https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/21/israel-is-winning-the-war-while-the-west-retreats/
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.