by Charles Moore who covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.
After the Hamas massacres, the first reaction of decent people has been horror and sympathy. Western leaders, such as Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak, have expressed these feelings well. The sympathy is primarily for the people of Israel but also, by extension, to Jews everywhere.
Even in free countries such as Britain, Jewish citizens are not as safe as they should be. Anti-Semitic rhetoric and threats increase. In some cities, and for many Jewish university students and school pupils, the danger has risen.
And what inspires something close to despair is that the spark for the anger was not really any act by Jews, but the biggest and most revolting attack on Jews since 1945.
Tomorrow, there will be a march in central London, which will purport to want to “stop the war”. I shall be amazed if a single placard honours the victims of the Hamas atrocities of October 7.
Protest will likely focus solely on Israel’s response in Gaza. If you knew nothing about the background – which, if you rely on propaganda from organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), you will not – you would not learn that any Israeli had suffered at all.
We non-Jews should try to imagine what this must feel like for our Jewish fellow-citizens. The Jewish organisation which offers them direct protection is called the Community Security Trust.
The fact that it needs to exist indicates that, for the Jewish community, there is not enough security in Britain.
Not all our country’s institutions are unequivocal. Our King, I am glad to say, combined his expression of sympathy with an express condemnation of Hamas’s terrorism. Our national broadcaster, however, cannot even utter the word. Yesterday, Mishal Husain criticised the Defence Secretary for “singling out the BBC and singling out Hamas”. Interesting how she linked the two.
So our politicians are right to unite in support of British Jews. They should redouble it. Sir Keir Starmer, who has backed Israel strongly and is fighting successfully against Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitic legacy, should now demand that all Muslim organisations must explicitly condemn Hamas.
The MCB wants us to believe that it represents all British Muslims. So far, it has said only that “The targeting of innocent civilians can never be excused or justified”. The H word is not mentioned.
It would help if Sir Keir, whose party has strong influence among Muslims, asked the MCB to agree that Hamas did exactly such targeting, in an atrocious form and on an appalling scale.
But although pity for Israelis and protection for Jews everywhere are vital components of the response to what Hamas has done, they could become an excuse for doing little else. “Yes, yes,” politicians could say, “Of course we must look after the poor Jews,” as if this were an issue all by itself. It is not: the fate of Israel engages the values and the vital interests of the West.
It would not be true to say that all opponents of Israel are opponents of the West. Some are sincere, moderate supporters of what they see as Palestinian rights. But it would be pretty much true to say that all opponents of the West are opponents of Israel.
There are several reasons for this. Israel is a Western-style democracy and has succeeded partly for that reason. Its success is galling to those countries which pursue a different path.
It can also be misleadingly presented as a “colonial” nation, since it consists in part of white people occupying land on which “people of colour” make claims. And of course its Jewishness is an affront to all dictators, because dictatorships detest all independent communities and faiths.
The Hamas massacres were dated to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war in which a surprise Arab attack on Israel created an oil crisis for the West and induced the US and the Soviet Union to rearm the opposing sides. The frenzy of last week’s attacks was fanatical but not undisciplined. Its extreme force and jihadi rhetoric hoped to frighten the same enemy and ignite the same grievances.
The Arabs lost the Yom Kippur war, but also gave the West a nasty fright. Arguably, Hamas has a better chance this time than did its 20th-century predecessors.
In 1973, the then Iranian regime was friendly to the West, and China, as well as being at daggers drawn with the Soviet Union, was out of the picture. Today, Iran is run by the ayatollahs who back Hamas and Hezbollah. Russia, by invading Ukraine, has taken on the entire Western alliance, blaming us for its aggression.
China, working flat out to achieve the status of top nation by 2049 (the centenary of its Communist revolution) is now, in theory at least, locked in “a friendship without limits” with Russia. It carefully avoids condemning Hamas, while saying it is “a friend to both sides in the conflict”. Anyone who includes Hamas as a legitimate part of one side and says he is the friend of both is lying.
In his State of the Union address in 2002, President George W Bush famously identified an “axis of evil”. It was an arresting phrase, but it didn’t fit. The regimes he was talking about – Iran, Iraq and North Korea – were evil all right, but they did not form much of an axis.
There is a de facto axis today, and it is not necessary for these purposes to debate here exactly how evil its component parts may be. All that needs to be understood is that the axis – Russia, China and Iran – shares an overwhelming interest in weakening, indeed supplanting, the West.
Putin’s Russia wants to rebuild its empire. Xi’s China wants to fasten each Belt and construct each Road until it controls the world. Khamenei’s Iran wants to assert itself as the champion of true Islam, defeat the Great Satan (the United States), Little Satan (us) and dominate the Middle East.
So far this century, the axis has watched the West, and licked its lips. It has perceived debt, division, decadence and drift. It has noticed, in matters like our deference towards Black Lives Matter or our determination to impose upon ourselves a net-zero regime that China, Russia and Iran would never dream of attempting, a sort of self-hatred. Where it can, it has therefore tested our resolve.
Luckily for the West, Xi Jinping ruined China’s charm offensive, which had all but bought us off, by showing his totalitarian claws and by giving Covid to the world. Luckily, too, Putin’s miscalculation that President Zelensky’s leadership could be quickly decapitated gave Ukraine time to hit back and woke the West up.
In the Middle East, the change of attitude expressed in the Abraham Accords showed that many Arab nations are ready to tone down the Israel/Palestine dispute and get on with life together.
But the West has not definitively prevailed in these conflicts, and Iran/Hamas may now succeed in murdering Middle East peace.
Our divisions continue. Our attention span is as short as ever. Our deficits are large, our defences are small, our energy supplies are still insecure.
This remains a good time for the axis to make trouble. It may be an even better time next year, what with the winter in Ukraine, the Taiwan elections in January and, above all, the potential – even likely – chaos of the American presidential elections.
As in Ukraine, human sympathy is a fine reason why we should support Israel in its suffering. But so is self-interest. Both those countries are bearing heavy burdens for us.
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