In just four months, Israel has defeated more than half of Hamas's fighting forces, Benjamin Netanyahu said. Photo: AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of The Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelphobia: The Newest Version of an Old Hatred and What to Do About It
Almost five decades ago, after a fruitful visit to Israel In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, American writer Saul Bellow wondered whether there was not one Israel, but two.
He wrote that the first Israel was almost “insignificant.” Constituting less than a quarter of one percent of the Middle East's territory, with a population of three million in a region with 75 times that number, it was insignificant both territorially and demographically.
Although the Vietnam War, from which the United States withdrew that same year, cost millions of lives, the total death toll on both sides in all of Israel's wars was about 67,000. This outbreak on the world stage became the real Israel.
The Second Israel, he wrote, was a phantom of the imagination. As the umbilical cord of Western civilization and the cornerstone of Christendom, Israel, along with classical Greece, formed the source of our morality and the model of our sensibility and cultural richness.
It also served as catnip for anti-Semites who have always both fetishized Jews as the chosen people pulling the strings and despised them as lowly killers of Christ, a dynamic that continues to this day with slander such as the «Zionist lobby» and “genocide.”
As Bellow inimitably put it: “Mental Israel is vast, a country of inestimable importance, playing an important role in the world, as vast as all history, and perhaps as deep as a dream.” .
Since he wrote these lines. In other words, the Jewish state underwent an economic miracle, increased its population by another six million people, and became a regional military superpower. But its reality remains relatively small. For example, until October last year, the total number of combat casualties over 75 years had risen to 86,000; still far less than, say, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the three years when we joined the invasion of Iraq.
However, deep sleep remains. The West's passion for the Jewish state is completely untrue and riddled with hypocrisy. When the RAF, US Air Force, and Iraqi and Kurdish forces destroyed the Islamic State in Mosul in 2016–2017, at least 9,000 Muslim civilians were killed.
These deaths, partly funded by British taxpayers, were no less horrific than those in Gaza that were exaggerated on our television. Add to this our other battles against the Islamic State, and the death toll is much higher. Who then took to the streets of London? Where were the flares and posters? What was the reason for the concern?
Last week, students and teachers marched in London calling for a lasting ceasefire. Photo: Guy Smallman/Getty Images
When Israel suffers the worst terrorist attack in its history and reacts out of necessity amid fluttering leaflets urging civilians to evacuate, it is dragged before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). When Britain and America act the same, nothing. Other democracies may wage war, but the Jews are doomed to genocide. The protests are associated with the Jewishness of the hands squeezing the levers of the bomb. That is, they are about ourselves.
In Britain, Israel is accused of imperialism, and in America of racism. Accusations of white supremacy are widespread, and around the world, countries with the most indelible genocides in their histories are those most loudly accusing Jews of the same crime.
Morally lax anti-Zionists care little and know less about Israel's reality . Instead, they are concerned with the blood-sucking Jews of the imagination.
Moreover: they seek to undermine the position of Jews as the most vulnerable expression of established Western liberalism, be it Benjamin Netanyahu, the Union flag, the Churchill statue, the cenotaph or the police (whom they will no longer be able to set off fireworks following the intervention of the Home Office this week).< /p>
When a group called Art Workers for Palestine recently staged a sit-in at the Tate Modern to demand a ceasefire, I imagined Bibi barking into the phone in Jerusalem: “Are art workers on strike now? Withdraw your troops.» No. This is a performance. Ironically, those who are “woke” are the least awake. These people only care about themselves.
The world of dreams is not limited to Israel. Over the past five decades, as wartime memories have been lost in the sands of decadence, the deep sleep of narcissism, which refers not to the planet as it is but to how we create it for the sake of our self-image, has intensified. characteristic of the entire West.
It is very good for the poster-wielding masses to live their lives in indulgent fantasies. It's another matter when our leaders fall victim to the same delusion.
On Monday the Royal Navy, once the king of the waves, was unable to turn around its £3 billion aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth because it had a rusty propeller. Nothing could be more symbolic. British defense spending is abysmal: it remains below our target of 2.5%, compared with an average of 7.9% in the 1950s.
