If Europeans were in Israel’s place, would they defend themselves?

I don’t trust the overwhelming, unanimous indignation, nor the sea of Palestinian flags unfurled on land, sea, and air at film festivals, in stadiums, cycling tours, schools, parks, parliaments, and on the streets. Something doesn’t add up when I keep reading the same figures (sourced from Hamas), seeing the same images, the same narrative, and the same insistence on hammering the words “genocide” or “famine” as though they were trending topics. And it unsettles me to see how the keffiyeh has become the fashionable muzzle to silence any doubts about a conflict that is everything but a story of pure good versus pure evil.

Hysterical emotion is the perfect excuse to keep the facts from tarnishing a good story of oppression. That way, it’s easy to gloss over the fact that forty-five hostages are still being held, that Israel did not start this war – it was launched in a coordinated attack by three of Iran’s proxies – that Hamas uses Gazans as human shields, and that they don’t even allow them to take shelter in the hundreds of kilometres of tunnels dug beneath hospitals and schools. Or that the supposed neutrality of the UN has long been a bad joke, ever since Israel became a permanent fixture on the agenda of its Human Rights Council and resolutions against the Jewish state turned into the General Assembly’s favourite pastime.

Intimidation is also quite useful for forgetting that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2004, that in two decades no one has received more humanitarian aid than that tiny strip of land – specialised in building tunnels not exactly meant to improve traffic – that Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority continues subsidising terrorism through the sinister pay-for-slay program, that between “the river and the sea” there is no room for two states, and that it’s hard to agree to a truce with someone whose only aim is to wipe you out.

It seems that in Europe, waving a Palestinian flag is enough to ignore that Egypt keeps its border with Gaza firmly shut, that the positions of Saudi Arabia or the Emirates are far more critical than those of Spain or France, or that the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas’s parent organisation) is banned in several Arab countries while their “NGOs” stroll freely through the corridors of the European Parliament.

I also don’t trust the collective fervour that tries to equate a war with genocide, turning a legal term as serious as it is precise into a frivolous slogan. Because genocide is not committed by sending advance warnings via SMS of a military intervention; because Israel remains a tiny drop of ten million Jews in an Arab ocean of 452 million people, some of whom are even members of the Knesset; because the Palestinian population has grown like never before since 1948; and because twenty percent of Israelis are… Arabs. I am deeply suspicious of the zealots shouting “genocide” who don’t write a single tweet when Islamist militias massacre thousands of Christians in the Congo or Nigeria. But above all, it seems to me that calling Israel a genocidal state is an obscene fallacy, because the great difference between Israel and Hamas is that one does not commit genocide because it doesn’t want to, and the other because it cannot. No. Repeating a lie a thousand times does not make it true.

Finally, it bothers me that the herd’s unanimity prevents millions of Europeans from asking themselves the following question: If they were in Israel’s place, would they also defend themselves tooth and nail against an enemy bent on erasing them from the map? At this point, I am overcome with dismay, because I fear the answer is… no. After decades of peace and prosperity, it seems that Europe has lost its survival instinct and does not dare to name its enemies. Western Europe has spent forty years under the threat of Islamist terrorism, its borders are a sieve through which countless rapists, murderers, and terrorists have passed. It is directly threatened by rampant Islamisation, and yet millions of Europeans accuse Israel of all evils while whitewashing Hamas, one of the arms of the Islamist hydra that dreams of turning the old continent into a caliphate.

This is a war: A terrible, regrettable, and tragic war, with destruction, innocent deaths, hunger, and suffering on both sides. But it is not a one-sided massacre, nor a macabre whim of Israel, and even less a genocide. Faced with this outpouring of outrage, so meticulously orchestrated, and beyond the cynicism of some politicians who use Gaza to cover their national embarrassments, I cannot help but think that, deep down, what truly irritates millions of Europeans is seeing a people fight for their survival. Because to exist is to defend oneself, and Western Europe’s number one problem is that it no longer wants to exist.