The Blogs: The common challenge for Israel and free civilization

The legal situation

If we correctly include the period of British Mandate rule, the Middle East conflict has already dragged on for more than a century. During this time, Judaism has had confirmed its legal claim to the restoration of its historical homeland in Palestine seven times. The first confirmation came as part of the peace settlement after World War I through the Mandate Treaty of 1922, which obliges the mandatory power Great Britain to restore the Jewish homeland. The treaty does not provide for the possibility of unilateral termination before it is fulfilled and is therefore still valid today.1) The continuity of this legal status is guaranteed by the preamble to the UN Charter of 1945, which calls for “to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties … can be maintained …”

Meanwhile, the Arab side has unintentionally confirmed this restoration of the historical Jewish legal claim, decided in 1922, six times. The first confirmation came in 1947, when the UN partition plan was rejected by the Arab population of Palestine. The UN plan, this way prevented from being legally effective, could not restrict or even replace the mandate agreement. The Arab strategy of persistently rejecting any territorial compromise solution continues to this day. All substantive negotiations, such as those in Camp David in 2000, have led to nothing. Instead, the five Middle East wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and from October 2023 to January 2025 have confirmed the continued validity of the legal situation established in 1922. This happened when the Palestinian side postponed the legal dispute to the military level five times by attacking and/or threatening Israel’s existence, and lost five times at this level. Thus, nothing remains which could back any Arab territorial claim to Palestine, insofar as it could be considered unclear before the rejection of the 1947 partition plan – except for what a victor grants to a repeatedly defeated party out of goodwill and in the interest of peaceful coexistence.

But this peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs was already sabotaged during the mandate period after World War I. Only superficially was the obstacle Arab resistance, because the real cause behind this was polarizing decisions by the mandate power Great Britain.2) After the founding of the state of Israel, several forces continued the course of “sustainably” torpedoing any permanently stabilizing arrangement in Israel/Palestine, including the UN, thousands of “charitable” organizations, the mainstream media and an inadequately or misinformed political establishment.

The time that has passed has worked against Israel to a threatening extent. This applies both to demographic development and to the atmosphere that is now hostile to Israel and anti-Semitic worldwide. After the First World War, around 650,000 Arab inhabitants of Palestine faced more than 13 million Jews, twenty times the number. Their descendants, who have called themselves Palestinians since 1967, have grown to 14 million and are spread worldwide. They have thus almost caught up with the 15 million Jews today. The demographic overtaking process within a few years is inevitable. Against this background, the aforementioned systematic prevention of a final territorial settlement turns out to be a cheap time-wasting strategy for a combined war on the demographic and propaganda levels.

Identification of true friends and true enemies

A final peace settlement and thus a sustainable safeguarding of Israel’s existence against these perfidious strategies cannot be achieved by military means alone. However, it is not difficult if the boundaries between allies and enemies, which have been artificially, blurred in the media environment, finally become clearly visible and with them the global context of the solution. The Jewish state has already made a big step further in identifying its true enemies and its true friends in the Gaza war.3)

In order to turn this new knowledge into a grandiose victory, however, a broadening of perspective is required. – Parallel to the obstruction of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, which has now lasted for more than 100 years, the entire Judeo-Christian cultural area was also exposed to an obstruction of its development, which is normally programmed for freedom, democracy and integration. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Europe needed nothing more urgently than unification in a union based on the liberal model of the USA. The outstanding promoter of this peace-securing idea was the Frenchman Victor Hugo.

However, circles interested in division and disunity have succeeded, among other things by influencing opinion through the media, in setting the course for self-destructive fratricidal wars and bloody revolutions by promoting nationalism within individual states.

Appeasement as an accelerant of Islamist terrorism

Over the decades after World War II, more and more advocates of a multicultural society gained access to the political arena. Their supposedly cosmopolitan migration policy actually became the disintegrating promotion of parallel Muslim societies in Europe and now also in North America and Australia. This anti-concept ignores the basic prerequisites mentioned above for the harmonious development of a liberal civilization and endangers its stability. In the supposedly progressive, but in fact no way future-proof, appeasement atmosphere of left-woke Western politics, Islam was able to ‘successfully’ resist any sustainable reform and instead harden into a political ideology that threatens personal freedoms and the rule of law.

Like any power that encounters no controlling resistance, Islamism also tends to reinforce itself. Its jihad ideology was able to give rise to terrorism at the level of armed conflict, which has been expanding since the 1960s and 1970s. This mix of war and organized crime is not compatible with the basic rules of humanitarian warfare. Rather, its focus on civilians, the release of accomplices by taking hostages and the transformation of peacetime into permanent war characterize it as a war crime of the particularly serious kind. As it also routinely takes place against Israel from neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Syria, the use of violence is raised to the international level and the sovereignty of these countries is damaged under Article 2 of the UN Charter.

