Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 34
How Israel – and the World – Changed After 7th October 2023
Israel is embroiled in the greatest crisis in her history. The trauma her citizens have suffered since 7th October 2023 defies the imagination. After a few days (in some cases hours) of sympathy, the international community – with few exceptions – has reverted to type and has either remained indifferent or has turned against her. We've seen a global rise in antisemitism fuelled by biased and distorted media reporting of the hideous war Hamas started and (at the time of writing) refuses to end.
I will not elaborate here the unspeakable horrors of 7th October [1] that struck Israel with a force 13 times (proportionately) that of the 9/11 attacks on the USA. Nor will I try to fathom the psychopathology underpinning the obscene promise by the perpetrators to conduct similar massacres ‘again and again’ [2]. What I suggest is that we should consider, as best we can, the implications of that event, particularly for the people, mainly Israelis and Palestinians, directly involved.
The impact of the massacre and the misery it has caused will take time to assess. It’s hard to glimpse any positive signs through the vale of tears but there are nevertheless a few glimmers of light.
With the exception of the extremist fringes, Israelis are more united than ever. Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, left and right have joined forces in an impressive show of mutual support. After the war, the major recriminations will begin but these are being held in abeyance for now. Remember Netanyahu’s attempted judicial reforms and the vast weekly street demonstrations they provoked? They seem but a distant memory. This divisive issue remains high on the agenda of an unpopular government but a more urgent matter is at hand – the continued viability of the Jewish state.
Looking beyond Israel’s immediate horizon, the Arab countries have not mobilised their forces to defend Hamas nor have they torn up the 2020 Abraham accords. The truth is that most Arab leaders loathe Hamas and are praying for Israel to achieve its elimination. One reason for this is the threat that Islamism poses to their own regimes. A second is an overriding fear of Iran, the most powerful military force in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic’s mischief-making knows no bounds and may yet force a further expansion of the war on the multiple fronts – particularly in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen – where the IRGC holds sway.
The Jewish world has been shaken to the core. Many diaspora Jews had become exasperated with Israel in 2023, especially after an unscrupulous Likud party sought to shore up its power base by allying itself with ultra-nationalist fanatics. Today, many liberal Jews watch with dismay as their progressive friends make common cause with Islamo-fascists who were quick to disseminate antisemitic incitement via compliant mainstream and social media platforms [3]. This perceived betrayal is compelling a growing number of formerly Israel-sceptic Jews to reflect on their ideological allegiances and to seek to reconnect with their national roots. And a number of mainstream Jewish organisations (particularly on the left) that had until recently tolerated ‘antiZionists not antisemites’ in their midst are distancing themselves from hatemongers seeking shelter in ‘the Jewish tent’ [4].
While Jewish support for Israel has remained (with a few exceptions) steadfast or even strengthened, non-Jewish empathy has been patchy. Within hours of news breaking of the massacre, and before the IDF had launched its counter-offensive in Gaza, thousands of activists took to the streets of the world’s cities to demonstrate their support – for the terrorists. Over the ensuing weeks, the scale of these marches grew and became vehicles for jihadist chants calling to ‘globalise the intifada’ and liberate Palestine ‘from the river to the sea.’ While the marchers claimed to be demanding peace, they issued no condemnations of the Hamas massacre, no calls to release the abducted hostages, and no demands on Hamas to cease launching rockets at Israeli civilians. Noisy pro-Palestine, pro-peace activism was revealed as fraudulent, an alibi for those who were firmly on the side of those who would attack and murder Jews. The mask had slipped. This time, most Jews got the message.
We all saw how quickly the window of global sympathy for the victims slammed shut (though to his credit President Biden maintained his support for longer than most). Dara Horn was right – people love dead Jews [5]. Women’s rights groups, always quick to protest every misogynistic micro-aggression, took weeks (if they bothered at all) to condemn the prolonged and sadistic sexual violence to which Israeli women and girls were subjected during the Hamas pogrom. UNICEF [6], ostensibly tasked to promote assistance ‘for every child,’ had little or nothing to say about the butchering of Israeli children or of the years of indoctrination and abuse to which Hamas had subjected Gazan youngsters. International Red Cross officials maintained their dismal historical record towards Jews by shrugging their shoulders in response to the pleas of the hostages’ families. The NGO superpowers of the human rights community, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, appeared more interested in highlighting the ‘context’ to the savagery unleashed by the killers than the plight of their victims.
Israel didn’t start the war and was justified, both morally and legally, in seeking to repel and neutralise the attackers. Yet when the IDF struck back at Hamas targets embedded deep within Gazan civilian areas, the reflex double standard kicked in and the finger-wagging resumed, with the familiar charges of ‘war crimes,’ ‘collective punishment’ and ‘massacres’ hurled at Israeli commanders. Israeli attempts to remind everyone that Hamas had initiated the conflagration fell on deaf ears. Nevertheless, despite the great lengths to which the IDF goes to protect non-combatants [7], often at the expense of her own soldiers’ lives, the suffering of the Gazan people in the 2023-24 war is undeniable.
It is also far from unique. UN officials solemnly intoned that the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza – that they explicitly blamed on Israel rather than Hamas – was unprecedented in scale and severity. Their selective memories had conveniently erased the millions of lives lost in the Balkans, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ukraine as well as the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur. Also forgotten in the rush to judgement of the IDF campaign were the huge casualty tolls that accompanied Western democracies’ recent assaults on Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS. It was a woeful response by the international community that Israelis will not forget.
The UN, it turned out, not only failed to live up to its own lofty principle of impartiality in their obsessive berating of Israel; it was complicit in the slaughter of the innocents of 7th October. Its role in facilitating the empowerment of a plethora of terrorist groups over many decades has now been established beyond dispute. It achieved this extraordinary feat through its relentless one-sided condemnations of Israel in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council and even the World Health Organization. Above all, it fanned the flames of conflict between Arabs and Jews via its Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. It’s never been a secret (even if denied) that the UNRWA school curriculum preaches antisemitic and anti-Israeli violence and hatred.
But the rot runs deeper. Israeli intelligence has long suspected that Hamas could not have constructed the vast network of tunnels running under homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and other civilian structures without the knowledge and cooperation of UNRWA. Those fears were confirmed by powerful new evidence unearthed by the IDF in Gaza. It transpires that the body established as a temporary facility to promote the peaceful rehabilitation of refugees has been doing the opposite for decades – funded to the tune of billions of dollars by US, UK, EU and other taxpayers. Is it conceivable that the donors were unaware of the nature of the monster they were rearing?
Let’s zoom out for a moment to reflect on the century-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Anyone with a brain is now aware that the conventional wisdom, both in Israel and abroad, was wrong. All the usual excuses for the failure of peace-making – land, settlements, refugees, Jerusalem – pale into insignificance next to the root cause, namely the genocidal Arab opposition to Jewish sovereignty. In the dying days of the Mandate, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, who was no phylosemite, grasped the truth when he explained with admirable concision the nature of the problem: the Jews’ determination to establish a state clashed with the Arabs’ determination to stop them [8]. Little has changed in the succeeding 75 years.
Hamas and their supporters have left us in no doubt that the Arab annihilationist ambition remains undimmed and that ‘all means necessary’ continues to be their weaponry of choice to promote it. A visceral hatred of Jews has been drummed into successive generations of Arab children with results that found expression (though not for the first time) on 7th October. This grim process was always there in plain sight but was too depressing (or, in the case of the UN, too embarrassing) for many to contemplate. Today denialism is no longer an option. Once this large-scale brainwashing is publicly exposed and a programme implemented to counter it – the denazification of post-war Germany might serve as a useful model – real peace-building can begin. That will benefit Israelis, Palestinians and the wider region.
So where are we now? The nation of Israel, including the global Jewish community, remains traumatised and the nightmare continues. But Israelis across the political spectrum are convinced that they have no choice other than to defeat and disarm Hamas. At some point over the coming weeks or months, the war will have reached a conclusion at immense cost to both Israelis and Palestinians, for all of which Hamas is culpable. Displaced people on both sides of the border will gradually return to their homes.
When that happens, we can't return to business as usual. The seismic shock of the 7th October attack (and the legions of apologists who rushed, like the UN secretary-general, to explain that ‘it didn’t happen in a vacuum’) will take time to process. It has been a rude but necessary awakening. Jews have (re)learned a valuable lesson: Israel's continued existence and security are more vital than ever, not just for the Jewish and Israeli people but for the Palestinians, the Middle East and humanity.
Although the physical wounds will heal over time, the emotional damage will not. The searing images of that autumn day will be indelibly woven into the fabric of the collective Jewish psyche. As that happens, a new realisation will dawn – that Jews remain a fragile, vulnerable minority despite their political self-determination and formidable army. Both were found wanting in 2023. Israel must restore her defensive deterrence if she is to continue to serve her foundational mission as the ultimate safe haven for all Jews everywhere. The post-Holocaust certainty that Never Again was more than a slogan has evaporated in the light of the discovery that Israel’s neighbours – and many more besides – seem unable or unwilling to shed their most violent antisemitic fantasies. What can the civilised world do to help? Well, it can start by acknowledging that it failed – Israelis, Jews and its own ideals. And that acknowledgement will spawn a realisation. It – we – must act.
With the help of moderate Arab states, we must thwart Iran’s oft-repeated goal of destroying Israel, either directly or through its terrorist proxies. We must ensure that UNRWA is either radically reformed or, better still, scrapped altogether so that it can no longer nourish the aspiration to fulfil the non-existent ‘right of return.’ Above all, we must rid Arab (including Palestinian) society of its intergenerational Jew-hatred that antedates the establishment of Israel by at least a millennium. And in parallel with this focus on the region, we must hold to account those who promote or enable antisemitism in the UN, media, academia, churches, NGOs and elsewhere.
None of this will be easy but neither was the rebirth of Israel in 1948. Jews may lack a contemporary Theodor Herzl but they can draw inspiration from his words: if you will it, it is no dream. Israelis, backed by the Jewish diaspora along with well-wishers of all backgrounds, are more than capable of converting that dream of a secure and self-confident Jewish state into reality in the 21st century just as they did in the 20th.
The bottom line is stark: a rebooting of Zionism is required to render it fit for our dangerous new world. This is non-optional. It must happen to avert Hamas’s publicly expressed vow to repeat the bloodbath of 7th October ‘again and again’ until not a single Israeli - or Jew - remains alive.
1. Quitaz S. ‘I had never witnessed such barbarism before’: Major F and battle of Holit. Fathom, December 2023. https://fathomjournal.org/i-had-never-witnessed-such-barbarism-before-major-f-and-the-battle-of-holit/
2. Hamas official threatens to repeat 7th October. https://youtu.be/BJNccvNJtGk
3. Smiry M on X: https://twitter.com/MuhammadSmiry/status/1736810861740929134/photo/1
4. Greenberg JK. Jewish Voices for Hate. Tablet, 18 December 2023. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/jewish-voices-hate
5. Horn D. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. London, Norton & Co, 2021
6. Shurat Hadin on X: https://x.com/ShuratHaDin/status/1736837774748110886?s=20
7. Kemp R on X: https://x.com/COLRICHARDKEMP/status/1732779663313801339?s=20
8. Schwartz A, Wilf E. The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace. New York, All Points Books, 2020, p.2.
