RUTHFULLY YOURS

How does Israel do it? When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) assassinated the head terrorist of Hezbollah two weeks ago, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that ‘We are winning’. And he was right.

A year after the darkness of 7 October, the message from Israel is: let there be light! The IDF has crushed Hamas in Gaza, delivered hammer blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and shaken the terrorists’ sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots.

So how has Israel – a small state of fewer than 10million people, surrounded, as Daniel Ben-Ami analysed on spiked, by genocidal Islamist enemies and isolated on the international stage as never before – had such military success?

No doubt superior military technology, both imported and homemade, has played its part, alongside the sort of intelligence and chutzpah required to blow up personal pagers in terrorists’ pockets.

The most important factor, however, is surely the active commitment of a large part of the Israeli population to the war effort. It is a people’s war, supported by millions who identify with and have a stake in the Jewish State, and view its existential struggle against the Islamists as a fight for their own heritage and future.

Anybody who supports democracy and freedom should be unequivocally on Israel’s side. As the sole democracy in the Middle East, and the sworn enemy of Islamist terrorists, Israel is on the frontline of the global struggle between civilisation and barbarism.

Even more than that, Israel is an example to us all of what can be achieved if you fight for what you believe in and take the people with you. The support of the Israeli demos – the people – means that Israel is not only fighting for democracy. Its war effort is real democracy in action.

This idea might come as a surprise to those who get their news about the Middle East solely from the mainstream media. The only Israelis who ever appear on the TV news here, in between the constant coverage of suffering Palestinians, are those protesting against the Israeli government and demanding an end to the war.

The mainstream-media narrative is basically that this is ‘Bibi’s war’, only kept going by Israel’s unpopular prime minister, ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, as a cynical ploy to save his own political skin, postponing his fall from power and possible imprisonment. They want to reduce Israel’s war to the level of just another sordid government scandal. But that could hardly be further from the truth.

It is certainly true that Netanyahu has many opponents at home. Prior to the Hamas massacres of 7 October, Israeli society was politically deeply divided. In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, Netanyahu was bitterly criticised for leaving Israel open to attack. Those divisions have not gone away, and even Netanyahu has acknowledged that his government will be called to account.

Yet those issues have not undermined the consistently widespread public support for Israel’s counter-attacks against Hamas and Hezbollah. The one thing that most Israelis agree upon, apart from the urgent desire to return all of the hostages taken by Hamas, is the need to defeat Islamist terror. Indeed, in the wake of the recent attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to the indiscriminate shelling of Israeli civilians, Netanyahu and his Likud party have enjoyed a resurgence of support in the opinion polls. Away from party politics, every poll shows strikingly high levels of public support and admiration for the IDF.

Israelis support the war because they appreciate that what’s at stake is the survival of their democratic state. Most are dismissive of the naive talk in the US and Europe of a two-state solution; they know that the Islamists are not really fighting to create a Palestinian state, but to wipe the sovereign Israel off the map – ‘From the river to the sea’ – and to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean.

In one remarkable recent poll by the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs, 68 per cent of Israelis said they supported a direct attack on Iran if its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, continues launching rockets at Israel. More than two-thirds of respondents opposed the notion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after 7 October. And 92 per cent thought the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank – the Western powers’ preferred partner in a future Palestinian state – could not be trusted to prevent a repeat of the 7 October massacres. That is hardly surprising, given that some PA officials openly celebrated the attacks, while the leadership tried to blame Israel for staging the pogrom against its own citizens.

The anti-Israeli crusade in Europe and America has brought together all that is worst within our democracies, from the Western elites’ self-loathing to the merger of old-fashioned Islamic anti-Semitism with the new version of that prejudice spread by woke identity politics. Deserting Israel now means abandoning our own society’s democratic values, and siding with barbarism against civilisation.

By contrast, Israel at war is democracy in action, a beacon for us all. The people of Israel had to fight to establish the Jewish state in 1948 and have been fighting to defend it ever since. As citizens with an historic, hard-fought stake in their society, they have risen to the challenge despite their deep divisions. It is the common cause which the Israeli people have made in this war that has given the IDF the will to fight on, with more military success than many experts expected.

The link between popular engagement with a war and military success has been a feature of history, ever since the poor sailors of Ancient Athens, the ‘birthplace of democracy’, defeated the mighty Persian Empire at the naval Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Israelis are showing it once more. Reports suggest that many younger Israelis, of the peace-seeking generation that was dancing at the Nova music festival when Hamas murderers attacked, have since come round to the view that Israel must defeat its mortal enemies to survive.

Behind their empty words of sympathy for the 7 October victims, Western rulers’ retreat from fully supporting Israel in its wars against Hamas and Hezbollah reflects the elites’ loss of faith in fighting for national sovereignty and democracy at home. Those of us who want to stand up for our democratic civilisation, warts and all, should stand foursquare with the Israelis. To paraphrase the scriptural words Netanyahu used in his speech at the United Nations two weeks ago: Israel is a blessing, not a curse, in the war to defend Western democracy.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist. The concise and abridged edition of his book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, is published by William Collins.