These are dangerous days for Israel. It faces a two-pronged attack. From one flank come the radical Islamists, from the other Western intellectuals. The former are entrenched in dank tunnels in Gaza City prepping IEDs for their last stand against the Jews they so feverishly loathe. The latter are ensconced in the airless ivory towers of the West, prepping hyperbolic claims bordering on misinfo to the end of delegitimising the Jewish State they so manically oppose. One’s weapon of choice is violence, the other’s propaganda. Their aim, though, is the same: to wound, possibly fatally, the world’s only Jewish nation.
The West-Hamas alliance is undeniable now. Events of the past week have made it clear that however unwitting this unholiest of hook-ups might be, it is nonetheless real. Hamas has scurried to its tunnels in Gaza City, one of its ‘last major strongholds’, where a brigade under the command of Izz al-Din al-Haddad is planning to ‘resist’ the forthcoming IDF assault. Meanwhile, the Israelophobic influencers of the West pump out report after report on how criminal Israel is. The ante has been upped. The terrorists throw grenades, the intellectuals throw shade. They’re in league in all but name, united by a merciless antipathy for the Jewish State.
The most pressing front in Israel’s multi-flank war with its haters is in Gaza City. We should soon see a bloody showdown there between the IDF and Hamas’s surviving battalions. Benjamin Netanyahu says it will be Israel’s ‘Battle of Berlin’. The IDF is mobilising thousands of reservists. They will encounter an army of anti-Semites that has turned from a conventional fighting force into localised guerrilla units planning surprise strikes. Hamas’s threat remains largely subterranean: its Gaza City militants lurk and plot in a ‘highly developed underground’.
The coming battle for Gaza City will give the lie to the claim that Israel is carrying out a genocide. Israel has delayed its ‘Battle of Berlin’ so that civilians can flee Gaza City for safer zones – odd behaviour for a ‘uniquely murderous’ state hell-bent on ‘erasing’ the Palestinian people. The sight of Hamas’s fascistic guerrillas striking at the army of the Jewish nation will confirm this is war. War between the army of a democratic state and the army of an aspiring caliphate. The genocide libel will become unsustainable in the face of what promises to be brutal urban conflict between two parties.
Hamas will be on the back foot in this face-off, having had its ranks devastated by the IDF. But it has something in its favour: the anti-Israel hysteria of the West’s influencers. Over the past week, our elites’ crusade of criminalisation against the Jewish State has reached dizzying new heights. Israel has been found guilty in the kangaroo court of the West’s puffed-up moralists of every war crime imaginable. It has been judged the most savage nation in existence. Such shrill damnation of the Jewish State has one effect and one effect only: to inspire Hamas to continue its ruinous war in Gaza.
‘It’s definitely genocide’, the cry went up last week, following the publication of an exposé by the Guardian and others claiming that 83 per cent of the dead in Gaza are civilians. The figures come from the IDF’s own ‘intelligence database’, we were told. They show that ‘five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces’ have been civilians. This is ‘an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare’, said the Guardian. You have to look to Srebrenica or Rwanda, it said, to see similar levels of wanton destruction of human life.
The truth – as we have come to expect on everything Israel-related – is far more complicated. What the IDF database actually says is that 8,900 – around one in six – of the dead in Gaza are ‘named fighters’ from ‘Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’. There will be many other dead, it says, who are either fighters who could not be identified or fighters from other Islamist groups. Indeed, the purple-prose ‘exposé’ of the IDF’s supposed genocidal ruthlessness undercut its own claims by acknowledging that the number of fighters killed is ‘likely higher’ than 8,900 since the IDF’s database ‘does not include… operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name [or] Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ’.
Right. So it’s not true that only one in six of the dead are militants. That was a reckless and sinister misrepresentation of the facts. It’s even feasible that the number of fighters who could not be identified is higher than the number who could be: war, after all, is a messy business where establishing facts is hard. And yet the post-truth insistence that 83 per cent of the dead are civilians spread like a fire in influencer circles. ‘Barbarians’, they cried. ‘Demons’, even. The small print, the truth, was incinerated in the rush to damn Israel as genocidal.
It seems the butchery of truth is a small price to pay for that most jealously coveted goal of the West’s cultural establishment: to find Israel guilty of genocide. It’s not only numbers they’ll twist – it’s language, too. Recall when the Irish government said the International Court of Justice should broaden its definition of genocide in order that Israel might be put in the dock for its ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza. Can’t find Israel guilty of genocide? No problem, just change the meaning of genocide. Classic Orwellianism. One human-rights expert reminds us dimwits that genocide is ‘a crime that can be committed without a single person dying’. So whether Israel had killed 60,000 people or none, it could still be deemed a genocidal state. This is a species of madness.
Also last week, the IPC – the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification group linked to the UN – ruled there is famine in Gaza. No one doubts there’s huge suffering in Gaza, including deathly hunger. And yet some scepticism is warranted here, too. Israel says the IPC applied a lower ‘famine threshold’ to Gaza than it does for other countries. The IPC report also seems highly politicised: one of its contributors is an expert on international nutrition who has a track record of stinging commentary on Israel, including describing its founding in 1948 as being built on ‘the destruction of the state of Palestine by Jewish insurgents’. Could we not have some neutral analysis for once, please?
The screws are truly being turned on Israel. A sick union of anti-Semitic militants and fashionably Israelophobic Westerners has devoted itself to damning the Jewish nation as the wickedest nation. Nothing better captures the crisis of civilisation than this sinister pincer movement, this double siege of Israel by the neo-fascists on its borders and their gurning useful idiots in the cultural citadels of the West. Israel should win in Gaza City. But that other flank, the one overrun by Westerners so suspicious of our civilisation that they find greater common cause with its enemies – that will be a harder fight. And not just for Israel – for all of us.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
Who funds spiked? You do
We are funded by you. And in this era of cancel culture and advertiser boycotts, we rely on your donations more than ever. Seventy per cent of our revenue comes from our readers’ donations – the vast majority giving just £5 per month. If you make a regular donation – of £5 a month or £50 a year – you can become a and enjoy:
–Ad-free reading
–Exclusive events
–Access to our comments section
It’s the best way to keep spiked going – and growing. Thank you!
