse.
eople stand on top of the remains of an Iranian missile in the Negev desert near Arad, on October 2
Demonstrators wave flags and carry portraits of slain leaders during a rally in Tehran on October 2
Victim-blaming was in, justice was out. In the wake of October 7, Israel became the most hated nation on earth. The sheer loathing of it was out of all proportion to its size and influence.
It is almost exactly a year since the Hamas attack exposed the moral decadence in large parts of our society. October 8, 2023, ought to have been a day of shining ethical clarity for humankind, given the horror that had unfolded over the preceding 24 hours as Hamas embarked on its killing spree.
No one was spared, not children, not women, not the elderly. Rockets were fired at moving cars. Grenades were thrown into bomb shelters in which families had taken refuge. A music festival was turned into a site of rape and slaughter.
More than 1,100 people were killed in total, 796 of them civilians. Shocking though it was, even this death toll failed to capture the full depravity of the massacre. The assailants took glee in their sadism, filming their violence and sharing it online.
Not content with their bloodbath in Israel, they also took 250 hostages, whom they dragged back to Gaza and then paraded, bruised and bloodied, through the streets. This was more than terrorism or mass murder.
It was, in the words of German novelist Herta Muller, ‘a total derailment from civilisation’. The Jewish nation found itself subjected to the very butchery it was built to withstand. The state to which Jews had fled to escape the pogroms had now experienced one of its own.
All this should have awoken the world’s conscience. Yet Israel waited in vain for the young and educated of the West to rally to its side.
From the moment that news of the Hamas attack began to be broadcast, the voices of equivocation and excuse-making could be heard. Some said Israel had provoked the atrocities by their mistreatment of the Gazan population.
Just as they now say Israel provoked Iran by attacking Hezbollah – even though Hezbollah has fired rockets at Israel almost every day since October 7.
Others claimed Hamas’s October 7 assault was a just response to Israel’s colonial-style occupation of Palestinian land. Referring to the mass killings at the music festival, Ashok Kumar, a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, tweeted: ‘Sometimes partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp has consequences.’
One disturbing opinion poll in the US found 60 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old Americans felt Palestinian grievances justified Hamas’s action.
Israeli festivalgoers run for their lives through the desert after being warned of an incoming rocket attack just as Hamas invaded the country on October 7
Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian, center, from Kfar Azza kibbutz into the Gaza Strip on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023
Perhaps worse than the specious justifications were the expressions of jubilation, which started even as the massacre was still underway.
‘Today is a day of celebration,’ said Rivkah Brown of the Left-wing media outlet Novara on October 7, utterly dismissive of concerns about civilian death. ‘The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we should not apologise for it,’ she said.
And this perverse mood of exhilaration spilled out onto the streets, epitomised by a large demonstration on October 9 outside the Israeli embassy in London, where, according to one report: ‘Arabic music was blasting, people were linking arms and dancing.’
Such scenes of elation were also accompanied by expressions of intimidation and acts of violence. At Birmingham University, protesters displayed a banner saying: ‘Zionists off our campus’, a slogan that was part of an ugly atmosphere in Britain in the weeks after October 7 that saw anti-Semitic hate crimes rise by 1,350 per cent.
Jewish schools and shops were attacked. At the Wiener Historical Holocaust Library in central London, the oldest such institution in the world, graffiti in support of Gaza was daubed at the entrance.
The mix of crude anti-Semitism and glorification of terrorism was also on display in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations which have become such a feature of cities in Britain and elsewhere in the West since October 7.
The relentless nature of these anti-Israeli protests, along with moronic chants like ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, again highlights how deranged and morally perverted this cause has become.
Together with the wave of hate crimes, the demonstrations served to promote the internationalisation of Hamas’s reactionary ideology, where the Jewish state is singled out for special contempt as the source of the world’s ills, with the Jewish people held to be guilty by association.
Indeed, no nation provokes the wrath of the West’s activist class as much as Israel.
Thousands can perish in Syria’s civil war, or in Saudi Arabia’s Western-backed offensive in Yemen, or in Myanmar or the Ethiopian region of Tigray, and not one foot will touch a street in our cities in protest.
Yet the minute Israel takes action against the terrorists on its borders, the marchers will be out with their placards, screeching about genocide.
The very existence of Israel excites fury on a visceral level that transcends logic. It seems to me that Israel has become a kind of sin-bearer for the woke warriors of the West, a totem of everything they find objectionable in Western society, culture and history.
