There were many lessons learned from October 7 but the lessons of October 8 sometimes feel more pertinent. What that day taught us derives from the fact that protests against Israel began the day after the pogroms, before Israel had done anything other than succumb to a massacre.
Embedded within the sea of flags flowing through Londion last Saturday, as the grim anniversary approached, were signs that openly wished death upon the Jews and voiced support for the jihadis that would fulfil that vision. After the past year, that surprised exactly nobody.
There was the large banner saying, “we don’t want no two state, we want 1948” (the first time the Arabs rejected the offer of a state in favour of attempted genocide). There was the hand-drawn sign saying, “I heart Hezbollah”. There was the faux-heroic silhouette of the late Lebanese murderer Hassan Nasrallah, one of the most vicious terrorists of recent times, accompanied by the slogan, “we will not abandon Palestine”.
When Hezbollah members salute, they use the Sieg Heil. Does this not tell us everything we need to know? The moderates who attended the marches would benefit from contemplating this internet meme: “if you are in a rally and there is a Nazi flag and the person holding the flag is not getting kicked out, well, you are in a Nazi rally.”
Of all the dark things came crawling from under their rocks on October 8, the darkest by far has been the ghost of Hitler. That’s not to say that modern jihadis and the fanatics of the Third Reich are identical. But their antisemitism is related, both in heritage and in substance. And it can regularly be found on the streets of London.
The father of modern political Islam, Amin al-Husseini, worked with Hitler in an attempt to bring the Final Solution to Palestine. From Husseini’s blended Islamist-Nazi doctrine stemmed the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Islamic State and Hamas. The fact that Islamists of today valorise the Führer – one former journalist, for instance, recently tweeted, “rise, Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned” – is evidence enough that the DNA lives on.
In an expression of startling conceptual gymnastics, it is not uncommon to find Arabic voices saying that had the Nazi extermination programme existed, they would have supported it. For instance, an editorial in the Egyptian state newspaper Al Akhbar stated: “French studies have proven that [the Holocaust] is no more than a fabrication. I complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, ‘if only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief without their evil and sin’.”
When people defend Israel by reaching for the Second World War, they are accused of trying to short-circuit the argument. Don’t you dare compare Israel’s struggle against Hamas with Britain’s fight against the Nazis, they say. Don’t you dare mention how the RAF firebombed Dresden. But they only say this because they’ve been rumbled.
Remember that Mitchell and Webb sketch when they played SS officers asking “are we the baddies?”. Well, forgive me if I state the obvious: the jihadis are the baddies. That means that the Israelis are the goodies. Simplistic perhaps, but sometimes there is truth in simplicity. Yes, Palestinian civilians have been killed and every single one was a tragedy; but far fewer lost their lives than in the collateral damage of Britain and America’s wars, and in a far more justified conflict.
In sending their sons to the front lines, the parents of Israel are making a great sacrifice. They are doing it so that we don’t have to. This is so obvious that the necessity of its repetition tells us much about those who still have their fingers in their ears. Here is the reality to which they are deaf: Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are part of a wider axis led by China and Russia that is working on multiple fronts for the subversion of democracy everywhere. Surely this can’t be true, people say? Surely the woes of the Middle East, which are all Israel’s fault, won’t ever arrive on our doorstep?
They already have. Look again across central London on Saturday. See the placards, the flags, the slogans. In a sane society, these crowds would be standing in sombre vigil for the victims. Instead, they were agitating for the perpetrators. Do you really think these people are aligned with the principles of democracy and oppose Israel purely on the grounds of international law?
Look at their silence when it comes to the massacres and oppression in Syria, Yemen and China. Look at their banners, their slogans, their attitudes. Where is the respect for Britain? Where is the respect for liberalism? Where is their affection for the West? They hate the Jewish state simply as the most vulnerable expression of our freedoms.
The Gaza marches have menaced the statue of Winston Churchill. That should also tell you something. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described parliamentary democracy as “one of the most serious signs of decay in mankind”, arguing that it was not “individual freedom which is a sign of a higher level of culture but the restriction of individual freedom”. Only the wilfully blind could fail to see the parallels with the jihadis and autocrats of today.
In her new book, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World, Anne Applebaum underlines that the anti-democratic forces that threaten the free world – Russia, China, Iran and their allies – have a common enemy.
“That enemy is us,” she writes. “Their opposition has its roots in the very nature of the democratic political system, in words like ‘accountability’ and ‘democracy’. They hear that language coming from the democratic world, they hear the same language coming from their own dissidents, and they seek to destroy them both.” Although the denizens of the Gaza rallies in London may not knowingly make common cause with Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, the new radicalism that animates them subverts the same enemy. That is to say, us.
Here's the con: the new anti-democratic radicalism flies beneath the radar of public decency by aping it. Or to put it another way, the activists on the streets of London shriek about human rights and international law while supporting those who oppose them. So much for the hard-core. But the fact that the moderates by their side lack the instinct to see through this charade tells us something about them, too. Malice? Perhaps not. What then? To find the answer, let us turn to Churchill, who in The Gathering Storm railed against the soft western pacifism of his times that allowed the enemy to grow strong in plain sight.
“These constituted a picture of British fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt,” he wrote, “and, though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries which, even so far as they have unfolded, are already beyond comparison in human experience.”
So we find ourselves returning to the Nazis. In the United States, Jews account for just 2 per cent of the population but 67 per cent of all religiously-motivated hate crimes. It is a similar story in Britain, where antisemitic incidents have tripled in the last 12 months, and throughout the West. So much for “never again”.
If we had learned from our history, we would have long ago recognised the signs of a growing corrosion and acted firmly against it. But these days, history, if it remembered at all, runs on the loom of ideology. Nobody cares what really happened. They care about their political posturing. The end-point can be seen when people seriously argue, as they have done recently, that Churchill was the problem, not Hitler, just as they argue that Israel is the problem, not jihadism.
The West’s solidarity with the Jewish state is only as strong as its grasp on its history, its national heroes, its sense of decency and social unity, its willingness to face down a threat and its alertness to its own strategic interests overseas. Mainstream society’s solidarity with Israel, in other words, is of a piece with its understanding that the IDF is defending its own people and values.
On the anniversary of October 8, remember this: lose solidarity with Israel and you lose yourselves.