According to the preamble to the UN Charter, the declared aim of the world organization is to “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The banning of criminal and anti-humanitarian types of warfare should have been a priority in this context. Specifically, according to Article 24 paragraph 1, it is the UN Security Council that has the accountability of countering military force with appropriate means and without delay.

However, the UN and the Security Council in particular have failed to show the necessary determination. In this way, emotionally dead MIC militarists were able to delay, weaken and block the international ban on chemical weapons, cluster bombs and mines. At the same time, multicultural dreamers have made an effective fight against terrorism impossible with their appeasement towards Islamism. While Article 24 of the UN Charter requires the Security Council to “ensure prompt and effective action”, its numerous resolutions against terrorism fizzled out in the nirvana of vagueness.

While statistics show that over 90% of terrorism has an Islamist background, politically ideologised Islam is ignored as the origin. This denial appears, for example, in UN Resolution 2178: “The Security Council … Emphasizing that terrorism cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality or civilization, … 1. Condemns the violent extremism, …” – The Security Council … condemns violent extremism, emphasizing that terrorism cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality or civilization.

In 1978, UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, was set up – as a simply stupid or deliberately counterproductive measure.

However, the focus of this force, which was created in the middle of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), was not, as it should have been, on the persecution of Christians by Islamists and on terrorist attacks against Israel, but on hindering the self-defense of the Jewish state. In addition, UNIFIL, with a strength of 6,000 men at the time, was far too weak in terms of personnel to vigorously and immediately enforce (theoretically conceivable) actual peacekeeping decisions of the Security Council.

UNIFIL’s mission has continued to this day, at a correspondingly gigantic cost. The fact that the reinforcement to now 10,500 men was completely inadequate became clear during the Gaza War, when Hezbollah was able to fire around 9,000 rockets from southern Lebanon into Israel during the first 12 months alone. Under the ‘watchful’ eyes of UNIFIL, the terrorists had for many years the opportunity to set up a huge system of tunnels, weapons depots and combat posts for attacks on Israel. Western citizens know almost nothing about this total failure of the peacekeeping force, which costs around 800 million euros every year, even though the limits of absurdity have long since been exceeded.

The propagandistic reversal of good and evil

But when the Israeli Air Force flew missions against Hezbollah positions and announced them in advance to protect enemy civilians, these were “Israeli attacks” in the press headlines. The omission of the causal context and the perfidious choice of words have literally burned into the media audience the morally twisted judgment of Israeli responsibility for the civilian victims in months of repetition. The major news agencies set the direction in this orchestrated propaganda campaign against free civilization, and do so through the choice of words in their headlines. Reuters demonstrated in a report on January 15, 2025 how a twisted view of facts can be conveyed with just a few words, swapping perpetrators and victims for each other: “Gaza death toll: how many Palestinians has Israel’s offensive killed?”4) The recurring pattern consists of omitting the explanatory context and making an unfair assessment through wording that distorts the facts. The correct question should have been: “How many Palestinians have died as a result of Hamas’ irresponsible decision to wage a 5th Middle East war against Israel as a militarily inferior party?”

In historical retrospect, the current wave of propaganda can be seen as the culmination of decades of distortion of Israel’s history and its secure legal position. The mere fact that the outbreak of the Gaza War on October 7, 2023 represents the fourth new edition of the Middle East War, which was actually decided militarily in 1948, indicates massive outside influence. The UN has particularly distinguished itself among the manipulative forces. Its partisan resolutions and actions were never intended to provide a long overdue warning against the warlike and terrorist Arab revanchism that has been going on for almost 77 years – always subtly implying that the Arab side was morally right. The actually legitimate and morally highly justified Israeli measures for its self-defense, on the other hand, were wrongly warned against, always using the same formalistic trick. This perfidious trick, which is used to continually assign non-existent guilt to Israel, consists in the distortion of priorities between two Charter principles – the sovereignty claim of the (Arab) states under Article 2 of the Charter and the (Israeli) right of self-defense under Article 51. In an inflationary manner, Israel was called upon in UN resolutions to respect the territorial sovereignty of its Arab neighbors and to refrain from military operations on their territory. However, these calls were always taken out of context by ignoring the incessant Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, even when they were carried out from the territory of these same countries. – However, effective defense was impossible without touching these foreign territories.