Burnt cars are left behind at the site of the weekend attack on the Supernova desert music Festival by Palestinian militants, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel, on October 10, 2023
A street in kibbutz Kfar Aza is seen on October 27 – 20 days after Hamas stormed the area
From racism and poverty to military aggression, the Jewish nation is said to be at the centre of a vast web of global oppression.
Yet so much of this demonisation is based on myths and dishonesty, like the portrayal of Israel as a ‘white supremacist’ nation when it is actually a nation where whites are in the minority and a high percentage of its Jewish population is of North African or Middle Eastern descent.
Just as fallacious is the common description of Israel as a ‘colonialist’ power when, in reality, it was born from an anti-colonial movement against British rule in Palestine in the late 1940s. This inconvenient truth does not suit the agenda of the haters, of course.
Even more grotesque is the parallel drawn by pro-Palestinian activists between Israel and the South Africa of the apartheid era. Yet there is no comparison. Israel is an advanced democracy whose Arab population has the right to vote and whose Supreme Court includes Arab justices.
The entire process of denigrating Israel is riddled with lies and contradictions. In their fulminations against the Jewish state, the progressive activists blather about ‘social justice’ for Gaza.
Yet homosexual relations are illegal in Gaza, with the result that gay people face persecution and torture there, a reality that makes the London-based pressure group ‘Queers for Palestine’ look like a bunch of deluded idiots.
Nor is there any justice for women under Hamas’s brutal Islamist dogma, which imposes widespread discrimination against them. According to one recent study, women in Gaza have one of the world’s lowest rates of participation in the labour market, at just 20 per cent.
Outspoken Western feminists, who see dangerous misogyny in a touch on the knee or a risque joke, fall silent in the face of mass rapes by Hamas fighters, because – in the woke playbook – Jews are the oppressors and Palestinians the victims.
Apart from the charity called Jewish Women’s Aid, not one group in England that focuses on sexual violence against women condemned the sex crimes of Hamas. In fact, the radical organisation Sisters Uncut actively challenged the reports of abuse, claiming that there was a risk of stirring up Islamophobia.
The theory that Israelis invented or exaggerated the incidence of sexual assaults for their own political ends fits the anti-Semitic stereotype that portrays Jews as cynical, cunning liars, continually manipulating events for their own political advantage.
That belief in the Jews’ inherent dishonesty also lies behind the lurid conspiracy theory that Israel fabricated much of the attack on October 7 in order to provide a pretext for pulverising Gaza.
Personal belongings lie among the debris of a house destroyed during the October 7 attack by Hamas militants in kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip on October 18
Troops remove the bodies of victims, killed during an attack by Hamas terrorists in Kfar Aza
It is an approach that could be called ‘Pogrom denial’, a smaller version of the vile practice of ’Holocaust denial’ which has been central to modern anti-Semitism.
While few of the Western pro-Palestinian brigade go so far as to question the reality of the Holocaust, they undermine its central importance to the Jews and to humanity in other ways.
One is to scold Israel for using its traumatic legacy as a stick with which to beat Hezbollah and Hamas, even though both groups are built on the desire to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth.
Another is to challenge the Jewish people’s moral ownership of the Holocaust by robbing the Nazis’ genocide of its racial specificity, instead presenting Hitler’s policy as a generalised act of extremist wickedness.
Dressed up as a step towards greater inclusion, it is a process that downgrades the unique suffering of the Jews.
Other hypocrisies are glaring, such as the habit of self-regarding activists to don the Keffiyeh, originally a scarf worn by Bedouin tribesmen but now an emblem of solidarity with Palestine.
Yet these are often the same people who shriek about ‘cultural appropriation’ if a white person wears a sombrero or has their hair braided.
Moreover, in a rich irony, few of the Keffiyehs are made in Palestine but rather are manufactured in China using forced Uyghur labour.
These double standards are embodied in the figure of Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and now independent MP for Islington. He likes to see himself as a feminist ally, supporter of gay rights, advocate of democracy, and champion of the oppressed.
Yet in his hatred of Israel, he has ended up colluding with violent misogyny, racism, homophobia and authoritarianism.
Tragically, there are too many in the West who have taken the same route as Corbyn. That helps to explain why we failed collectively the moral test of October 7.
Israel deserved better.
After The Pogrom: 7 October, Israel And The Crisis Of Civilisation by Brendan O’Neill (£11.99, Spiked) is out now
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