Phillips:
The anti-Semitic West almost seems to want
Israelis to suffer.
It’s
the moral equivalence which is so devastating. When Egypt this week proposed
its ceasefire in
Gaza, a BBC presenter asked whether both sides would now conclude that there
was no point carrying on with the war. From the start, restraint has been urged
on both sides — as if more than 1,100 rocket attacks on Israel in three weeks
had the same weight as trying to stop this onslaught once and for all.
Israel
has been bombing Gaza solely to stop Hamas and its associates from trying to
kill Israeli citizens. But for many in the West, the driving necessity is not
to stop Hamas but to stop Israel.
Moral
equivalence morphs instantly into moral bankruptcy. People have looked at the
casualty count — around 200 Palestinians killed at the time of writing, while
only a handful of Israelis have been injured or killed — and decided that this
proves Israel is a monstrous aggressor.
No
concern at all for the Israelis who have only a few seconds to rush to a
shelter when the sirens start to wail, car drivers flinging themselves to the
ground at the side of the road. No concern for the elderly or dis-abled
Israelis who can’t get to a shelter, the hospital patients left helpless while
the rockets slam into the ground nearby.
Just
imagine if the Scots, for example, had for years been firing at England volleys
of rockets that were now putting 40-50 million people within range.
Unimaginable? Of course it is. No country would tolerate it. But that’s the
equivalent situation in which tiny Israel has found itself. Yet it is
simultaneously having to fight another war: against a West determined to
demonise it with accusations of deliberate atrocities, lack of restraint or an
attempt to conquer more land.
To
these people, whatever Israel does to defend itself is bad. Killing Gazans is
bad, warning them to flee so they won’t be killed is bad, the Iron Dome missile
defence system is bad because, while Palestinians are being killed, Israelis
are not. Ah yes, that’s the real outrage, isn’t it? Not enough dead Jews. How
dare they defend themselves so effectively!
And so
the West does Hamas’s dirty work for it. Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily.
Its strategy is not just to kill Israelis and demoralise the population, but
also to de-legitimise Israel so that the West, too, will work for its
destruction. Hamas’s rockets have failed in the first two objectives — but the
third is a runaway success.
In its
hundreds of tunnels, Hamas has built an underground infrastructure of
industrialised terror the length of Gaza. As a Fatah spokesman blurted out, it
has situated its arsenal among civilians, underneath schools and hospitals and
mosques, for the infernal purpose of using its population as human shields and
human sacrifices.
It has
urged Gazans to make themselves the target of Israeli air strikes. It has
ordered them to ignore the Israeli warnings to evacuate, which are delivered by
leaflet, phone, text and warning shots.
Doesn’t
the Israel-atrocity brigade ever pause to wonder why Hamas has provided no
air-raid shelters for its people, while Israel has constructed a national
shelter system? Gazan civilians are dying in order to maximise their numbers
killed in the war, so that Hamas can incite against Israel in both the Muslim
world and the West.
And it
openly games the PR system. Hamas social media guidelines instruct Gazans not
to post pictures of missiles launched from “residential areas” and always to
add the term “innocent citizen” to any casualty’s name. So the figures it
issues for civilian as opposed to terrorist casualties, re-circulated by the
UN, are worthless.
Israel
is waging this war in accordance with international law, which states that when
houses are used for military purposes they may become legitimate military
targets. But as Ibrahim Kreisheh, the Palestinian delegate to the UN Human
Rights Council, admitted in a remarkable TV interview, while Israel’s killing
of civilians is considered in law merely a mistake, Hamas is committing war
crimes by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. Indeed, given its use of
Gazan human shields, it is guilty of war crimes twice over.
All
civilian casualties, however, are deeply to be regretted and to be avoided
wherever possible. And so Gaza presents Israel with a hideous dilemma. Either
it inescapably kills a lot of civilians as a by-product of destroying the
infrastructure of mass murder, or it leaves that infrastructure at least partly
in place to spare the civilians. Until now, it has chosen the latter.
It is
also allowing food and fuel into Gaza; its offer of blood supplies was turned
down by the Palestinian Authority. When a Hamas rocket downed a power line
supplying electricity to 70,000 Gazans, workers from the Israel Electric
Company braved Hamas rocket fire to restore power to Gaza — enabling it to fire
more rockets at Israel.
Yet it
is Israel which is said to be “out of control,” guilty of indiscriminate
slaughter and even — as ludicrous as it is obscene — “genocide.”
Those
who demonise Israel in this way should realise just what they are supporting.
Palestinian society, both through Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah (whose
military wing has also been firing rockets from Gaza), brainwashes its children
that glory lies in killing Jews. It routinely pumps out Judeophobic incitement
straight from the Nazi playbook.
A few
days ago, Yahya Rabah, a member of the Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza,
recycled the medieval blood libel when he wrote in Al-Hayat al-Jadida that the Jews offer sacrifices during Passover “made
from the blood of our children.”
Every
western supporter of the Palestinian war against Israel is also tacitly
supporting such anti-Jewish derangement. This psychotic bigotry is the true
driver of that war, as well as the Islamist war against the West. Yet
astoundingly it is never, ever mentioned. The intractable problem of Gaza has
been exacerbated by the meddling incomprehension of a western world that just
doesn’t grasp how Islamist fanatics play by entirely different rules.
The
West insists on moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, as if
the century-old conflict between the Arabs and the Jews were simply a squabble
over the equitable division of land. It is not. It is a war to destroy the
Jewish national homeland by people driven into frenzy by forces immune to
reason.
Israeli
parents are now steeling themselves for the nightmare of their sons in the
Israel Defence Force being deployed in a Gazan land war to stop the rockets.
Some of those boys will be killed. But it will be the Palestinian casualties,
the Hamas war crime, which will be used once again to blame the Jews for their
own destruction.
