RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New York Times is breathing a sigh of relief. For while Israel has fired a few rockets at Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s massacre of 12 Druze kids in the Golan Heights on Saturday, it has stopped short of launching all-out war on its unfriendly neighbour. For now, says the NYT, we’ve not seen a ‘major escalation’ in Israel-Lebanon hostilities. Yes we have. The slaughter of the Druze youths was a ‘major escalation’. Hezbollah’s firing of a missile that butchered 12 children was surely the very ‘surge in fighting’ that the NYT fears. Or is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates to the apocalyptic violence of the Islamist armies that surround it?

The media chatter in the wake of Saturday’s bloodbath has been incredibly – and depressingly – revealing. Hezbollah’s rocket hit a miniature football pitch in Majdal Shams in northern Israeli territory. That’s a village inhabited by the Arabic-speaking Druze people, who are spread across northern Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The rocket’s 50kg warhead detonated right where youngsters were taking a breather between games of footie. Twelve of them, all aged between 11 and 16, were killed. It was such a devastating explosion that the remains of one of the kids have not yet been found.

Hezbollah denies firing the rocket. Few are taking its denials seriously, aside from the usual Israelophobic hotheads online, who hate the Jewish State with such unhinged intensity that they hang like wide-eyed fanboys on its enemies’ every word. Israel, as Sky News reports, says the missile clearly flew the short distance ‘over the sunburnt hills’ that divide Lebanon from the Golan Heights. US intelligence officials say they have ‘no doubt’ Hezbollah fired the rocket. And yet, still, the media discussion focusses less on the horror of what Hezbollah did than on the horror of what Israel might do in response.

Everyone’s fretting over an ‘escalation’ in hostilities following the Majdal Shams massacre. ‘Diplomats [are] scrambling to prevent a surge in fighting’, says the NYT. Too late. The surge in fighting already happened. It happened on Saturday when Israel lost 12 of its children to the rocket fire of radical Islamists. There are widespread ‘fears of escalation’ after Saturday, says Reuters. That it printed these words next to a photo of a row of small white coffins containing the remains of the kids murdered by Hezbollah is extraordinary. There’s your ‘escalation’, Reuters. It has already occurred.

The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.

Some outlets really do seem more anguished over what Israel might do next than they are over what Hezbollah already did to those Arab kids. Al Jazeera condemns the ‘lethal action’ Israel has taken since Saturday, which includes ‘drone attacks’ in southern Lebanon that killed two people. There are now ‘fears of escalation’, it says, parroting the chattering-class party line. Alex Crawford of Sky News wrote an extraordinary piece on Lebanon’s hope that America will ‘leverage pressure on the Israelis to reign [sic] in their lust for revenge’. Lust for revenge? Is that what we call it now when a state whose children were massacred by a foreign army of extremists chooses to fight back?

When the state is Israel, yes. No other nation whose kids were massacred by the rockets of a hostile army would be told to ‘de-escalate’ its feelings, to curb its ‘lust for revenge’. The UK and the US fought a years-long war against ISIS, in part because of its slaughter of British and American citizens. Yet Israel is expected to ‘rein’ itself in following the killing of its citizens by Islamists. The implication here is pretty sick – that Israel should take it on the chin. Let itself be attacked. Or at least be cool in how it responds to the murder of its people. That Israel is being warned not to do what every other nation would almost certainly do in response to the butchery of their citizens sends a chilling message – that Israeli life is worth less than other life; that where our people are worth fighting for, Israel’s are not; that Druze kids matter less than Western kids.

We see this time and again in the discussion of Israel. Attacks on Israel by Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are seen as bad, sure, but it is Israel’s response that is truly feared, that is fretted over as potentially apocalyptic. Even following Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, in which it slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else had since the Nazis, the woke lost more sleep over Israel’s promise of ‘mighty vengeance’ than they did over Hamas’s fascistic terror. When, earlier this month, Israel attacked Houthi bases in Yemen following a Houthi attack on Tel Aviv that killed a 50-year-old man, the UN droned on about the ‘urgent need to avoid regional escalation’. And now it is Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s barbarism, rather than Hezbollah’s barbarism, that seems to exercise the angst of the righteous of the West.

The truth is that it is Hezbollah that ‘escalated’ tensions – and ruthlessly so. Since the 7 October pogrom, Hezbollah has fired an untold number of missiles at Israel in solidarity with its fellow anti-Semitic Iranian stooges in Hamas. Swathes of northern Israel have been set alight by Hezbollah rockets. An estimated 60,000 Israelis have had to evacuate their homes. And now we’ve had the deadliest Hezbollah assault of the post-October moment. Israel should ‘show restraint’? It has. If it now decides not to, if it now decides that the displacement of tens of thousands of its citizens and the massacre of a dozen of its kids is something that must be forcefully confronted, could we blame it?

The treatment of Israel as the only true escalator of tensions in the Middle East is so telling. It speaks to the double bigotry of Israelophobia, where Israel is viewed as the region’s sole autonomous actor whose every military antic threatens to unleash apocalypse, while the other side is infantilised, reduced to the level of missile-firing overgrown children who cannot truly be held responsible for what they do. Even when what they do is escalation. It is this dual demonisation of the Jewish State and infantilisation of its enemies that gives rise to the skewed discussion we see today. Which leads to a situation where even Israel’s response to the murder of its children is seen as more troubling than the murder of the children. The West’s viewing of the Middle East through identitarian goggles has blinded it to the truth – and to morality.

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 – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy