Israel continues to surge ahead

Three years have gone by since thousands of trained fighters belonging to Jihadist organisations and like-minded “civilians” with a fondness for loot and carnage invaded southern Israel, where they went on a rampage of rape, torture, mutilation and murder and then returned to Gaza taking with them hundreds of hostages, including many women, children and infants.

In many places in the rest of the world, the barbaric onslaught – the worst suffered by the Jewish people since the defeat of Hitler’s Nazis – was greeted with jubilation. Not only Islamists but also many self-styled progressives thought it foreshadowed the final solution to the Zionist problem that for some reason obsessed them. Even before the Israelis responded to the attack, such people staged mass demonstrations in most major Western cities where they joyfully made it clear that they supported the explicitly genocidal terrorists of Hamas in their holy war against the Jewish people: in their original charter, they looked forward gleefully to the day when, as a religious text promised them, pious Muslims would fight the Jews and kill them all.

Before October 7, 2023, it was widely assumed that, with few exceptions, civilised Westerners would find threats to repeat the Nazi Holocaust quite horrifying, but that was not what happened. Instead of recognising that the Israelis had no choice but to hit back really hard against those seeking to murder them, many told themselves that the violence was due to the refusal of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to satisfy all Palestinian demands. This might have made sense were it merely a question of a dispute over territory which could be settled by changing borders here and there, but this has never been the case. As far as the Islamists are concerned, any predominantly Jewish state, no matter how tiny, in what they call Palestine simply cannot be tolerated.

Most Western politicians find this bewildering. They cling to the notion that a “two-state solution” could put an end to the explosive Middle Eastern imbroglio because working one out would be relatively simple and would save them from having to take sides between Israel and the religious fanatics who are determined to put a definitive end to the hated “Zionist entity.” Many are also influenced by geopolitical and economic considerations so, after wrongly coming to the conclusion that the Arabs and Iranians have more to offer than the Jews, they toy with the idea that everything would be better if Israel ceased to exist. What is more, Islamic violence understandably scares them because it could lead to their assassination, as has sporadically happened in the United Kingdom and other countries.

The sadistic massacre that took place just over three years ago taught Israelis that it would be foolish for them to pretend they could make friends with all their neighbours by treating them with kindness. The kibbutzim whose members were savagely slaughtered on that October 7 belonged to pacifist groups that took it for granted that, if they went out of their way to help people in Gaza get proper medical treatment and earn good money, they would manage to bridge the gaps between the two communities.

That proved to be a big mistake. Almost all the individuals they had thought of as their friends turned out to be in league with the Jihadists and supplied them with information they found useful. Not surprisingly, the terrible fate suffered by many “peaceniks” as a result of their sentimental optimism made other Israelis realise that their own survival depended on their country’s military prowess, not on its willingness to make concessions to its mortal enemies who would see them as signs of weakness.

Once that was settled, Israel swung into action, counter-attacking in Gaza, Lebanon and then subjecting the Islamic Republic of Iran to a systematic pounding that deprived it of most of its air defences but did not eliminate entirely the danger posed by its nuclear programme. Though the US government insists that it will go to virtually any lengths to ensure that a regime whose leaders say they would be happy to engage in an apocalyptic war in which they too would die never gets its hand on an atomic bomb, the Israelis suspect that in the last resort it will be up to them.  After all, they must take into account the possibility of the next US government sharing the anti-Semitic feelings of a growing number of young North Americans and Europeans for whom the Nazi Holocaust belongs to ancient history and the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza.

In the West, but not in the Middle East, until quite recently Jews were widely seen as weak victims of Fascist brutality who deserved sympathy and help, but now that Israel has emerged as a regional powerhouse that is far stronger than her Muslim neighbours, attitudes have changed. This is especially true among left-leaning “progressives” in Europe, North America and Australia who value victimhood and disapprove of military fortitude. For this to change, Western countries would have to go through ordeals comparable to the one Israel suffered three years ago, but perhaps in such an eventuality many would simply attribute a massive Jihadist attack to their own wickedness and beg forgiveness instead of fighting back as the Israelis did.

Be that as it may, despite having to confront many utterly ruthless enemies and put up with endless chiding from Western politicians who desperately want to win over the rapidly expanding Muslim communities that are living in their countries, Israel has not only grown in military strength but is also doing very well economically. According to recent figures, per capita GDP is slightly higher than in Canada, the UK, France, Japan and Italy and is close to that of Germany. What is more, Israel is the only developed country in which the birth rate is above what is needed to prevent the population from shrinking. All this suggests that, by and large, her long-term prospects are far brighter than those of almost any other country on Earth, and that she is in a position to provide far more geopolitical benefits to her allies than are those who want to wipe her out.