Open season against the Jews The West’s obsessional attack on Israel can only be explained by its assault on its own core values and identity Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/account
All bets are off. Clearly, there’s no limit to the world’s attempt to defame, delegitimise and destroy Israel, signalling through this incitement an implicit but unmistakable indication that it’s now open season on Jews wherever they are.
The chants of “Globalise the intifada” and the Arabic cry threatening to slaughter the Jews just as Mohammed did in Khyber in the seventh century CE no longer merely represent troubling activist behaviour on the West’s pro-Gaza demonstrations. Unbelievably, the so-called civilised world is sending out implicit signals that attacking Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, is morally justified.
This weekend, Britain’s Starmer government is said to be planning to recognise a state of Palestine. This is in advance of a move led by France, and also including Australia and Canada, to recognise Palestine unconditionally, scheduled to take place at a meeting next week of the UN General Assembly in New York City.
There have been signs, though, that French President Emmanuel Macron may be having second thoughts. In an audio recording obtained by i24 News, he is heard saying: “I will not recognise a Palestinian state without the release of the hostages.”
By its own lights, Palestine recognition is utterly ridiculous. A state can’t be wished into being by others who merely want it to exist. “Palestine,” moreover, has no boundaries or any coherent government.
Recognition of this fantasy state is a cynical move whose purpose is to isolate Israel in world opinion and to create a Potemkin international diplomatic structure to put Israel on a course of destruction.
The consequences of recognition by such prominent Western countries are baleful. It upends international law governing the creation of states, as well as the 1993 Oslo Accords requiring a negotiated settlement of the Israel-Arab impasse.
It also supports the Palestinian genocidal agenda twice over. It rewards Hamas and other Palestinian terrorism, which incentivises yet more Islamic rejectionism, violence and war.
Moreover, Palestinian Arabs have never hidden the fact that the purpose of such a state is to provide a launching pad for the extermination of Israel and the murder of Jews. It would put the whole of central Israel within easy range of missiles fired from Ramallah.
Last week, the United Nations adopted a declaration of recognition supported by the United Kingdom, the European Union, Spain and other countries. This called not just for a boycott of Israel and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which would leave Hamas in power to repeat October 7-style massacres again and again, but also the resettlement of generations of Palestinian refugees within Israel itself.
This influx of foreign Arab settlers would wipe out the Jewish state and —given the Palestinians Arabs’ murderous record against non-Muslims — all too likely lead to the killing and expulsion of its Jews.
This “right of return” to another state than their own, which has always been a key demand by Palestinian Arabs, unquestionably exposes the bogus claims made for the “two-state solution”. What’s being proposed is not just recognising an Arab state of Palestine but creating a second Arab state of Palestine instead of Israel.
None of this would worry Spain, whose prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, recently lamented that his country didn’t have the capacity to use nuclear weapons against the Jewish state to stop its war against Hamas. This from a country with a blood-soaked history of persecution, torture and mass murder of Jews.
As anticipated, the United Nations itself has now accused Israel of the worst crime possible in a report produced by a commission set up explicitly to find Israel guilty of heinous crimes and manipulate the evidence to support it. As dictated by the Hamas and Palestinian Authority script, the commission, headed by two vicious Israel-defamers, has accused Israel of genocide.
The report, which can only be described as an insult to the intelligence, achieves this by presenting the characteristics of war itself as genocide. By this definition, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the allies’ defeat of Nazi Germany would be termed genocides as well.
As UN Watch has said of the report: “It selectively misinterprets statements by Israeli leaders, accepts unverified Hamas casualty figures, disregards Hamas’s systematic use of human shields, relies on unverified media reports (such as by Al Jazeera), and assumes that civilian deaths in Gaza are only the result of deliberate targeting by Israel.”
In short, the report shreds the last vestiges of the world body’s claim to be anything other than a front for Hamas and those member states that want to wipe Israel off the map.
Of course, the real purpose of the “genocide” canard is to kill the Jews twice over. By falsely accusing Israel of the crime of which the Palestinians themselves are guilty, those accusing Israel of genocide sanitise the Palestinians’ truly genocidal agenda and thus give them tacit permission to ramp it up still further.
It also puts a target on the back of Jews everywhere. Since those bent on genocide are not just evil but fanatical and beyond reason, the only way to stop them is by killing them. Everyone who accuses Israel of genocide is therefore inciting attacks against Israelis and their supporters.
Only America currently stands between Israel and this unconscionable, obsessional and murderous malice of the world against the Jews. That support, though, is itself vulnerable. In 2028, Trump — Israel’s greatest supporter in the history of the presidency — will have departed the White House.
The Democrats are so deeply in hock to their anti-Israel, anti-Jewish far-left that they will be enemies of both Israel and civilisation for the foreseeable future.
The Republicans, however, are themselves now badly split between conservatives and conspiracy-theorist, antisemitic crazies — a development which has come into sharper focus since the murder earlier this month of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
Whatever the motive for Kirk’s assassin turns out to be, Kirk’s death is a strategic blow to America. Talked of as a future president, he had a unique gift in reaching American youth with a patriotic message of cultural conservatism and Christian renewal. And he was a great supporter of Israel.
Since his murder, however, MAGA’s conspiracy-theorist wing has erupted with a stream of antisemitic claims centered on Kirk’s memory and with deranged fantasies that Kirk was murdered by the Mossad.
The leader of this faction, former Fox News host and current political commentator Tucker Carlson, is claiming to be the true inheritor and guardian of Kirk’s legacy. As such, he is claiming (with no evidence at all) that before his murder, Kirk had turned against Israel. But Tucker himself has platformed innumerable wild and vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish claims.
On his Tablet podcast this week with Israeli commentator Gadi Taub, the American political analyst Mike Doran said Kirk’s murder had set in train a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party—over Israel. It’s also a struggle over Israel for the soul of America.
It is beyond remarkable how so much of the world’s agenda now involves hatred of Israel and the Jews.
There are many reasons for this. The rise of Muslim political power in Britain and Western Europe (and increasingly in the United States) has got politicians dancing to the Islamists’ tune and turning their countries into hotbeds of Islamic supremacism and “Gaza first” policies to destroy Israel.
This agenda finds eager acceptance among liberal universalists, whose hatred of the West and the nation-state has led to embrace of the Palestinian cause and belief that preposterous Palestinian lies are the unvarnished truth.
In other words, as I wrote in my book published earlier this year, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They can Save It, the West’s attack on Israel and the Jews can only be explained by its attack on its own core values and identity.
This has erased conscience, justice and rationality in the West. That’s why it’s behaving in this way towards Israel — the great standard-bearer of conscience, justice and rationality.
As history has shown, every culture that tried to wipe out the Jews has itself been wiped out while the Jewish people have survived. History is once again repeating itself.
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