Our armed forces are now the smallest they have been since the Napoleonic Wars. While tanks rumble back to the forefront in Ukraine and Gaza, we have allowed our heavy equipment to fall into disrepair in favor of some pipe dream of cyber warfare; and when we did think about it, our £5.5 billion Ajax fleet was too heavy, leaving crews sick and unable to fire on the move. This week a cross-party defense committee report concluded that if Putin attacked tomorrow, the UK would be unable to defend itself.
Belatedly, the truth begins to sink in. Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said the world was no longer post-war but «pre-war». Intelligence officials warned on Wednesday that Britain was running out of time to prepare for war.
“We live in truly dangerous times,” one of them told the press. “The likelihood of large-scale conflict at some point in the future is greater than in the past. The requirements here are higher than ever in our experience, more complex and varied. We must begin the process of preparing for conflict today.”
All of this is disturbingly reflected in our recent history. After World War I and the Cold War, defense budgets fell sharply as the threat was apparently eliminated. In the 1930s we came face to face with the madness of this false sense of security. If this lesson is not learned, it comes back to us now.
This is a wake-up call that continues to elude society. Particularly affected are the left and young people, whose worldview remains dormant.
When the head of the British army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, floated the idea of conscription last month, it was met with widespread ridicule. Social media has begun to ridicule the values for which our grandparents gave their lives.
Never has the offer of service to one's country been so disdained. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to realize that jokes — and even dreams — tell you something about a nation's unconscious. At the slightest hint of sacrifice for one's country, Britain's neuroses were laid bare.
One cannot help but think of John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” he wrote. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse… Until justice and injustice cease their ever-renewed struggle for dominance in the affairs of mankind, men must be ready, when necessary, to fight for one against another.”
Who in Britain would want it now? Who is at any university in America? Let us lift the curtain: these are the very people who most zealously judge Israel.
There is a direct connection between the hypocrisy and self-will directed against the Jewish state and our own state of cultural somnambulism.
The Global Threats We Face We are all part of the same weather system today. Intelligence officials have called the conflicts in Gaza and the Red Sea «storms,» Russia's ongoing offensive in Ukraine a «hurricane,» and the Chinese threat «climate change.» With this in mind, the tendency is to berate and patronize It is understandable for Jerusalem to appease Tehran's tyrants, withhold funding needed for Kiev's victory, and look away from Beijing's creeping shadow.
Show me a hysterical woman accusing Israel of genocide, and I will show you a leader who has lost touch with the need for self-defense. Show me a leader who has lost touch with the need for self-defense, and I will show you a nation in danger.
In a video message on Wednesday rejecting Hamas's absurd demands for survival, Netanyahu quoted retired Maj. John Spencer, head of the urban warfare department at the US military academy at West Point and one of the world's leading experts on such conflicts.
Spencer noted that while it took the West nine months to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Israel killed, wounded or captured more than half of Hamas' 20,000-strong fighting force in just four months. With enough determination, complete victory would certainly be achievable.
Spencer is someone to take seriously. As important as it is to highlight Israel's military prowess, his more important point appeared in last week's article.
“No soldier fighting an entrenched enemy in a densely populated urban area in an area barely twice the size of Washington, D.C., can avoid all civilian casualties,” he wrote in Newsweek. “Reports of the deaths of more than 25,000 Palestinians, whether civilians or Hamas members, made headlines. But Israel has taken more measures to avoid unnecessary harm to civilians than virtually any other country that has fought urban warfare.»
As someone who served twice in Iraq and has studied urban warfare for more than a decade, he went He could further testify personally that “Israel took precautions that the United States did not during the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He concluded: “When it comes to preventing harm to civilians, there is no comparison in the modern world to Israel's war against Hamas… The only cause of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip is Hamas. On Israel's part, he made more efforts to prevent them than any other army in the history of mankind.»
Clearly, Spencer is one of the few with his eyes wide open. What a contrast to President Biden, who infamously remarked on Friday that Israel's desperate war to protect its civilian population from future massacres was «over the top.»
