Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord

For much of the last 664 days, it has been possible to argue that the puritanical mobs who last year camped on 120 university lawns across America, or who continue to march in London every weekend under Palestinian flags, crying Ceasefire Now and Freedom for Palestine, have got their moralistic, left-wing ideals upside down: that it is Israel that is the genuinely left-wing project in the Middle East and the Palestinians who are the racists, the repressive anti-democratic ultra-nationalists whose values ought to shock anyone from a caring background.

That’s all changed. Since Israel’s understandable refusal to work with the United Nations aid agencies, and its installation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, concerns about hunger have been allowed to fester, to the point where starvation and malnutrition, whether as an instrument of military policy by Israel (as the world claims) or an instrument of military policy by Hamas (as Israel claims) is now the theatre in which this war is being fought.

In the last week, first France, then Britain and now Canada have all agreed that, if certain conditions are met or not met, they will recognise Palestine as a state at the United Nations General Assembly in September. Israel’s outraged response has been that the world is rewarding terror. That may once have been the playbook of Israel’s opponents but not now. They have at last learnt that when it comes to international diplomacy, it’s weakness, not strength, that calls the shots.

France, Britain and Canada could never have supported violence on the international stage; but what they can support—and what they are now supporting—is victimhood. That has transformed hatred for Israel into a noble and heroic cause, utterly outflanking objections inside Israel, which can now only be seen as an inhumane pariah.

The big issue is whether America will follow suit. Yesterday’s news, here in the UK, was full of how Trump’s MAGA and evangelical base, which dominates the Republican Party in the USA, has had enough, especially among its younger generation. Those young Republicans supporting Israel in 2019 were said to run at 65%; that’s now down to 50%. Trump is reported as having said to a prominent American Jewish fundraiser, “my people are starting to hate Israel.” If Trump feels that not just the Left but now the Christian Right can no longer tolerate what is seen as Israel’s cruelty or indifference to others, especially following the bombing of the one Catholic Church in Gaza on 17 July, then the game is up. It looks like the next generation of support is heading south and can no longer be counted on.

If America decides to go back on decades of tradition and stops using its veto, it is almost certain that the United Nations will start looking at putting in peacekeeping forces. They’ll want one phalanx on the West Bank, to protect Palestinians from the outrageous behaviour of gangs of renegade settlers, and the UN’s presence there will undoubtedly extend into an occupation of East Jerusalem. Another phalanx will move into Gaza to protect the residents there from further bombing by the IDF.

The UN’s Blue Helmets’ past efforts may not exactly be shrouded in glory for the impact they’ve had in other troublespots: peacekeeping efforts failed to do anything about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, nor to prevent ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica between 1992 and 1995, or in Darfur since 2003, or in the Democratic Republic of Congo for several decades, or in Syria since 2011, but the very fact of their presence on the ground sets the seal on what the world is no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to. It also makes criminal prosecutions for war crimes at the Hague inevitable.

Israel’s incapacity to care how it is seen in the outside world—its insistence on projecting its own petulant self-righteousness—was never going to change anyone’s mind. Talking to a senior staff member in one of the UK‘s most prominent Jewish organisations recently, I was told that there is despair at the country’s shoulder-shrugging attitude to public relations. “They hate us anyway so it doesn’t matter what we do,” is how the Israeli government position was characterised to me. And that is exactly what I complained about in my article last week about David Mencer, and in pieces I have written previously about Eylon Levy and Mark Regev.

My own concerns about the Mencer interview on the BBC’s Today programme with Nick Robinson on 25 July were amplified yesterday in a BBC radio programme which invites public feedback for its broadcasting. A listener from Exeter, in the West Country, complimented Robinson on his “masterly” conduct of the interview and said that, as a consultant psychiatrist, he could not have held back in the way that Robinson did, confronted with a spokesman sent in by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to defend what the listener saw as Israel’s “genocide”.

Another listener, from Gateshead in the North of England, congratulated Robinson on his skilful interview and his perseverance in handling Mencer’s avoidance of the issues he was being asked to reply to.

Most worrying was the opinion of a listener in Paris for whom the corrective to a bad Israeli speaker was not a good Israeli speaker but a good anti-Israel speaker. “When an interviewee interrupts continuously, calls you a liar, refuses to be held accountable, and starts shouting, just deny them the platform. . . . Cut them off and put on an aid worker instead.”

For months, the Netanyahu government has insisted that there is no starvation in Gaza. Having refused to allow the United Nations to deliver the same quantities of aid that were being delivered before the 7 October attack, it has now spun around and said that there is no shortage of aid, and that supply problems are solely the responsibility of Hamas. Meanwhile, there have been no plausible explanations for why hundreds of people have needed to be shot to death at or near aid distribution points.

The challenge is this. For the academic Left, which drives progressive and diplomatic thinking around the world, Israel is the product of an imperialist, expansionist, colonialist, capitalist—add whatever adjective you like—project to benefit prosperous Jews at the expense of indigent Arabs. Once upon a time, it wasn’t difficult to challenge this view as hysterical, one-sided, disproportionate and disgustingly divisive. Once upon a time, also, Israel had a tourist industry and a vested commercial interest in being found attractive. I’m always surprised by non-Jewish friends in London who tell me that years ago, they spent their gap year, before going to university, on a kibbutz—and loved it. That’s unimaginable today.

Now that Israel has what appears to be a Kahanist government, the defence of its leftist credentials is impossible to make. Logic suggests, the argument goes, that Israel was always a racist entity, and has found its true political identity in a government dominated by Bezalel Yoel Smotrich and Itamar Ben‑Gvir. There may be anti-government protests every Saturday night in Tel Aviv, and they may include serving soldiers, but these don’t amount to anything. As far as the outside world can see, there is no substantial opposition to the catastrophe that Israel has brought upon itself by having to be seen, as always, as the Strong Man of the Middle East.

I was almost alone, I think, after 7 October, in hoping that Israel would have the insight to make no military response to the outrage that it had just suffered. For four days a sense of shock and sympathy went round the world unlike anything we have seen in years. It was profound to the point of being sacred—and we dropped it. Seventy thousand deaths later, and with Gaza in ruins, that global alignment with Israel has been lost, perhaps for ever. The UN created Israel, people now say; the UN can uncreate it.

After 7 October, Israeli government ministers made remarks—in understandable anger—that were also incendiary and ill-advised. Those remarks are now part of the rhetoric of anti-Zionism. Hamas’s atrocity had worked in our favour and we didn’t make use of it: the suffering they caused was wholly to our advantage and we didn’t value it or learn from it.

They did. The whole of the Hamas roadmap since then has diverted from terror to victimhood. We failed to exploit the horrors they visited on us; they have totally exploited the horrors we have visited on them. In the world arena, bully-boy tactics make the perpetrator deplorable; what wins is the sympathy vote. The Palestinians and their supporters have played that card with finesse; it looks like they’re going to reap the reward.

Tisha B’Av is coming up, with the message that we need to recognise that we’re in “the depths of the pit”, because it’s only from there that we can cry for help, and ask for relief. Imagining we’re magically endowed with Jewish Power—Otzma Yehudit—and can go on doing what we like is precisely what prevents that.

I hope we fast well and productively.