Western appeasement of anti-Israel fanatics threatens to hand victory to axis of evil
Jake Wallis Simons
18 min read
Israel has defeated more than half of Hamas’s fighting force in just four months, Benjamin Netanyahu has said - AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman
Almost five decades ago, after a seminal visit to Israel in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, the American novelist Saul Bellow wondered whether there wasn’t one Israel but two.
The first Israel, he wrote, was next to “insignificant”. Accounting for less than a quarter of a per cent of the Middle East, with a population of three million in a region that was home to 75 times that number, it was both territorially and demographically negligible.
While the Vietnam War, from which the United States withdrew that same year, had claimed millions of lives, the total deaths on both sides in all of Israel’s wars amounted to about 67,000. This blip on the world stage was the Israel of reality.
The second Israel, he wrote, was a phantasm of the imagination. As the umbilical cord of Western civilisation and the foundation stone of Christendom, Israel, alongside classical Greece, forms the wellspring of our morality and the template for our sensibilities and cultural richness.
It also functions as catnip for anti-Semites, who have always both fetishised Jews as the string-pulling chosen people and despised them as the lowly killers of Christ, a dynamic that persists to this day with smears like “Zionist lobby” and “genocide”.
As Bellow inimitably put it: “The mental Israel is immense, a country inestimably important, playing a major role in the world, as broad as all history and perhaps as deep as sleep.”
Since he wrote those words, the Jewish state has undergone an economic miracle, added a further six million people to its population and become a regional military superpower. But its reality remains relatively small. Until October last year, for example, its total combat deaths had risen to 86,000; still far fewer than, say, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost when we joined the invasion of Iraq.
Yet the deep sleep remains. The West’s passions about the Jewish state are out of all proportion to reality and shot through with hypocrisy. When the RAF, American Air Force and Iraqi and Kurdish forces destroyed Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, at least 9,000 Muslim civilians were killed.
Those killings, partly funded by the British taxpayer, were no less gruesome than the ones in Gaza magnified on our televisions. Add our other battles against Islamic State and the death toll was far higher. Who took to the streets of London then? Where were the flares and placards? Where was the concern?
Students and educators marched in London last week calling for a lasting ceasefire - Guy Smallman/Getty Images
When Israel suffers the worst terror attack in its history and responds out of necessity amid the flutter of leaflets advising civilians to evacuate, it is dragged in front of the International Court of Justice. When Britain and America act similarly, nothing. Other democracies may wage war, but the Jews are condemned to wage genocide. The protests are about the Jewishness of the hands on the bomb toggles. Which is to say, they are about ourselves.
In Britain, Israel is accused of imperialism. In America, it is accused of racism. Allegations of white supremacy are ubiquitous and across the world, countries with genocides most indelibly in their histories accuse the Jews most loudly of the same crime.
The morally flaccid anti-Zionists care little, and know less, about the Israel of reality. Instead, they care about the bloodsucking Jews of the imagination.
More than that: they seek to undermine the Jews as the most vulnerable symbol of established Western liberalism, whether that takes the form of Benjamin Netanyahu, the union flag, the statue of Churchill, the cenotaph or the police (at whom they will no longer be able to launch fireworks, following a Home Office intervention this week).
When a group called “Art Workers For Palestine” staged a sit-in at the Tate Modern recently to demand a ceasefire, I imagined Bibi barking down the phone in Jerusalem: “What, now the art workers are on strike? Pull the troops out.” No. It’s performative. Ironically, the “woke” are the least awake of all. These people care only about themselves.
The dreamworld is not limited to Israel. Over the last five decades, as memories of wartime have been lost in the sands of decadence, the deep sleep of narcissism – which relates to the planet not as it is but how we conjure it for the sake of our self-image – has grown endemic across the West.
It’s all very well for the placard-carrying masses to live out their lives in an indulgent fantasy. It is another matter, however, when our leaders fall prey to the same delusion.
On Monday, the Royal Navy, once ruler of the waves, was unable to deploy its £3bn HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier because it had a rusty propeller. Nothing could have been more symbolic. British defence spending is abysmal, remaining below our target of 2.5pc compared to an average of 7.9pc in the 1950s.
Our armed forces are at their smallest since the Napoleonic wars. As tanks rumble back to the forefront in Ukraine and Gaza, we have allowed our heavy hardware to decline in favour of some cyberwar pipedream; and when we did turn our minds to the matter, our £5.5bn Ajax vehicles turned out to be too heavy, prone to making crews sick and unable to fire on the move. This week, a cross-party defence committee report concluded that if Putin attacked tomorrow, Britain would be unable to defend itself.
Belatedly, the truth is beginning to sink in. The Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, has said that the world is no longer postwar but “pre-war”. On Wednesday, intelligence officials warned that time was running out for Britain to gear up for a fight.
“We are living in truly dangerous times,” one told the press. “The likelihood of a large-scale conflict at a point in the future is higher than it has been in the past. The demands here are greater than at any time in our experience, more complex, more varied. We’ve got to start that process of preparing for conflict, today.”
All of this echoes disturbingly in our recent history. After the First World War and the Cold War, defence budgets were drastically reduced amid an apparent withdrawal of the threat. In the 1930s, we were brought face to face with the folly of this false sense of security. Left unlearned, that lesson is returning to us now.
It is a wake-up call that continues to evade society. Particularly afflicted are those on the Left and the young, whose worldview remains that of the slumberer.
When the head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, floated the idea of conscription last month, it was met with widespread mockery. As one, social media roused itself to poke fun at the values for which our grandparents gave their lives.
Never had the suggestion of serving one’s country been so disparaged. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to understand that jokes – and indeed dreams – tell you something about the unconscious of a nation. At the mildest suggestion of sacrifice for one’s country, Britain’s neuroses were laid bare.
One could not help but recall John Stewart Mill in 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 a war, is much worse… As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
Whom in Britain would be willing now? Whom at any university in America? Let us pull back the curtain: these are the very same people who sit in judgement most zealously over Israel.
There is a direct connection between the hypocrisy and high-handedness directed at the Jewish state and our own condition of cultural somnambulism.
The global threats that face us today are all part of the same weather system. Intelligence officials have described the conflicts in Gaza and the Red Sea as “storms”, Russia’s continuing onslaught in Ukraine as “a hurricane” and the dangers of China as “climate change”.
With this in mind, the tendency to scold and patronise Jerusalem, appease the tyrants of Tehran, withhold the funding necessary for Kyiv to prevail and look away from the creeping shadow of Beijing are of a piece.
Show me a hysteric who accuses Israel of genocide and I’ll show you a leader who has lost touch with the need for self-defence. Show me a leader who has lost touch with the need for self-defence and I’ll show you a nation in peril.
In his video statement on Wednesday rejecting Hamas’s ludicrous demand for survival, Netanyahu cited retired Major John Spencer, head of the urban warfare division at the US military academy at West Point and one of the world’s foremost experts on such conflicts.
Spencer had pointed out that while it had taken nine months for the West to defeat Islamic State in Mosul, Israel had killed, wounded or captured more than half of Hamas’s fighting force of 20,000 men in just four months. With enough grit, total victory was surely within reach.
Spencer is a man worth taking seriously. As important as it was to highlight Israel’s military prowess, his more consequential insight came in an article last week.
“No military fighting an entrenched enemy in dense urban terrain in an area barely twice the size of Washington DC can avoid all civilian casualties,” he wrote in Newsweek. “Reports of over 25,000 Palestinians killed, be they civilians or Hamas, have made headlines. But Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that fought an urban war.”
As someone who had served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, he went on, he could personally attest that “Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
He concluded: “When it comes to avoiding civilian harm, there is no modern comparison to Israel’s war against Hamas… The sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas. For Israel’s part, it’s taken more care to prevent them than any other army in human history.”
Clearly, Spencer is one of the few with his eyes wide open. What a contrast with President Biden, who shamefully remarked on Friday that Israel’s desperate war to protect its civilians from future massacres was “over the top”.