Perhaps this would earn him applause among those inclined to believe that Jews take pleasure in killing babies, but at West Point the hallways must have rang loudly with the sound of collective slaps as a cascade of sentient heads fell into their hands.
< img src="/wp-content/uploads /2024/02/12da03f327d36d18d1083197d81f4c2e.jpg" /> Biden said Netanyahu's response in Gaza 'was over the top'; Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
And not just at West Point. Every country interested in the reality of the region wants Hamas to disappear. Gulf Arab states may criticize Israel in public, but they do not hide their true feelings in private.
Neither does Egypt, which had its own clashes with Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, during the Arab Spring and recently added dystopian fortifications to its border with the Gaza Strip. Only states that have no skin in the game succumb to the agitation of lunatics on the streets.
The problem is deep. Throughout the Western world we have forgotten how to respond to the demands of reality. Look at the proposed EU Navy (and it's impossible to contemplate without cringing), which would be deployed to protect shipping in the Red Sea without launching «any attacks» on Houthi targets on land, said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.< /p>
Look at how the Biden administration responded when Iranian proxies killed three soldiers on the Jordan-Syria border last month. The American retaliatory strike was announced so far in advance that by the time the strikes took place, the sites had largely been abandoned. Yes, the leader of the Kataib Hezbollah group that carried out the attack was neutralized in a drone strike on Wednesday. But does anyone seriously think this will deter Iran?
In 1988, when Ronald Reagan responded to the bombing of a US ship by attacking the Iranian fleet, it cowed Tehran and hastened the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. In 2020, when Donald Trump authorized the killing of Tehran terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani, there was no meaningful retaliation. Commentators' squeals about World War III rang hollow.
This should not have come as a surprise: Washington's defense budget is more than $850bn (£670bn), dwarfing Tehran's $9bn. America's economy is 31 times larger than Iran's; its air force has 13,000 aircraft, compared to Tehran's 551; and its navy is four times larger.
And that's not even mentioning America's nuclear arsenal. But rather than learn from history and firmly apply deterrence (calculated strikes on Iranian forces themselves might have worked), Biden chose to err on the side of caution. The Ayatollah could be heard chuckling. Hitting the octopus' tentacles only emboldens the beast. And the tentacles have a nasty habit of growing back.
Biden's cautious retaliation did not deter Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Photo: OFFICE HANDOUTS SUPREME LEADER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
This inadequate response was emblematic of the Biden administration's approach to Shiite theocracy. One of his first decisions after taking office was to try to warm up Barack Obama's nuclear deal.
Led by ultra-dovish Rob Malley, who has since had his security clearance revoked amid allegations that he mishandled classified information, the American delegation was given the runaround for months while the Iranians accelerated their progress on the bomb .
Meanwhile, Tehran was showered with carrots, including the release of $6 billion in exchange for five American hostages. This increased the premium to $1.2 billion per hostage, an attractive proposition for any rogue regime.
This is how an administration behaves in a state of sleep. This brings me to the two-state solution. Few people, least of all me, would deny the principle of Palestinian self-determination.
Indeed, Israel has conceded to these demands several times. For example, in 2008, Ehud Olmert offered 94% of the West Bank, adding 6% Israeli land to make up the difference; sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which would make it the capital of a Palestinian state; Israeli withdrawal from the Old City of Jerusalem, which will be under international control; a tunnel connecting the West Bank and Gaza Strip, ensuring the territorial integrity of Palestine; and a thousand Palestinian refugees are accepted into Israel annually for five years, and financial compensation is provided for the rest.
It's hard to imagine a more generous plan. This was literally all the Palestinians demanded. However, Mahmoud Abbas, having suffered a grotesque failure in leadership, rejected this proposal.
In truth, the main obstacle to a two-state solution is the fact that the Palestinian leadership has never truly acknowledged the presence of Jews on your own land. That is why they more than once turned away from the edge of the world. As Golda Meir noted: “They say we must be dead. And we say that we want to be alive. Between life and death I know no compromise.”
Israeli soldiers take positions near the Gaza border Photo: AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg
Terror calls for terror everywhere. When Brighton bomber Patrick Magee was locked up at the Old Bailey in 1986, he shouted the IRA slogan “tiocfaidh ár lá”, which means “our day will come”. This is also the philosophy of the autocratic Palestinian leadership.
The French were driven out of Algeria after 132 years—almost twice as long as Israel existed—through a campaign of thousands of cuts. Jews, including my own family, fled Eastern Europe after a series of pogroms. Given such precedents, why should the Palestinians make peace if they mistakenly believe thatvictory will come in time?
From cradle to grave, Palestinian society is being indoctrinated. The polls may not be entirely reliable, but they show widespread support for Hamas and the October 7 atrocities in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Israelphobia runs deep in schools, including those run by the UN. training program. In the Gaza Strip, half the population was born under Hamas rule and came of age steeped in its ideology; In the West Bank, authorities are offering financial rewards to the families of convicted terrorists.
The international community's insistence that new Palestinian leadership is needed is undeniable. But where are these future leaders? Anyone who has any support either has blood on their hands, or other people's money in their pockets, or both.
This may not correspond to the reality that the international community would like. This may not fit with neo-colonialist notions of the noble savage. But it's true. Unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state, as Lord Cameron has suggested, or “imposing it” on Israel, as Josep Borrell has suggested, will not help solve this problem. In fact, emboldening extremists will only make matters worse.
Proclaiming support for a two-state solution is, of course, a way to dominate as the fairest person in the room.
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But although We have the freedom to indulge such beliefs in luxury, Israelis should worry about the lives of their children. Take the West Bank, the heart of a future Palestinian state. It includes a strategically important mountain range within easy missile range of Israel's narrowest segment.
Known as the «Hadera-Gadera rectangle», this center of Israel is only nine miles wide and 60 miles long, but is home to half its population and much of its vital infrastructure, including Tel Aviv.
An invasion by a new state of Palestine would be catastrophic and threaten to split the country in two. Ignoring the widespread presence of radicalism on the Palestinian side is a luxury the Israelis can hardly afford when asked to relinquish control of the strategically dangerous West Bank.
The new state could be demilitarized. But what if future police forces try to bolster their capabilities with armored cars, night vision goggles and heavy weapons? What if the Iranians turn the new country into a stronghold of fanaticisminoverrun it with terrorist cells armed with rockets, suicide bombs, mortars and automatic weapons, as happened in the Gaza Strip? Will the international community support an Israeli invasion to neutralize this threat or will it be referred to the International Court of Justice?
It takes special sophistication to dull such sharp realities. Does the international community really believe that a new state of Palestine will miraculously become the only democracy among the 22 autocracies of the Arab world? That Palestinians will leave their corruption and Israel-phobia at the door? What development will bring an end to the cycle of bloodshed? As Bellow concludes: “Much of the intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
This clouded thinking is symbolic of the heavy-lidded West, besotted with its own reflections. But in Israel the enemy is at the gates. On Monday, Yoav Gallant, Israel's defense minister, said there was a «huge possibility» of a second front opening in the north.
After all, the events of October 7th proved that Israel can no longer turn a blind eye to a genocidal enemy on its border that is building attack capabilities. Meanwhile, the Iranians are developing their nuclear weapons. The dogs of war are on our heels.
More than 240 Israeli hostages were taken into Gaza by Hamas in October 7. Photo: Amir Levy /Getty Images
The autobiographies of Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens contain the same episode. In 1989, they visited Bellow for dinner in Vermont, driving through the magnificent tunnel of maple trees that famously led to his home.
The conversation turned to the subject of Israel and became quite heated. It is disgraceful that Hitchens was a friend and ally of the charlatan anti-Western subversive Edward Said; he and Bellow got into a heated argument over a magazine article with the headline “Edward Said: Professor of Terror,” which Hitchens believed was deliberately exposed.
One day, a “brainy” British journalist “crush” burned down, Amis recalls , an awkward silence «slowly stretched over the dinner table.»
Eventually, Hitchens offered something of an olive branch, explaining that he was defending his destructive friend because otherwise he would have «felt bad » With brutal honesty, Bellow responded, “How are you feeling now?” I fear the West may be faced with the same question in the near future.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What to Do About It. about this
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