The world vs Israel: standing against the tide

Cathy Wilcox, cartoonist for Melbourne, Australia newspaper The Age thinks she’s clever, showing a map of the world in which Israel is in blue and the rest of the world in Hamas red. But what she really revealed is something far deeper — a truth older than her pen, older than every nation in the world today.

From the very beginning, it was Abraham — one man who smashed the idols of his father’s house and stood against the entire pagan world. Alone, but carrying a truth so powerful it overturned history itself: that there is One God, that life has meaning, that human dignity matters.

And later, it was the Maccabees — a small band of Jews facing an empire determined to erase their faith and identity. The few against the many. Outnumbered, outshouted, outgunned — and yet they endured, and through them, the Jewish people survived.

And in ancient Persia, when one Jewish man refused to bow down to the Vizier who then sought to eradicate all Jews from the Empire, but it was that one man, Mordechai, and his adopted daughter Esther, who prevailed.

Now, here we are again. A tiny Israel in blue, against the sea of red that apologises, excuses, or endorses Hamas — a designated terrorist organisation whose pre-civilisational barbarity and values stand against every human freedom we hold dear: freedom of worship, women’s equality, gay rights, pluralism, freedom of thought, of life itself.

And perhaps, without realising it, Wilcox’s choice of colour is grimly apt. Red is the stain of Hamas’s savagery. Red like the pants of Naama Levy, brutalised, sexually violated, bloodied and then kidnapped into Gaza on October 7th. The young woman who never came home. That red is not abstract — it is the lived cost of a world that excuses barbarism.

To those who sneer at Israel’s isolation: this is not the first time the Jewish people have stood against the tide of history. And every time, it has been the Jewish people who carried forward the values that later generations called civilisation. When the Medievalists burnt heretics and witches, it was in Talmudic academies that reason and moral law were preserved. When the Enlightenment cracked open Europe’s darkness, it was Jewish thinkers who helped give voice to liberty, justice, and human dignity.

The map may show Israel as a speck of blue against a world of red, but history shows something else: the speck endures, the speck transforms, the speck leads. The tide of history has never drowned us — it is we who have reshaped it.

So let Wilcox draw her map. She is right in one way: Israel is small, and the world often aligns with its enemies. But she forgets the lesson Abraham taught, the Maccabees embodied, and Esther lived: truth is not decided by numbers.

Adam Slonim is presenter of the Behind The Headlines podcast and a commentator.