The sovereignty right of Lebanon and Syria under Article 2 of the Charter was in fact violated by the terrorist groups who attacked Israel from there without official authorization and in the middle of peacetime. However, repeated UN resolutions have not condemned these terrorist activities and their unofficial tolerance by the Lebanese government, but Israel’s self-defense measures protected under Article 51. These measures included, among other things, the establishment of a protective strip in southern Lebanon. As a right to survival, self-defense naturally had to take precedence over the sovereignty claims of Arab neighbors in accordance with Article 51, when these were not able or willing to prevent assaults from their areas.

The manipulation of the Middle East conflict by the UN has freed the Arab countries from any responsibility for the results of their revanchist aggression since their attack on the newly founded Israel in May 1948.5) As a result, the supposedly peacemaking world organization has transformed the dispute over Palestine/Israel into a surreal, permanent game of violence that supports terrorist crimes, irresponsibility, falsification of history and media slander and prevents peaceful coexistence.

The destructive interaction of terrorist violence emanating from southern Lebanon and its ‘moral’ backing through media coverage is topped by the corresponding interaction in the Gaza Strip. In the media’s superficial view, the Israeli counter-offensive after October 7, 2023 was retaliation for the massacres of that day. In the course of this distortion of context, the demonstrably manipulated6) Palestinian civilian casualty figures were propagandistically contrasted with the approximately 1,300 Israeli casualties very early on in the war. The accusatory slogan was that Israel had ‘overreacted’. The number of Palestinian civilian casualties cited by the Hamas Ministry of Health (46,600 in the end) even prompted Arab governments and Western media in the last months of the war to defame the Israeli military actions as genocide.

To propagate such a naive, superficial or maliciously slanderous misjudgment is to ‘morally’ justify the Arab revanchism that has continued for 77 years in its five wars to date, the incessant terrorism and the denial of Israel’s right to exist, which violates the “principle of the sovereign equality of all … (UN) Members” according to Article 2/1. The terrorist activities that this reprehensible backing has encouraged also include a growing willingness to deliberately sacrifice the lives of one’s own civilians for propaganda purposes by setting up combat posts in mosques, schools and hospitals.

Political responsibility

When the Germans chose the Nazi party in 1933, they chose a militaristic course that brought them war. The consequences they had to bear were 14 to 15 million displaced persons,7) many millions of deaths and the loss of 23% of their territory.

The inhabitants of Gaza took on the same responsibility for the actions of their political leaders when they chose Hamas in 2006 and thus its program published in 1988. This document, called the Covenant or Hamas Charter, has the character of a declaration of war in that the claimed Arab-Islamic Palestinian state encompasses the entire territory of Palestine, wiping out Israel, and in that any negotiated solution is rejected, as Article 13 shows: “… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad…”8)

Thus, one can argue about whether the ordinary citizens of Gaza or the Hamas leaders are primarily to blame for the deaths of civilians in the Gaza war. But before one can consider whether Israel, which announced every military strike against the constantly changing Hamas combat posts in advance, should also be held partly to blame, the polarizing role of the UN must first be mentioned. In the Gaza war, Israel found itself in the position of a defending victim in two senses: in the short-term reactive and long-term strategic way. In the short-term, Hamas continued its fight from ever new combat positions for the entire 15 war months. In the densely built-up Gaza Strip, this generally happened with gross negligence and deliberate endangerment of its own civilians. Incredibly, this was often done deliberately from hospitals and schools.9)

In the long term, the massacre of October 7, 2023, together with the continued shelling of Israel from Gaza during the 15 months, was merely the predictable escalation of a decades-long total refusal of any peaceful coexistence on the part of the terrorist organization. Since its founding in 1987 and long before October 7, the organization has demonstrated its complete incompatibility with civilization and also with the goals declared in the preamble to the UN Charter by firing around 10,000 rockets against Israeli territory and by countless terrorist attacks. It is a gigantic scandal that the UN is stabbing the Jewish state in the back in its legitimate military efforts against Hamas by grossly misapplying responsibility, thereby encouraging the terrorists to continue and further increase their crimes.

An early milestone for this distortion of the legal situation was set by the then Egyptian President Nasser in his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 27, 1961 with the words, “The only solution to Palestine…is… the annulment of Israel’s existence.10) Reference This complete denial of Israel’s right to exist violates the sovereign equality of all UN members guaranteed in Article 2 of the UN Charter. The destruction of Israel, which is being sought as the ‘liberation’ of Palestine, has 0% to do with personal freedom and 100% to do with forced Islamization – as is clearly demonstrated by the decline in the proportion of Christians among the Arabs of Palestine within a century from around 10% to barely more than 1%. As all Islamists and most Arab governments still hold on to this ‘legal view’, this is one of the many signs that the UN is not a community of values based on solidarity and principles, but a forum for unfair bullying in which decisions are based on the interests of influential groups. The world organization must be stopped or abolished on this destructive path through thorough reforms.

