RUTHFULLY YOURS

You’re more likely to see a protest against Hamas in Gaza than in London. For brave, spirited agitation against this army of anti-Semites that murders Israelis and oppresses Palestinians, forget Britain’s activist class – they’re too busy frothing about the ‘evil’ Jewish State morning, noon and night. Look instead to the bombed-out Gaza Strip itself, where, finally, fury with Hamas is bubbling over.

Hundreds of Gazans took to their rubble-strewn streets to register their disdain for Hamas. Around a hundred gathered in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza, brandishing placards saying ‘Stop War’ and ‘Children in Palestine want to live’. Some chanted ‘Hamas out’ and even ‘Hamas terrorists’. The ‘people are tired’, said one attendee. They’re tired of war, so they want the people who started this war – Hamas – to go.

There were protests in Jabalia, also in the north, and in Khan Younis, one of the big cities in the south. Marchers hollered ‘Down with Hamas’. Others made a simpler cry: ‘We want to eat.’ The valiant dissenters may have numbered in the hundreds, rather than the thousands. But their demand that Hamas stop denying them the two essentials of life – food and freedom – should echo around the world. Let’s hope these are the first stirrings of a larger revolt.

It is extraordinary to me that it seems less risky to protest against Hamas in Gaza than in Britain. Yes, these protesters will likely be chided by their ruthless Islamist rulers. One Gazan said he saw Hamas security forces ‘in civilian clothing’ breaking up a protest. But I reckon you’d get a far speedier roughing-up if you were to hold up a sign saying ‘Hamas terrorists’ on the streets of London.

We actually have proof for this. Iranian-born activist Niyak Ghorbani frequently counter-protests anti-Israel demos in London with his banner saying ‘Hamas Are Terrorist’. Every time, without fail, he is jeered at and shoved by the lefty mob. Last year he was even arrested by the Met, for his own safety apparently. So it isn’t only Gaza’s cops who feel the collars of Hamas-haters: so do ours.

The truth is that if any of those fearless Palestinians were to try their Hamas criticism here in Britain, they would get an earful from our ‘progressives’. They’d be branded ‘Zionist stooges’ and ‘genocide apologists’. They might even get dragged off the streets.

Calling Hamas ‘terrorists’ is blasphemy in left-leaning polite society. Even the BBC refuses to do it. There’s more moral clarity, and infinitely more moral courage, on those protests in Gaza than there is at our national broadcaster.

It is a testament to the moral collapse of the Western left that it is impossible to imagine them ever taking a stand against Hamas. Hamas is a virulently racist movement devoted to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. It is also misogynistic, homophobic and horribly illiberal. It doesn’t only kill Jews – it brutalises Palestinians too, depriving them of the right to vote and the right to speak.

Yet our activist class gets angrier at the sight of people criticising Hamas than it does at Hamas itself. If I were them, I would engage in some serious self-reflection, and ask myself how I ended up more on the side of the monsters who carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust than I did on the side of their victims. Whether their Israeli victims or their Palestinian victims. Perhaps the small but inspiring revolts in Gaza will trigger such soul-searching.

The great service of these protests is to remind the world who is responsible for the calamity in Gaza: Hamas. These dissenters are right to target their cry of ‘Stop War’ at that army of bigots and killers, for it was they who started the war – and it is they who refuse to end it by releasing the remaining Israeli hostages and surrendering to Israel.

When these protesters cry ‘Children in Palestine want to live!’, they give voice to a truth too often overlooked here in the West: namely that it is the stubbornness of Hamas, its elevation of its medieval loathing for Jews above every other consideration, that is prolonging this war. Every death is on Hamas. Every child who perishes in this conflict that Hamas ignited is essentially a sacrifice to Hamas’s own deranged vanity and twisted anti-Semitic crusade.

The revolt in Gaza is a real ‘Free Palestine’ movement. If Western leftists had better moral bearings, they would be fully aligning with it. They would be tirelessly calling for Hamas to submit to Israel, for that is the only way this war ends. Unless these people are more interested in carrying on with their fashionable rage against the Jewish State than they are in saving Palestinian lives? It can’t be that, surely.