Faced with the choice between defending herself against Jihadists in the traditional manner and appeasing European politicians who rely on Muslim votes by doing little beyond asking the United Nations to condemn what had happened, Israel reacted to the savage pogrom of 7 October 2023 with an all-out counterattack against those determined to put an end to her existence and that of most of her inhabitants. Until about 20 or 30 years ago, this is what any well-armed European country would have done in similar circumstances, but since then much has changed.
On the military front, Israel has been phenomenally successful. In addition to reducing Hezbollah – which until then was seen as a formidable force – to a leaderless rabble unable to keep Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in power and almost wiping out Hamas, she subjected Iran to a memorable pounding. In the Middle East, where only the strong can prosper and, as Thucydides put it, the weak suffer what they must, Israel is now regarded as a regional superpower you had better treat with due respect. Governments in many neighbouring countries understand this very well. They want to get on good terms with a technologically advanced and militarily lethal nation which, despite living in a hostile neighbourhood and having scant natural resources, has managed to prosper.
Nonetheless, most Western observers tell us that Israel has paid a very heavy price for taking on the Islamists seeking to destroy her not just by having to shoulder the financial costs of the wars she is waging and the lives of many young soldiers, but also by alienating “world opinion.” They say Israel is now far more isolated than she was two years ago, what with the governments of the United Kingdom, France and many other countries punishing her for the war in Gaza by rushing to recognise an as yet unformed Palestinian state and making herself the target of belligerent pro-Hamas demonstrations in almost all significant cities and university campuses which, let us remember, began when the pogrom was still underway.
What is more, throughout the West, anti-Semitism, vigorously promoted by the “red-green” alliance of extreme leftists and Islamists, has become so virulent that many Jews fear they no longer have a future in Europe. For them, Israel, surrounded by millions who want to see them all dead, is the only safe haven they have.
Does Israel’s diplomatic isolation matter that much? Only if you take seriously what goes on in the General Assembly of the United Nations, a body that supposedly represents the “international community” which includes almost 60 Muslim-majority countries whose inhabitants tend to hate Israel and just as many squalid dictatorships. Also “isolated” is the United States, which, as Donald Trump keeps reminding us, wields about as much power as the rest of the world put together. To the disapproval of progressive elites almost everywhere, Trump has come up with a set of proposals that, those behind them hope, could put an end to the war raging in Gaza, where the unfortunate inhabitants are caught between the Israelis and the Hamas terrorists who use them as human shields and prevent them from taking refuge in the vast network of tunnels they have built.
Peace would have come to Gaza long ago if Hamas had returned the hundreds of hostages it seized on October 7 and then decamped to Qatar, where the group’s leaders are holed up in luxury. Though the Israelis knew that many, perhaps most people, in Gaza fully shared the genocidal ambitions of their rulers and cheered wildly when they learned that they had succeeded in raping, mutilating and slaughtering a large number of Jews, they would have left them alone if they had not stood between them and the Jihadists. However, like the Western Allies in World War II, they understood that it would be suicidal for them to distinguish always between enemy combatants and presumably peaceful bystanders.
As is mandatory these days, Trump’s peace plan includes allusions to an eventual Palestinian state with secure borders and all the rest which, it is widely thought, would at long last put an end to the otherwise intractable Middle Eastern problem. Those who think this way take it for granted that political arrangements that are regarded as normal in their own part of the world can be applied everywhere, but this is not the case. For many Muslims, Israel is evil not because her inhabitants are bad but because they, like their seventh-century forebears, do not submit to Islam, an offence against Allah which, according to them, cannot be pardoned.
Hamas and other Jihadists are not fighting for Palestinian statehood, a concept that is foreign to them, but to further the cause of Islam which, they tell themselves, is destined to conquer the entire world. While only a minority of Muslims may believe this is feasible and fewer still are willing to play an active part in the struggle, there are enough of them to cause a great deal of damage. Polls suggest that up to three-quarters want to see Sharia law adopted by the non-Muslim country they are living in and roughly half think that anti-Western terrorism is justifiable.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu often reminds Westerners that Jews are not the only ones on the holy warriors’ hit list and warns them that, if Israel were to fall, they would be next. He is surely right. Had Israel caved in to the combination of barbaric violence and diplomatic pressure she is being subjected to and limited herself to negotiating peacefully a return of the hostages in exchange for thousands of Muslims imprisoned for committing terrorist crimes, militant Islamism would have received an immense boost.
To make the panorama even darker, Hamas would have shown that taking hostages works wonderfully well against societies that are too squeamish to do whatever proves necessary to get at those responsible. This would have encouraged like-minded militants to do the same. As a result, Western countries would have been almost certain to get hit by an even bigger wave of terrorist atrocities than the ones they have already grown accustomed to, which in all likelihood would have brought into power governments willing to take a far sterner approach to the challenge posed by Islamism which, hard as it may be for many to understand, is fast becoming as serious a threat to Europe as it was almost three-and-a-half centuries ago when an Ottoman army lay siege to Vienna.
Comments