Israel enters the abyss

Hamas must be destroyed but the invasion of Gaza carries huge risk

Palestine winning the propaganda war?

Nearly a million people displaced, 8,000 buildings destroyed by Western-backed air strikes.  At least 3,000 civilian casualties many of them children. Inconceivable human suffering as water and food become scarce. “Humanity itself is under attack” says the International Red Cross. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls for “a year of peace”.

Only this is not Gaza today but Mosul,  the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. And the enemy is not Hamas but Islamic State or “Daesh”, who turned the city into a death camp after 2014. ISIS was eventually destroyed, street by street, house by house, often led by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters not renowned for taking prisoners.  Thousands of innocents died. The US-led coalition destroyed Mosul in order to save it, though the city has undergone a remarkable revival in the past five years.

It looks very much as if Mosul’s fate is to be visited in Gaza as we await the Israeli Defence Force ground invasion.  This Isle-of-Wight-sized strip of land has already seen devastation reminiscent of the bombing in Mosul.  2.3 million Gaza citizens live in terror and unimaginable hardship. A million have been forcible displaced.  Things can only get worse.

The weight of history lies heavy over this conflict of rights. Not least over the Hamas’s murder of 1400 Jewish civilians on October 7th which Israel regards as the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. The images from the terrorists’ own GoPro cameras, released by Israel, depict unspeakable barbarity. The tales of rape and murder of babies are not propaganda. Yet the impact in the Western media has been strangely muted. Never has there been so little interest, it seems to me, in a hostage crisis where British people are among the captives. “Jews don’t count” says the comedian, David Baddiel bitterly.

At any rate, the Palestinian cause, and by extension Hamas, seems to have captured the imagination of many young people in the West. They have been demonstrating in their tens of thousands and appear to believe that the destruction of Israel is a legitimate war aim. From the river to the sea…