This might have won him applause among those inclined to believe that the Jews relish killing babies, but at West Point the corridors must have rung loud to the sound of collective slaps as a cascade of sensible heads dropped into hands.
Biden said Netanyahu's response in the Gaza Strip 'has been over the top' - Nathan Howard/Getty Images
And not just at West Point. Every country invested in the reality of the region wants Hamas gone. The Gulf Arab states might criticise Israel in public but make no secret of their true feelings in private.
Nor does Egypt, which had its own clashes with Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, during the Arab Spring and has recently added dystopian fortifications to its border with Gaza. It is only the states with no skin in the game that bend to the agitation of the sleepwalkers in the streets.
The problem is profound. Across the Western world, we have forgotten how to respond to the demands of reality. Look at the proposed EU Navy – a notion it is impossible to consider without cringing – which will be deployed to protect Red Sea shipping without carrying out “any kind of attack” against Houthi targets on land, its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.
Look at how the Biden administration reacted when Iranian proxies killed three soldiers on the border of Jordan and Syria last month. American retaliation was announced so far in advance that the targets, when the strikes came, had largely been abandoned. Yes, the leader of Kataib Hezbollah, the group that had carried out the attack, was killed in a drone strike on Wednesday. But does anybody seriously think this will deter Iran?
In 1988, when Reagan responded to the mining of an American ship with an assault on the Iranian navy, it cowed Tehran and precipitated the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. In 2020, when Donald Trump authorised the killing of Tehran’s terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani, meaningful retaliation came there none. The commentariat’s squeals about World War Three rang hollow.
This should have come as no surprise: Washington’s defence budget is more than $850bn (£670bn), dwarfing Tehran’s $9bn. America’s economy is 31 times the size of Iran’s; its airforce comprises 13,000 planes compared to Tehran’s 551; and its naval fleet is four times the size.
That’s without even mentioning America’s nuclear arsenal. But instead of learning from history and firmly enforcing a deterrent – calculated strikes on Iranian forces themselves might have worked – Biden opted for caution. You could hear the Ayatollah chuckling. Slashing at the tentacles of the octopus only emboldens the beast. And tentacles have a nasty habit of growing back.
Biden's cautious retaliation will not have cowed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - SUPREME LEADER OFFICE HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
This inadequate response was emblematic of the Biden administration’s approach to the Shiite theocracy. One of his first decisions after taking office was to attempt to reheat Barack Obama’s nuclear deal.
Led by the 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 towards a bomb.
Meanwhile, Tehran was showered with carrots, including the release of $6bn in exchange for five American hostages. This raised the premium to $1.2bn per hostage, an attractive proposition for any rogue regime.
So behaves an administration in a state of sleep. Which brings me to the two-state solution. Few people, least of all myself, would deny the principle of Palestinian self-determination.
Indeed, Israel has conceded to these demands on several occasions. In 2008, for example, Ehud Olmert offered up 94pc of the West Bank, with 6pc of Israeli land added to make up the difference; sovereignty over East Jerusalem, making it the capital of a Palestinian state; an Israeli withdrawal from the Old City of Jerusalem, which would be under international administration; a tunnel connecting the West Bank and Gaza, ensuring Palestinian territorial contiguity; and Israel accepting a thousand Palestinian refugees annually for five years, with financial compensation provided for the rest.
It is hard to imagine a more generous plan. It was literally everything the Palestinians had demanded. Yet in a grotesque failure of leadership, Mahmoud Abbas turned it down.
In truth, the main obstacle to a two-state solution is the fact that the Palestinian leadership has never truly accepted the presence of Jews in the land. That is why they have turned away more than once from the brink of peace. As Golda Meir famously remarked: “They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.”
Israeli soldiers take positions near the Gaza Strip border - AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg
Terror calls to terror everywhere. When the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee was taken down to the cells at the Old Bailey in 1986, he bellowed the IRA slogan “tiocfaidh ár lá,” meaning “our day will come”. This is the philosophy of the autocratic Palestinian leadership.