The deeply hypocritical ‘moral’ atmosphere in the UN can also be found in large parts of international politics. This ‘legal’ environment proves to be an obstacle to the rational identification of terrorism as a particularly serious war crime. Thus, a targeted fight against terrorism fails at the level of tribalistic bullying. But from a rational point of view, this level is completely irrelevant: terrorism is objectively clearly distinguished from ordinary murder by several anti-humanitarian characteristics. These include the targeted killing of civilians, the capture of hostages in order to extort the release of accomplices, the sacrifice of one’s own citizens as human shields and the involvement of neighboring countries such as Syria and Lebanon by attacking Israeli territory from there. This makes those who help terrorists to acquire the false image of freedom fighters becoming accomplices.

Like any uncontrolled use of power, radicalization and armed violence by terrorists are subject to self-reinforcing as long as they encounter insufficient moral and physical resistance. The UN has indeed passed various resolutions against terrorism. However, as soon as one compares the well-sounding declarations of intent with the actual actions and their results, they turn out to be mere compulsory exercises with a fig leaf character. For example, resolution 2250 (2015), aimed at deradicalising young people, stated in paragraph 13, “(The Security Council) … Calls on all relevant actors to consider instituting mechanisms to promote a culture of peace, … and interreligious dialogue that involve youth and discourage their participation in acts of violence, …;”

In contrast, the practice in the UNRWA camp schools for refugee children has consisted for decades of ‘educating’ them to hate Israel and Jews, as textbooks show, for example: “I shall sacrifice my blood In order to water the land of the noble ones And remove the usurper [Israel] from my country And exterminate the defeated remnants of the foreigners…”11) The contrast between facade and practice reveals a deep-seated insincerity that is typical of the war by other means that a consortium of mainstream media, misguided politicians and ‘good’ organizations, including the UN, is waging against Israel.

A permanent war by all means

The defense of the Jewish state against these forces can only be successful in the long term if it is recognized as part of the defense of the entire Judeo-Christian cultural area and of liberal democracy and if it is handled in solidarity.

In line with the diverse attack strategies of the enemies of Israel and freedom in this war by all means possible, defense must take place on several levels. This includes strengthening freedom of expression and diversity of information to counter propaganda and secondly, strengthening democratic mechanisms, including improved control of the security apparatus made up of the military and secret services. Thirdly, there is a need to counteract the emerging global demographic imbalances.

In the Middle East conflict, left-woke politicians have long since outed themselves as irresponsible – actually. But while they unfairly stabbed Israel in the back with their uncritical funding of UNRWA, the mainstream media have kept quiet for decades about the massive agitation against Jews in their refugee schools. – Accordingly, they are letting Israel down in its current defense against terrorists. In Europe, these anti-patriots are preparing the ground for conditions as unstable as in the Middle East by opening the gates wide for Muslims unwilling to integrate. In doing so, they prove that they have not yet understood the global political connections between these theaters.

It is the same neo-conservative and left-woke politicians who are blind to reality and who are also damaging the Judeo-Christian cultural area in the Ukraine war. Instead of mediating to put an end to this European fratricidal war – and finally giving effect to the spirit of the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 and the Minsk Agreement of 2014/2015 – they have irresponsibly escalated the situation by supplying increasingly more attack-capable weapons systems. By standing by and watching the Ukrainian government’s refusal to negotiate, the Western governments are allowing an absurd reversal of the hierarchy between aid recipient Zelenskyj and helping NATO states. – In this environment shaped by biased media, the NATO militarists who are not attacked by Russia are determined to expand the war and leading the European cultural area to self-destruction. In summary, the global conflict situation is the military escalation of a decades-long, continuous war against liberal civilization by other means (propaganda, demographic growth, incitement to self-harm).

The Middle East comes out to be a testing ground for perfidious means of war and at the same time distracts from the actual goal of autocratically ambitious forces. – The rapid spread of Islam in Europe and its massive support demonstrate this true goal. This consists in the Islamization of the Judeo-Christian cultural area – which, at over 70 million square kilometers*), covers about 2,600 times the area of Palestine including Israel.

Even moderate and pro-Western Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a history of supporting terrorism12), while the financing of anti-Israeli propaganda and anti-Semitic movements, for example at American universities, continues to this day. The same applies to the construction of mosques with petrodollars (in addition to corresponding EU subsidies). The actual support of parallel societies with partially incompatible sets of values endangers the sustainable existence of free civilization.

An extended version of this article can be found here: https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/en/blog/common-challenge-israel-and-free-civilization-extended-version

References and internal links