Jeremy’s friends: Hamas and its cheerleaders

The Israel-Palestine crisis is following a familiar pattern. When Israel suffers a terrorist attack, it typically gets a grace period, which almost immediately fades with the graphic reports of spiraling deaths from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

This time, Israel’s grace period will last a little longer because of Hamas’s house-to-house butchering of Jews — over 1200 and counting — including the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival and reports of babies being beheaded and burned. Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed on one day, says Israel’s President Hertzog. It may not, however, be long before these atrocities are overtaken by the collateral consequences of Israel’s vow to destroy Hamas and its “capabilities”.

Of course, for the many thousands of Hamas supporters demonstrating around the world, there was no grace period. “Gas the Jews” shouted Palestinian supporters in Sydney. In Britain there was jubilation in cities up and down the country.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Glasgow were told by an impassioned middle aged non-Palestinian: “Resistance is not a crime.”

In Coventry, banners proclaimed “Victory to the resistance.”

In Hackney, London, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was so taken with the T-shirt of a smiling demonstrator that they posted it on their website. “Beautiful resistance” said her T-shirt.

“Victory to the Intifada” they shouted in Newcastle.

In Manchester, the crowd was told that Hamas had “inspired the world.”

To cheers of “Free Free Palestine” two men replaced the Israeli flag atop Sheffield Town Hall with a Palestinian flag. The Israeli flag had been briefly hoisted at the suggestion to local authorities from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to “show solidarity with the innocent people in that country who  faced appalling acts of terror”.

In London a wannabe “fighter”, aping his Hamas heroes with a head mask, smiled when asked how he felt about the murders of Israelis. A keffiyeh-clad teacher said that the dead were not  “innocent” because they were “settlers, colonialists”.

In Brighton, Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters were told “we need to celebrate these acts of resistance” because Hamas’s genocidal rampage was “a success”. Revolutionary violence “initiated by Palestinians” was “not terrorism”, said the speaker who declared herself a Palestinian: “It’s self-defence.” What happened was a “human rights issue”.

It has taken this most bestial chapter of the Israel-Palestine conflict so far to expose beyond any doubt the Orwellian sloganeering of these activists, who have convinced themselves of their commitment to human rights and anti-racism.

One of the UK’s foremost extremism analysts, with the twitter handle “Habibi”, has rightly described these demo organisers as “cheering Nazi-grade atrocities against Jews in support of ‘human rights’”.

These agitators risk being seen as the modern-day brownshirts, whilst seeing themselves as fearless progressives. They have been joined by 46 British Islamist organisations, “scholars and activists”, who have signed a joint statement defending the “Palestinian right to self-defence and resistance”, insisting that Hamas are not terrorists.

These petitioners include registered charities and organisations, all of which prioritise human rights in their advocacy  of various causes concerning Muslims, here and abroad. One example is CAGE, whose research director described ISIS’s chief be-header Jihad John  as a “beautiful young man”. Others include the Khomeinist oxymoronically named  “Islamic Human Rights Commission” (IHRC), the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, UK, (MPAC UK) — whose founder Asghar Bukhari raised money for holocaust denier David Irving— the Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), and a news and comment website called 5 Pillars. Both the latter insist they seek harmony with non-Muslims, but their output suggests the opposite.

The chilling triumphalism of these Palestinian cheerleaders is all about giving Israel a taste of its own medicine, and to hell with the inhumanity of what Hamas has inflicted on defenceless Jews. Yet there is no moral equivalence. Whatever excesses the IDF have committed over the years, nothing compares with the planned, cold blooded, calculated, barehanded butchery carried out by Hamas. Its “resistance fighters” are reported by some soldiers to have beheaded babies, tied up children before shooting them, slaughtered some 260 young music festival goers, bulldozed them into a pile to set light to their bodies, and dragged the elderly and children across the Gaza border as hostages.