The French were forced out of Algeria after 132 years – almost twice as long as the existence of Israel – by a campaign of a thousand cuts. The Jews, including my own family, fled eastern Europe after a string of pogroms. Given precedents such as these, why should the Palestinians make peace when victory will come in time?
From the cradle to the grave, Palestinian society is coursing with indoctrination. The polls may not be entirely reliable, but they show widespread support for Hamas and the October 7 atrocities both in Gaza and on the West Bank.
Schools, including those run by the United Nations, have Israelophobia baked into the syllabus. In Gaza, half the population was born under Hamas rule and came of age steeped in its ideology; on the West Bank, the authorities offer financial rewards to the families of convicted terrorists.
The international community insists that new Palestinian leadership is required, and this is undeniable. But where are these leaders-in-waiting? All those with any support have either blood on their hands or other people’s money in their pockets, or both.
This may not conform to the type of reality the international community would like. It may not conform to neocolonialist visions of the noble savage. But it is the truth of the matter. Unilaterally recognising a Palestinian state, as Lord Cameron has suggested, or “imposing it” upon Israel, as Josep Borrell has proposed, will do nothing to remedy this problem. In fact, emboldening the extremists will only make it worse.
Trumpeting support for the two-state solution, of course, is a way of winning dominance as the most fair-minded person in the room.
But while we may have the liberty to indulge such luxury beliefs, Israelis must worry about the lives of their children. Take the West Bank, the heart of a future Palestinian state. It includes a strategically significant mountain range within easy missile range of the narrowest segment of Israel.
Known as the “Hadera-Gadera rectangle”, this Israeli heartland is just nine miles wide and 60 miles long but home to half of its population and much of its vital infrastructure, including Tel Aviv.
An invasion from 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 Israelis can hardly afford when asked to give up control of the strategically perilous West Bank.
A new state could be demilitarised. But what if its future police force sought to bolster its capabilities with armoured cars, night vision equipment and heavy weaponry? What if the Iranians infiltrated the new country, infesting it with terror cells armed with rockets, suicide bombs, mortars and automatic weapons? Would the international community support an Israeli invasion to neutralise this threat, or would it be hauled before the ICJ?
It takes a special type of sophistication to dull such sharp realities. Does the international community really believe that a new state of Palestine would miraculously become the only democracy among the 22 autocracies of the Arab world? That the Palestinians would leave their corruption and Israelophobia at the door? That such a development would end the cycle of bloodshed? As Bellow concludes: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
This muddy thinking is emblematic of a heavy-lidded West besotted with its own reflection. But in Israel, the enemy is at the gates. On Monday, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said that there was an “overwhelming chance” of a second front opening in the north.
After all, October 7 proved that Israel can no longer turn a blind eye to a genocidal enemy on its border that is building the ability to attack. Further afield, meanwhile, the Iranians are developing their nukes. The dogs of war are snapping at our heavy heels.
More than 240 Israeli hostages were taken into Gaza by Hamas on Oct 7 - Amir Levy/Getty Images
The autobiographies of both Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens contain the same vignette. In 1989, they visited Bellow for dinner in Vermont, passing through the gorgeous tunnel of maple trees that famously led to his house.
The conversation turned to the subject of Israel and became rather heated. Shamefully, Hitchens was a friend and ally of the charlatan anti-Western subversive Edward Saïd; he and Bellow became locked in a bad-tempered argument about a magazine article with the headline Edward Saïd: Professor of Terror, which Hitchens was convinced had been left out on purpose.
Once the British journalist’s “cerebral stampede” had burned itself out, Amis recalls, an uncomfortable silence “slowly elongated itself over the dinner table”.
Eventually, Hitchens offered something of an olive branch, explaining that he had defended his pernicious friend because otherwise he would have “felt bad”. With blunt honesty, Bellow retorted: “How d’you feel now?” In the near future, I fear, the West may find itself facing the same question.
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
