Scribd
Upload
31 views5 pages

Israel's Bravery Has Exposed The Lie at The Heart of Starmer's Foreign Policy

Uploaded by

Tobias Schmidt
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
31 views5 pages

Israel's Bravery Has Exposed The Lie at The Heart of Starmer's Foreign Policy

Uploaded by

Tobias Schmidt
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 5

Israel’s bravery has exposed the

lie at the heart of Starmer’s


foreign policy
The battle Jerusalem faces is not just about
defending the Jewish state. It is about upholding
civilisation itself
Allister Heath 18 September 2024 7:36pm

Terrorist funerals the Lebanese way: Hezbollah bury four of their dead WAEL HAMZEH/Shutterstock

Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong,
incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no
longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.

Israel’s brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of


Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group’s
:
walkie-talkies, is a stunning fillip for the forces of civilisation
worldwide.

A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living
in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic
pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against
barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have
required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global
policeman.

The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the
young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat
exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration.

The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing “escalation”,


even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from
gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. All too
predictably, America, seemingly determined to ensure the survival of
every regional terror group, appeared upset at the successful attack
on Hezbollah. David Lammy, our foreign secretary, is delivering
speeches claiming climate change is a worse threat than terrorism; in
a rational world, Lammy would be privately congratulating his Israeli
counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever
conducted against a terrorist organisation, with few civilian
casualties, and pledging Britain’s help.

Instead, Keir Starmer has turned against Israel, banning the sales of
some weapons – a policy that Germany appears intent on following –
and refusing to oppose lawsuits against the Jewish state, in an
unforgivable moral inversion.

Labour has placed Britain on the side of those nihilists masquerading


as human rights lawyers who negate the essential distinction
between victims and aggressors, between rule-bound, democracies
:
desperate to minimise civilian casualties, and bloodthirsty
dictatorships for whom their people are pawns to be sacrificed.

Hezbollah is funded and controlled by the Iranian regime, an


obscurantist, fascistic, millenarian tyranny that persecutes
minorities, women and dissidents. Violating human rights and
plotting war crimes is Hezbollah’s raison d’être: its 150,000 missiles
point towards civilian centres and, like Hamas and Iran itself, it seeks
Israel’s liquidation, guaranteeing the massacre, expulsion or
subjugation of Jews. Hezbollah has forced some 63,473 Israelis to
flee their homes since October 7. This is unsustainable and explains
why a major Israeli response is looming; obscenely, this will trigger
widespread condemnation of the Jewish state.

Western foreign policy is a mishmash of cowardice, delusion and


contradictions. Iran is a threat to the world; its alliance with Russia is
deepening. Turkey, led by the despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has
threatened Israel with invasion, yet remains part of Nato. Qatar,
which puts up senior Hamas terrorists in luxury hotels, is a major
non-Nato ally of the US, home to a crucial Western military base and
a major investor in London. Egypt, a recipient of US aid, has tolerated
myriad tunnels to southern Gaza, refused to let in any Palestinians
and, bizarrely, is not held responsible for supplying Gaza with
provisions, that task falling to Israel. None of the three latter regimes
face sanctions: global ire is reserved for Israel.

One reason Western elites have become so Israelophobic is that,


infected by wokery, they increasingly loathe Europe’s and America’s
history and traditions, and view the Jewish state as a standout
example of a Western model they reject.

Winston Churchill would be convicted for crimes against humanity


today, as would Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman. D-Day
:
would be ruled illegitimate because so many French civilians died
during the Battle of Normandy.

Democracies might as well not bother with nuclear weapons, for


detonating one, even in retaliation for an unprovoked attack, would
be deemed a war crime. I’m in favour of much stricter rules than
those governing World War II, of doing everything possible to protect
civilians, but this is madness.

The Just War is a foundational principle. States have the right to


defend themselves. Every civilian life lost as collateral damage is a
tragedy, but pacifism is a deluded utopia that fails to grasp the reality
of the human condition. It is madness to criminalise all warfare, and
despicable to focus on that conducted by democracies and ignore
that advanced by our enemies.

It is equally stupid to entrust so much power to legal activists. Much


historic anti-Semitism has been ratified by kangaroo courts,
including during the 1930s. The Trial of the Talmud took place in
France in 1240, with rabbis forced to defend religious texts against
trumped-up accusations of blasphemy and obscenity.

Other bigot-fests masquerading as ordinary trials include the


Disputations of Barcelona and Tortosa, the Damascus Affair, the
Dreyfus affair that prompted Emile Zola’s seminal J’accuse, and the
trial of Mendel Beilis in Ukraine in 1913. It is a well-established model
that hasn’t gone out of fashion in far-Left quarters. They no longer
explicitly single out religious beliefs or individuals but leverage
lawfare to delegitimise what just happens to be the only Jewish
state.

The fact that the International Criminal Court and the International
Court of Justice have the trappings of a legitimate legal setting does
not mean they necessarily embody justice. The fact that their rulings
:
are deemed legitimate by Left-wing elites doesn’t automatically
make them such. The fact that today’s blood libels take on the
language of “human rights” doesn’t make them less monstrous. The
fact that it is possible for a country as unjustly governed as South
Africa to lead a genocide case against Israel proves that the entire
system is rotten. The case is backed by Iran, Brazil’s far-Left
president, Ireland and Egypt: we must have been transported into an
alternative, Kafkaesque universe.

Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic


sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-
imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued
relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you
destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order
implodes and the autocracies triumph.

The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and
allow it to finish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating
Hezbollah.
:

You might also like