We are living through a seismic moment in our history and the Jewish people will never be the same again.
On October 7 – that terrible day – few would have imagined that one year later Israel would still be under attack from an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.
Even fewer could have imagined that, far from sympathy and understanding over the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust and the targeting of Jews once more for genocide, the West would turn against Israel as the aggressor and war criminal and subject diaspora Jews to an unprecedented tsunami of antisemitism.
The scale and nature of this response indicate that something totally abnormal has been happening. It’s not just the street mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and every other university student hurling accusations of genocide at the Israelis for trying to defend themselves against genocide. It’s not just the wretched media pumping out the Palestinian-scripted narrative of lies aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel and writing the Jewish people out of its own history in the land. It’s not just the Biden administration and the Starmer government and the UN and international courts and NGOs and the Church of England all singing from the same Hamas hymn sheet.
It’s also that, when Israel bombs Hamas terrorists and their weapons in Gaza, the West tells it to stop because it’s killing “too many civilians”, even though it has produced the lowest ratio in modern history of civilians killed in war.
When Israel carries out an unprecedentedly precise attack by exploding thousands of pagers on the person of Hezbollah fighters so that vanishingly few civilians are harmed, the West accuses it of “indiscriminate killing”. When Hezbollah is left reeling still further after Israel wipes out with one missile the entire senior command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, the USA, France, Britain and other Western countries start piling pressure on the Jewish state to cease fire immediately.
In other words, there’s simply nothing Israel can do to defend itself adequately that will gain the approval of the so-called civilised world. Simply, the West doesn’t want Israel to win. It wants to leave the Jewish state indefinitely twisting in the murderous wind.
For decades, the West said nothing while Hezbollah assembled its 150,000 rockets pointing at Israel from civilian areas of southern Lebanon in flagrant disregard of UN resolution 1701. It said nothing for the past 12 months as Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with missiles every single day. It said nothing for more than 20 years while Hamas fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza to kill Israeli civilians, forcing them to all but live in bomb shelters and their children to suffer enduring trauma.
But when Israel finally defends itself, the West suddenly finds its voice and tells it that it mustn’t do so.
Why is this? Several reasons. There’s the way left-wingers and Islamists unite in an attempt to wipe Israel off the map. There’s the endemic Jew-hatred, whose latest mutation is the wish to eradicate the collective Jew in Israel. There’s the liberal article of faith that all conflicts can be ended through negotiation and compromise, so the notion that sometimes war may be unavoidable to defeat fanatics with non-negotiable agendas is simply never acceptable. And there’s the destruction of the West’s moral compass under the impact of ideologies aimed at destroying its identity, values and culture.
Now we understand how the Holocaust could have happened. It’s not just that there are people who want to exterminate Jews. They can only do so with the active connivance or indifference of the rest of the world.
October 7 presented the West with a clear choice: civilisation or barbarism. It has not chosen to defend civilisation. But as the West disintegrates under the weight of moral bankruptcy and collapse of self-belief, iron has entered the Israeli soul. Israel made a different choice. It said never again would it allow its people to be invaded, slaughtered, raped, beheaded and burned alive. This would be the last war in which it would have to fight for its existence.
The Israelis are deeply traumatised. Their grief and anxiety are off the scale. At the same time, their spirit is unbroken. Yes, many deeply dislike Benjamin Netanyahu and there are large demonstrations aiming to get him out of office. But Israelis are remarkably united in their determination to inflict total defeat upon the enemies who want them gone.
Yet there’s more. The astonishing, heroic commitment of the young conscripts at the front derives from their belief that they aren’t just fighting for their nation and for those who were slaughtered or kidnapped on October 7, but also for all those Jews who came before them and kept the Jewish people alive despite the centuries of such slaughter.
Israel will win this terrible war – whatever the cost – because it knows what it is, loves its Jewish identity and is proud of it. As a result, it is determined to live. The opposite is true of the West that has abandoned it.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist
