There are two burning questions about the war in Gaza and its consequences. The first is why it has taken the Israelis until now to assault directly what they’ve known all along to be the centre of Hamas terrorist operations, and the second is the extent to which the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations and violence throughout most of the Western world is a complaint, however orchestrated and unspontaneous, against Israeli conduct in Gaza, and the extent to which it is a profound vein of anti-Semitism, unsuspected and inexplicable, in much of the world.
On the first point, the Israeli explanation for why it fights on in Gaza is essentially unanswerable: Israel was subjected to a barbarous act of war on October 7, 2023 and has acted entirely within its rights to respond as nations normally do to acts of war, by enacting General Douglas MacArthur’s famous aphorism that “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” That being the case why did Israel not follow the other half of that same aphorism of MacArthur’s: ”Once war has been forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring that war to the swiftest possible victorious conclusion at the minimum possible cost in (Israeli in this case) and allied lives?”
Such a policy would have required the earliest possible attack on the most dense complex of Hamas tunnels and installations, in Gaza City. Given the morally commendable Israeli tendency to trade inordinately large numbers of terrorist prisoners to secure the liberty of captured Israelis, it is understandable that Hamas thought that the hostages that it retained could be used as the ultimate free pass out of hostilities while preserving their organisation, however sheared and diminished in combat, as a going concern in the governance of Gaza, while retaining their authority over the population by their harsh and stingy control of the distribution of food, with the collusion of their minions in the United Nations.
If Israel had struck immediately at Gaza City, while the world was cheering it on, and made it clear that this time they would not be held to ransom for the hostages but would mete out to the hostage-takers a steadily more unpleasant fate depending on their treatment of their hostages, international receptivity would have been greater than it has been. Instead, for no apparent reason, the Israeli government imagined that its overwhelming victory to date in killing more than 80 per cent of the trained Hamas trigger-pullers, they could induce Hamas leadership to disarm, concede victory, and give up the government as if the Hamas leadership had the slightest concern for the wishes or welfare of the authentically civilian population of Gaza, a proposition that is completely untenable on examining the Hamas record of government.
The efficacy of a final assault on Gaza City with a view to destroying the entire tunnel complex and killing or capturing all of the leadership that has not taken refuge in a five-star hotel in Qatar is illustrated by the sudden softening of Hamas’ terms for a durable cease-fire as this long-delayed Israeli attack has been prepared. Israeli proposals that were previously unacceptable have suddenly become acceptable. The colossal and demented egotism of the Hamas leaders becomes more vivid in these circumstances: Up to now, or perhaps even still, they imagined they could reassert their ironclad tyranny on that benighted and overcrowded enclave and carry on as if nothing significant changed after the massive affront to all of civilisation that they perpetrated in October 2023. Eventually, there will presumably be an inquiry into the mysteries of Israel’s being taken by surprise when this war began and of elements of its conduct of the war, but at least those who wish Israel to win and to eliminate Hamas and create a possibility for peace between the Arabs and the Jews in the region can refer to the now imminent Israeli seizure of the Hamas jugular in the famous words of Schiller: ”Late you come, but still you come.”
That leaves the second question of this extraordinary and widespread outburst of implicit enthusiasm for Hamas presenting itself as righteous disapproval of Israel. It is almost inconceivable that anyone, whatever their ethnic or sectarian affiliations, would excuse or minimise the gratuitously brutal murder of women and children and the elderly, in particular, in the Hamas invasion of Israel in October 2023, which we now know was expected to spark a general Arab uprising throughout Israel. We must be dealing with a combination of Muslim immigrants abusing the hospitality of the Western countries where they now live and gullible sophomores responding to the collective academic self-loathing that afflicts Western academia. Although it is impossible to be overly confident about this, my own impression is that the demise of international communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union deprived the West of any fear of a foreign adversary, and that has not been remotely replaced by the very distant and mainly commercial rivalry of China. In the absence for a time of such a threat, suspicious self-examination has occurred and torqued itself up to an absurd state of Western self-recrimination.
Thus, the Americans are dealing with a new wave of grievances from their African-descended population, rather than congratulating themselves on having made a greater and more successful effort than any civilisation in history to raise up a formerly forcibly servile minority to absolute equality with their former owners. We have the Canadians po-facedly advising the United Nations that they attempted genocide on the indigenous people of Canada (utter nonsense – a complete fiction). And we have guilt of colonialism and exploitation of the working classes staging a permanent work-to-rule operation in much of Europe.
In these circumstances, there is temporary weakness to tumble backwards into a primitive and revolting anti-Semitism. It won’t last. Hamas is finished and Israel is a natural ally of the Arab powers against the blunted encroachments of their ancient Iranian foes and even the posturing of the Turks. Israel will uproot what’s left of Gaza in the next month and this nostalgic total immersion reacquaintance with anti-Semitism will fade away.
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