https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israels-invisible-victims?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The sickening reaction of so much of the western public to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza doesn’t just reveal a frightening degree of bigotry, double standards and moral bankruptcy. It doesn’t just involve a staggering absence of knowledge about the Middle East, the history of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland and the fact that the forces Israel is fighting are also waging a war against the west itself. It also displays a brutalised callousness based on profound ignorance of Israeli society.
The hostility towards Israel’s military action is based on understandable revulsion at the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza whose homes have been flattened by the Israel Defence Forces. Through relentless, disproportionate and often deeply distorted media coverage, this has eclipsed the brief window of sympathy that opened towards Israeli suffering from the depraved Hamas atrocities of October 7 in which more than 1200 Israeli women, men, children and infants were slaughtered, raped, tortured, decapitated and burned alive by Palestinian Arabs.
In the war that has followed to destroy Hamas, Israel has been portrayed as attacker rather than victim. In fact, the toll of Israel’s victims is steadily mounting. Yet to the west, these victims are invisible.
At time of writing, 433 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, with 104 IDF soldiers killed during ground combat in Gaza so far.
This toll is not just a tragedy for the families of the fallen. Every one of these losses is also experienced as a knife to Israel’s heart. For these young men and women are felt to be the sons and daughters of all of us here in Israel.