Yet in the whataboutery calculus over who has done worse and to whom, there is one crucial element that must be factored in, and that is the intention with which each side acts. When it comes to values, intention is what distinguishes us from Hamas and their sickening apologists. Fact: it has never been the state of Israel’s intention as a strategy to murder civilians in cold blood. Fact: the IDF has an ethical code, even if, like armies everywhere, its soldiers don’t always abide by it. Fact: when it comes to security, Israel’s intention has been solely focused on protecting its citizens, whatever it takes.

The Holocaust casts a long shadow and will do for generations to come. Those who still find difficulty in understanding how the Holocaust entirely vindicates the Zionist enterprise need to tell us where else almost half the world’s Jews should go?  Back to where they came from, is the reply of the latter-day brownshirts, judging by their ritualistic chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.”  Is empathy so absent from Palestinian supporters that cries of “Gas the Jews” and photographs of burnt dead Jews, have no impact on their souls?

This monstrous victory parade of whooping Palestinians and (mainly) their supporters is beneath contempt. There are no words to describe their indifference to the inhumanity of Hamas which has also now revealed itself to be a theocratic genocidal racist movement on the ISIS model. Those of us who for years have dared to say so have been regularly abused.

Their genocidal intentions were no secret. “Enough warming up,” said Fathi Hamad, Gaza’s Hamas interior minister appealing to Palestinians all over the world  in 2019. “You have Jews with you in every place. You should attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them.”

So much for Jeremy Corbyn’s apology in 2009 for Hamas as “an organisation dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people” and his umbrage at Hamas being labelled terrorists as a “big, big historical mistake.” It has taken Corbyn three days to publicly “deplore” the “horrific attacks on civilians in Israel”, after displaying his typical peevishness at reporters for having the audacity to press him for a response. Even then, he seems unable to link his abhorrence to the word “Hamas”, whose butchers he once described as “friends.”

These 46 UK Islamist petitioners have nothing in common with mainstream Britain. So fundamentally divergent are our values, it is hard even to understand why some of them wish to continue to live here.

So, imagine how Israelis must feel about the actual perpetrators who have just committed these unspeakable atrocities on their own kith and kin. It’s not hard to understand why Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, whatever it takes — even if that extends to Hamas carrying out its threat to execute its Israeli and other hostages.

The days and weeks ahead are likely to see an Israeli assault on Gaza as devastating as the Allied bombings of World War II, albeit without the firestorms or indiscriminate carpet bombing that British and American bombers deliberately inflicted on German civilians in 1945 to bring the Nazis to their knees. Nonetheless, very many innocent Palestinian civilians will die and as their death toll mounts, so will the abomination inflicted on their Jewish neighbours retreat into the background. Israel’s extended grace period will be over. This terrible escalation of the Israel Palestine conflict will only get much worse, before it gets worse still.

This is the unutterably bleak reality of this enduring conflict. The current Israeli government has not had a policy toward the Palestinians other than containment and last weekend is how that policy ended. The magnitude of “Israel’s 9/11” must surely mean that Benjamin Netanyahu and his present coalition government are toast, after the newly formed emergency war cabinet have done their job.  

For a decade Netanyahu sought to undermine the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah by de facto co-operation, using sticks and carrots, with the PA’s Hamas rivals in Gaza. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

This was Netanyahu’s way of demonstrating that Israel has no credible partner for peace. His preeminent purpose has been to ensure that whatever compromises Israel might eventually have to make, would not include “The Land”, Judea and Samaria, the territory he has annexed in all but name in the West Bank.

That strategy has now blown up in Netanyahu’s face. And so he has vowed to use Israel’s military might to destroy Hamas: through the red mist of rage, an entirely understandable response to an enemy that acts with diabolical savagery. How else to describe the whooping and triumphalist baying of Hamas “fighters”, who, according to soldiers, mutilated and burned their victims, spitting on the dead bodies of their abducted prey paraded through Gaza’s streets, rejoicing with cries of “God is Great, God is Great.”

And yet, and yet. Israel has not spelled out what exactly “destruction” means: destruction of Hamas’s military? That goal is feasible, albeit one for which Palestinians will pay a terrible price. But where will Gazans live whilst, for all practical purposes, Gaza is levelled? In tents in the Sinai?

Or, does Israel mean the destruction of Hamas as both a military and political movement? That goal is surely impossible. A 2021 poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people”.

And who will run what’s left of Gaza? There will be no appetite for Israeli re-occupation. That leaves the Palestinian Authority, despite its unpopularity with the vast majority of Palestinians, on account of its corruption and dysfunctionality, to say nothing of the fact that the PA’s current President Mahmoud Abbas has said Adolf Hitler ordered the mass murder of Jews because of their “social role” as moneylenders, rather than out of animosity to Jews and Judaism.

Israel and the Palestinians have reached a strategic cul de sac, and for the sake of each other, they will both have to try to find a way out of it. At some point the red mist will have to lift, giving way to ruthless pragmatism. There is simply no viable alternative. Both sides will have to change.  Until now, the PA has refused to lead its people into accepting the reality of living permanently alongside the Jewish state, feeding them instead with a stream of vile antisemitic tropes from its media outlets and spokespeople. This is a truth that too many self-regarding progressives in the West have failed to acknowledge.

The Biden administration, well-meaning though it is, has shamefully disengaged from the conflict.  It now appears to be reengaging. Biden’s message is reassuringly clear: to Israel, kill Hamas — and good morning to Tehran from the Sixth Fleet. Try it on if you dare.

Meanwhile Israelis have to understand that the government they recently elected is a road to nowhere — except instability, gradual impoverishment, increasing isolation, and ultimately – just conceivably – annihilation through self-destruction. Israel is too small to accommodate a religious-secular civil war.

It will be the pragmatists of Right and Left in Israeli politics, not the messianic racists in Netanyahu’s cabinet, who must see this crisis through: the Lapids, the Bennetts, the Gantzs amongst many others. These Israelis have the professionalism, experience, and vision to lead their people away from a nihilistic future.

And when this war is over, Israel must be seen to be giving something seriously tangible to the Palestinians, even if it is not reciprocated. If Israel falters, its allies must step in, for it is on the question of The Land where tough love is needed. And tough though it may be, it will still be love because it will come from Israel’s true friends, who have long admired the survival and resilience of the Jewish people and want the miracle that is Israel to survive and prosper.  A good start would be more freedom of movement for Palestinians and an end to settlement expansion, even the withdrawal of some more recent settlements (it’s now impossible to enforce the return of over 500,000 settlers). These would be authentic and meaningful good faith gestures to revive the lifeless body of two states, still the only solution that has the remotest hope of stabilising such pitiless enmity.

Nothing justifies the barbarism of Hamas last weekend — absolutely nothing; their murderous house-to-house attacks in southern Israel were nakedly antisemitic.  There is nothing more to say on this.

As for the Israelis, the status quo is no longer an option. There will be a choice to be made: between The Land and The People. Many Israelis will say, with some justification, that this was tried in the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and the pogrom of last weekend was the result. It is not that simple.  You can’t keep talking up the principle of sharing the pizza, and expect that to be accepted by your peace partner as a good faith commitment, if simultaneously you keep eating the pizza, no matter how discredited your partner, who isn’t even getting a bite. Life also has to be made easier for Palestinians as they go about their daily business, even if that entails an element of risk. Easy to say, extremely difficult to do, but critical.

In Israel’s distant past, The People were ultimately prioritised over The Land.  And whilst there are historical and legal arguments to be advanced in support of annexation, in the real world these count for nothing, because the Land is so toxically disputed, and always will be. Long gone are the days when territorial disputes can be resolved by reference to religious texts. It’s the one thing that Hamas and Israel’s most messianic settlers have in common. It’s time for wiser, braver heads in Israel — of which there are very many — to deliver a secure Israel back to The People, not enslaved to The Land.

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