RUTHFULLY YOURS

As a boy in Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War, future historian Sebastian Haffner devoured daily army bulletins. At just seven years old, he was already a ‘fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior’, meticulously tallying troop strengths. He was confident that the Kaiser’s army would soon triumph.

The bulletins, however, were rose-tinted, designed to bolster morale rather than inform. As the front deteriorated, they increasingly resembled a fantasy league, with regiments holding favourable positions only on paper. When defeat finally came, it shocked the nation. Haffner likened the feeling to ‘someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank’ only to discover ‘a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune’.

Today, this experience is all too familiar. Like Germans deceived by rosy war bulletins, educated people are often blindsided by major events, misled by wishful thinking disguised as analysis. From Brexit to the rise and resurgence of Donald Trump, big events are routinely confounding mainstream predictions. Errors are inevitable when discussing the future, but something is amiss when they consistently tilt in the same direction.

Brexit was dismissed as unlikely to happen because few in the media class wanted it to happen. Similarly, before the recent US presidential election, MP turned commentator Rory Stewart proclaimed that Kamala Harris would ‘win comfortably’. Americans, Stewart supposed, surely wouldn’t vote for Trump again. Yet they did – across demographics and states, in greater numbers than before.

It should raise eyebrows that predictive errors so often reflect the broadly liberal worldview of those making them. This worldview esteems international law over sovereign parliaments and has a narrow view of democracy. When voters defy this orthodoxy, their choices are dismissed as mere ‘populism’. However comforting these assumptions may be, they collapse time and again under the weight of reality.

Most recently, Israel has confounded expectations in its war against Hamas. The IDF has ground Hamas into the rubble of Gaza, killing most of its leaders. It has wreaked sufficient devastation on Hezbollah to produce a ceasefire agreement, albeit a shaky one. Commentators warned solemnly of ‘escalation ladders’ and a ‘wider regional war’, predicting that Iran would not stand idly by as its proxies were degraded. Yet apart from a few token missile strikes, that is precisely what has happened.

Heeding caution in military matters is wise, as Iraq and other misadventures have shown. But an aversion to conflict at all costs grants bad actors free rein. As Israel’s enemies sue for peace – precisely because of Israel’s resolve in pursuing a war many deemed unwinnable – it’s clear that caution has its limits. While a decisive victory has yet to be achieved, Israel certainly appears to be winning. It has demonstrated that the murder of its citizens has dire consequences – a fact it must constantly prove to secure its survival. Israel has also shown that Iran, reportedly leaning on Hezbollah leaders to agree to a ceasefire, has little appetite to risk its neck for its proxies.

Yet many commentators continue to treat ‘de-escalation’ and an immediate ceasefire as the only viable routes to peace, scarcely hiding their disappointment when the realities on the ground suggest otherwise. After Hamas’s military leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed by the IDF in October, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, snarked that ‘to get a ceasefire and a deal you need every side really in it’. He thought this would be harder after the assassination. Yet since Sinwar’s death, Hamas has actually shown more interest in negotiation. Similarly, when Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was eliminated in September, journalists at Israel’s Channel 12, which has also taken a defeatist view of the war, reportedly greeted the news with ‘mournful faces and barely hidden disappointment’.

Contrast this with the elation of ordinary Israelis – and many others around the world – at these momentous victories. Such enthusiasm is well placed. Nasrallah’s policy of showering rockets on northern Israel until the IDF withdrew from Gaza has, for now, been discontinued. This is a tangible win for thousands of Israelis who can now return to their homes in the north.

The war itself enjoys widespread support within Israel. It is, among other things, democracy in action (just not the kind favoured by the media and commentary classes). Yet so many media outlets portray it as little more than a ruse by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cling to power. This narrative conveniently diverts attention from Israel’s strategic gains.

Reflecting on the Second Intifada, which broke out in 2000 and led to over 1,000 Israeli deaths, writer Pascal Bruckner remarked that journalists sympathetic to the Palestinian uprising had taken a more sanguine view of it than the Palestinians themselves. In 2004, Fatah leaders conceded that the ‘militarisation of the Intifada had been a great failure and had left society exhausted and on the brink of civil war’. According to Bruckner, this failure was a ‘disappointment for the militants, but also for the press correspondents, who thus found themselves repudiated’. The journalists, he concluded, had ‘allowed themselves to be blinded by their convictions: these men in the field had seen in reality only the projection of their own fantasies’.

Twenty years later, fantasies and wishful thinking still cloud much of the media’s judgement.

Michael Murphy writes for the Daily Telegraph and other publications. Watch his new documentary, Guardians of Israel, here. You can follow him on X: @michaelmurph_y.