JUST over three weeks ago, Hamas launched a pogrom in Israel. Not since the Holocaust have as many Jews been slaughtered in one day. For a short period, the response of the West was shock and sorrow. Even those institutions which are apt to indulge in Israel-bashing – whether the mainstream media, the United Nations or the European Union – wrung their collective hands in sympathy. But shockingly and disturbingly, it didn’t take long in some cases to transform into anti-Semitic canards and victim blaming, of Israel as the perpetrator, or even the puppet of a globalist war-engineering conspiracy.
Suddenly it seemed that people were prepared to believe the best of Hamas and only the worst of Israel. Tropes and lies as well as dangerously ‘quick on the draw’ reporting, such as about the bombing of the Gaza hospital, followed. This, and the false accusation that Israel itself engineered the atrocity as an excuse for a war of domination over Gaza, added fuel to this fire. That Israel’s intelligence failure was founded in a massive misjudgment about Hamas’s intentions has proved a far less popular theory.
Over the past two years Hamas has signalled that it was stepping back its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and was focusing instead on the welfare of its citizens. Israel quickly reciprocated by allowing into the country 20,000 Gazans seeking work. But this well-intentioned relaxation of its focus proved its undoing.
In fact nothing had changed in Iran’s long waging of a jihadist war against the Jewish state, or in its ultimate goal of establishing a global caliphate, while its main proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, remained as committed to the destruction of Israel, and the death of every Jew, as their paymaster.
Thanks to Barak Obama’s pernicious Iran Deal, billions of American taxpayers’ money have been sent to the mullahs of Iran, the latest £6billion payment being approved by President Joe Biden only last month. Biden also quietly lifted oil sanctions on Iran, thereby strengthening its regime. Emboldened by this, it needed little excuse to intervene. Meanwhile the EU and Britain, equally naively, sending more ’emboldening’ millions to the Palestinian Territories in the name of ‘foreign aid’ have financed the terrorist effort. If Western taxpayers want to know where their money ends up, they need look no further than the estimated 200,000 rockets that Hezbollah has lined up near the Golan Heights and the 7,114 missiles launched from Gaza, Syria and Lebanon since the war began, to say nothing of at the billionaire lifestyles of the Hamas leadership in Qatar.
So the question of why this attack on Israel, and why now, is not so difficult to fathom. For the mullahs of Tehran, it was perfect timing to instigate a pogrom against Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was distracted by internal politics, and a campaign to bring down his government led by anti-Israel NGOs and the pernicious left. Covid-19 lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations had weakened the country, and a mythical belief in the ‘unbeatable’ Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a ‘strong Israel’ lulled the government into a false sense of security.
Not only was Israel contending with the menace of Hezbollah in the north but also the presence of Islamist groups springing up in the West Bank such as Lions’ Den and Hamas in a new jihadist front partially financed by Iran. IDF troops had been diverted from the south to protect villages in the north vulnerable to attacks by Hezbollah. Hamas’s successful deception belied an uglier truth which is that the terror group has never taken care of its own people, preferring instead to use them as human shields in its relentless jihadist war. The entire zone reportedly has been turned into both a fortress and one giant human shield.
The deadly subterfuge worked well. The Israeli intelligence service underestimated their enemy who took them by surprise just as the Arab countries did at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Many Israelis were in synagogues or relaxing at home on 10/7, which was both the Sabbath and a Jewish religious holiday, and were unprepared for such lethal and depraved attacks.
Israel’s security systems were overwhelmed. More than 2,000 rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas while hundreds of jihadists invaded Israel via land and sea, some using tunnels undetected by Israel’s new defence systems. Humans proved to be as fallible as technology. The Israeli intelligence services receive multiple reports each day on terrorist activities in the Palestinian territories and surrounding countries. They made the fatal mistake of assuming one sent about Hamas activity was yet another drill by the terror group, and ignored it. The IDF was also woefully ignorant of Hamas’s new guerrilla tactics. It still has not found a counter to Hamas’s propaganda war, which it has always been very good at. Israel is terrible at it. Hamas know that the MSM will quote their libels like ‘Israel bombed a hospital’, and how rapidly this will turn the public from an ‘against Hamas’ position (because of the pogrom) into rooting for them because ‘Israel kills children’.
What is harder to fathom is that Israel has been forced into wars with Gaza before over far less devastating attacks than this one, yet none of the lunatic conspiracy theories sprang up as they are doing now. Yet the reality is that the attack by Hamas has proved a great way to destroy the Donald Trump-negotiated Abraham Accords, and fracture the much-needed Arab alliance with Israel.
For whatever perverse reason Biden, from the start, has been against this remarkable breakthrough by Trump. Iran too is very threatened by an impending deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. From this point of view the attack has nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with the signatories who are creating a strategic alliance against a common enemy- Iran.
Yet these facts are obscured by crazy conspiracy theories such as ‘false flag attacks’ and ‘Israel funds Hamas’, parroted by the historically and geo-politically illiterate. Yes, in 2018, Netanyahu made a misguided and somewhat desperate attempt to nullify the jihadist war by letting Qatar send millions to Hamas. The disastrous Oslo Accords, which gave birth to the stillborn Two State Solution, forced Israel into supplying water and electricity to Gaza and making regular payments to the Palestinian Authority. But, as ever, Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.
The freedom movement hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory over the pogrom. Several figures have used the slaughter of Jews to virtue signal on Twitter with inanities like ‘negotiate, don’t escalate’, and by creating a moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies where none exists. They reveal a startling lack of knowledge about the region and the difficulties in ‘negotiating’ with Islamist, genocidal adversaries. Self-appointed ‘experts’ have turned themselves into useful idiots for Hamas by calling for a ‘proportionate response’ from Israel. They appear blissfully ignorant of the Geneva Convention which the Jewish state abides by and Hamas flouts. Perhaps they would like the IDF to behead babies and flout it too?
Bizarrely many seem to think this is the ‘correct’ anti-establishment, anti-globalist stance. They forget that the largest global organisation in the world, the UN, is virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel or that Iran, which is influential at the UN, is the ninth largest funder of the World Health Organization. The conflation of anti-globalism with anti-Semitism on show in recent protests is as illogical as it is alarming.
Ironically it turns themselves into useful idiots for the New World Order and its new best friend China, exporter of lockdown propaganda. In their rush to share anti-Zionist conspiracy theories they seem unaware of the underlying hate intrinsic to the West racist-coloniser logic – the view that allows ‘the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”.’ In this view, Jews are just white Europeans.
The true anti-woke and anti-globalist stance is to stand with the nation of Israel, its right to exist and to defend its borders against those determined to destroy it.
