RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s now clear that, given a free hand, Israel can handle its mortal enemies in the Middle East. It’s their so-called friends in the West and the ‘international community’ that the Israelis have to worry about.

In 2024, Israel has achieved remarkable military successes on every front. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have hammered the genocidal pogromists of Hamas in Gaza, devastated their fellow Islamist terrorists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and shaken their sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots. All of which, as Brendan O’Neill recently argued on spiked, also facilitated the collapse of the brutal Assad dictatorship in Syria.

By the year’s end, nobody could seriously doubt Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that ‘We are winning’. Moreover, anybody who believes in freedom should surely be celebrating the success of the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East as a blow struck for civilisation against barbarism.

Instead, Israel’s traditional Western allies have spent 2024 retreating from its side almost as quickly as Hamas and Hezbollah fled before the IDF. For every military advance Israel has made over the past year, it has seemed to suffer more political setbacks on the international battlefield.

At the end of 2023, Israel was accused of committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza before the International Court of Justice – a perverse claim put forward by South Africa, supported by other states and recently endorsed by Amnesty International.

Worse, as 2024 ends, the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu for allegedly committing crimes against humanity in Gaza – the first leader of a Western-style democracy to be charged with war crimes. Forget all the tyrants on Earth, the prime minister of the world’s only Jewish state must apparently be singled out for punishment. And worse still, several Western states – including, shamefully, the UK Labour government – have declared their willingness to execute the warrant and arrest him.

Meanwhile, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has proposed that the United Nations suspend Israel’s membership, effectively declaring it a non-state, to be wiped off the international map (from the river to the sea?). The UN has come close to casting out Israel anyway, with huge anti-Israel majorities in each vote in the general assembly, and every UN Security Council member except the US recently backing the call for an ‘immediate, unconditional and permanent’ ceasefire in Gaza. That amounted to a near-unanimous demand for Israel to surrender to its enemies.

Every act of betrayal of Israel has been accompanied by the constant barrage of international media coverage that works on the principle of blame Israel first, and ask questions later. In this Gaza-through-the-looking-glass version of events, Israel’s just war against the genocidal death cult responsible for the 7 October pogrom is somehow twisted into an act of genocide.

In reality, the IDF has gone to greater lengths than any army in history to reduce civilian casualties, while making clear that Hamas is responsible for every death. Yet many in the West are too blinded by anti-Israeli hatred to see the truth. As a top US military strategist asked in Newsweek in March: ‘Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare. Why will no one admit it?’ The only answer appears to be – because it’s Israel that has set that remarkably humane standard of warfare.

The double standards by which the world judges Israel were starkly displayed after the fall of the Assad regime. Faced with dangerous uncertainty, Israel sent troops into a previously demilitarised zone to secure its border with Syria, and launched air strikes to prevent chemical weapons falling into the hands of Islamists. The United Nations and states including France immediately condemned these reasonable defensive actions for allegedly breaking international law. Yet when the Turkish government launched a fresh offensive against the Kurdish minority within Syria, there was not a word of condemnation from the ‘international community’.

The desertion of Israel is a travesty not only for Israelis and Jews worldwide forced to face a wave of anti-Semitism alone, but for the West itself, too. The Israelis are fighting for the principles on which our civilised societies were built: democracy, national sovereignty and freedom. We should be supporting them as the front line in the global war against barbarism and slavery.

Yet the globalist elites of Western society have abandoned those foundational principles, and they now fear and loathe the Israelis who dare to stand up for them. That is why since 7 October, we have seen the consolidation of an unholy anti-Israeli alliance in the West, between Jew-hating Islamists and self-loathing left-liberals. Through 2024, everything that is rotten in our societies has continued to congeal around the banners of the anti-Israel crusade.

To its eternal credit, Israel continues to ignore the Western naysayers and fight its corner. Yet as the old order in the Middle East falls apart, with the Western powers losing their grip on events, the future remains uncertain.

It is time, as Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told the hostile UN a few months ago, to make a choice: will we bequeath future generations the ‘blessing’ of a Middle East shaped by Israel and its pro-democracy allies, or the ‘curse’ of a region dominated by Islamists, with all the implications of that worldwide?

In 2024, the West made the wrong choices. In 2025, there is still time to put that right and get behind the Israelis who are fighting for us all.

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.