RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first three Israeli hostages were freed at the weekend under the terms of the new ceasefire deal struck between Israel and Hamas. Their return is a chilling reminder of the depravity of 7 October 2023, the day those hostages were first taken captive, and when more than a thousand Israelis were massacred and brutalised. In the weeks and months since, not only has this barbarism been largely forgotten in the West – many self-styled progressives have ended up siding with the barbarians.

As broadcaster and Times columnist Melanie Phillips puts it in her new book, The Builder’s Stone, the West failed the moral test of 7 October. Melanie was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What impact did 7 October have on you?

Melanie Phillips: It was a shattering event, because what happened on 7 October was something that very few of us thought would ever happen again. We knew about the hostility in the Arab and Muslim world. As Jews, we live with it all the time, both inside and outside Israel. But we never thought we would see again what can only be described as Nazi-style behaviour.

This was not just murdering Jews or murdering Israelis. This was the seeking out of Jews and Israelis. It was almost like a kind of ritual mutilation. Hamas militants beheaded some of them. They burned some of them alive. They tortured them. They raped them, both men and women. This was bestial and depraved behaviour and a level of sadism that Jews collectively remember from the Holocaust. And while we should not compare anything to the Holocaust, because it was sui generis in both scale and nature, this had very clear parallels and resonances.

The second terrible shock was simply the awfulness of what happened – the murders, the rapes, the beheadings, the burnings alive, the slaughter of children in front of their parents. Then, of course, there was the abduction of the hostages into Gaza. There was the sight of both militants and ordinary – if I can call them that – people exulting over all this and abusing the hostages, whether they were dead or alive.

The next terrible thing that happened was the aftermath. One would have expected, in a civilised world, that the West would have stood with Israel. But it turned on Israel. It represented everything Israel did to defend itself as aggressive, and completely ignored the fact that Israel was going to unprecedented lengths to preserve the lives of civilians. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an absolute tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred swept across Britain and the West.

This had a tremendous effect on me. It brought to a head something that I had long been considering – namely, the decline of the West. When the West turns on itself, what is it turning against? It’s turning against its core, foundational values. Those values were largely embedded by Christianity, but Christianity didn’t come out of nothing. Christianity came from Judaism. If the West wants to stop itself from going off the edge of the cliff, then what it has to do is reconnect itself with those foundational Jewish values.

The West didn’t understand that 7 October wasn’t just a war against Israel. It was a war against civilisation.

O’Neill: What do you think anti-Zionism really is?

Phillips: At its most straightforward, anti-Zionism is an opposition to Jews having the right to self-determination in their ancient homeland. Part of that can be explained by ignorance. Few people realise that Israel is the Jews’ homeland. They don’t realise that what people now call Palestine was, in fact, ancient Israel. Palestine was the name given to the area by the Romans in an attempt to erase its Jewish nature.

There is also something much deeper and much darker behind anti-Zionism. One of the most troubling things, post-7 October, was the business of the Israeli hostages and the attitude of so many people in the West towards them. These hostages included mainly women and small children, but also some men and elderly people. In London and other cities across the West, posters depicting those hostages were posted up in various public places, and we saw that they were torn down. As fast as they were torn down, they were put up. And as fast as they were put up again, they were torn back down.

It was an astonishing thing to see that the faces of the people who were tearing the posters down were very often convulsed with hatred and rage. They were not protesting against Israel. They were tearing down images of innocents who were kidnapped and, in some cases, slaughtered, tortured or lost to a terrible, unknown fate. Why does that fill them with such murderous rage?

What were they tearing down? They weren’t just tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages. They were tearing out the Jews from their heads, from their conscience and from their world. They wanted the Jews gone.

That, to me, is what has been going on in the West in certain circles. I don’t wish to exaggerate it, but we’ve had these massive ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations going on all the time. Nobody, apart from Jews and supporters of Israel, has asked what abomination we are seeing here.

We’re seeing a mass movement against Jews, Judaism and Israel. I say all three of those together because of the nature of these protests – what’s being chanted, the banners, the relentlessness of it, the obsession. We’re seeing something very much darker and deeper. There is no other cause in history where the West has behaved like this.

Those of us of a certain age could think back to the abominations and horrors of Apartheid South Africa. There were campaigns against that, quite rightly. It was a terrible thing that was going on there, and yet there wasn’t this same obsession. People didn’t walk around with the flag of what became Zimbabwe on their sleeves. You didn’t find NHS workers refusing to treat anybody if they’d been on a South African safari.

Why is there an absence of any kind of similar fury about the really terrible things that are going on? What about China and its persecution of the Muslim Uyghurs? What about Syria? What about the slaughter of African Christians by Muslims? Why is there this obsession with Israel and Israel alone? It seems to me that the answer is staring us in the face.

Those of us who understand anti-Semitism know that it is unique. It’s not just prejudice. It’s not just another form of racism. It’s not simply hatred. It is absolutely unique in the extent to which it not only hates Jews, but also wishes to remove them from the human race. It demonises them. It creates the idea that they are a kind of supernaturally diabolical conspiracy against the entire world, in which they serve their own interests at the expense of everybody else.

It’s no coincidence that Jews once again find themselves the focus of such widespread hatred. How else can we possibly explain the irrational obsession of what’s going on now against Israel and the Jewish people?

Melanie Phillips was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: