Israel will triumph, but diaspora Jews will pay the price

I won’t pretend I can see the future. But I believe that the opposite is the case, and that we will soon see that Israel is more secure than it has ever been, while antisemitism against the Jewish diaspora will become the new normal.

Look at how Israel’s enemies are suffering, and ask yourself whether, in his final moments as he sat hunched in a chair in a ruined Gaza apartment, Sinwar understood the utter failure of his strategy.

Hamas undertook the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazi era and brought down on Palestinian civilians the worst violence in their history.

There was a strategy of sorts behind Hamas’s 7 October atrocity. It was a modern version of the old anarchist “propaganda of the deed”: a spectacular assault that was meant to provoke the apathetic masses into revolution.

But propaganda of the deed worked no better for 21st-century Islamists than 19th-century anarchists. Hamas did not push the Arab states into actively opposing Israel, however strongly they deplored the sufferings of civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Nor have their populations – the famed “Arab street” – put their leaders under irresistible pressure to intervene. How can they, when virtually every Arab state is a dictatorship?

Meanwhile, the supposed Axis of Resistance looks like a broken reed. The aftermath of 7 October showed that the Iranian revolution is in its Brezhnevian phase of decline. Its officials are hideously corrupt, the Iranian economy is in ruins, the Islamic regime is infiltrated by Israeli intelligence, and large sections of the population would revolt if they had the chance.

To what must have been the intense disappointment of the Hamas leadership, Iran was able to land no significant blows after October 7, and even Hezbollah did not fight an all-out war against Israel with the full arsenal at its disposal.

By contrast, the Israeli response has been devastating. It has assassinated the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas and reduced Gaza and south Beirut to ruins.

It is obvious now, and frankly always ought to have been obvious, that the global left made a deadly conceptual error in seeing the fight between Israelis and Palestinians as a repeat of the 20th century’s anti-colonial wars that drove Europeans out of their imperial conquests.

They failed to grasp that Israelis are not the equivalent of French settlers in Algeria or British colonialists in Kenya. They cannot be forced to retreat back to France or the UK. They are a settled, prosperous people with a successful economy and a huge military advantage.

Instead of calling for the destruction of Israel, the global left and Islamic regimes ought to have called for a two-state solution and demanded their governments used sanctions to achieve it. The bitter truth for Palestinians is that they encouraged Hamas to go for everything and it has ended up with nothing.

I don’t want to get into arguments whether Israel’s response is “genocide”. The label is now a propaganda term that has been emptied of meaning. But it is undoubtedly true that the tens of thousands of deaths Israel is responsible for and the million and more refugees have normalised hatred of Jews.

Leaving everything else aside, the conflict strikes some people as horribly unfair when Israel has so many military advantages, although few stop to wonder whether Hamas ought to have thought about Israel’s military superiority before starting the war.

Hatred is a hard phenomenon to measure. The Community Security Trust tries its best and it has recorded an unprecedented rise in incidents of anti-Jewish hate in the UK since October 7. More anecdotally, you do not need to spend too much time on social media or overhear too many political arguments to learn that Israelis are now treated by many like white South Africans in the apartheid era – a group beyond redemption, who deserve everything they get.

In this climate, apparently reasonable people can still believe that antisemitism is a regrettable but understandable reaction to Israeli forces killing civilians.

I may be wrong, as I said. But the future looks like bringing us a triumphant Israeli state with the right and far right in control, and no hope on offer to Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, the intense dislike Israel produces will merge with deep racial prejudices and normalise anti-Jewish hatred.

It’s a vile future. But a future Yahya Sinwar and all the vicious, stupid clowns who cheered him on ought to have seen coming.