Where do I start with that Parris article on Israel?

In today’s Times, Matthew Parris, ex Tory MP turned journalist, wrote a strange and shifty article in which, in the manner of a frenemy telling you to ‘beware’ but not of what or whom, he strongly advised Israel to cease its operations in Gaza.

Why was the article sly? Because at various points, Parris refused to reveal his own opinion, unusual in a columnist:

‘I beg my readers to accept that I express no view whatsoever on the moral or military case for what the Israel Defence Forces are now being asked to do in Gaza. I really don’t. I don’t know Gaza, don’t know the minds of its inhabitants, don’t know how feasible it is to find and dismantle Hamas’s terrorist network there, and don’t know enough about military tactics to have a useful opinion about ceasefires or pauses.’

Then, as in the way of these disingenuous declarations of neutrality (a subtle version of ‘I support Israel’s right to exist, but…’), he goes on to drop the ‘but’ bomb:

‘I do, however, know something about the ebb and flow of popular judgment. So let me imagine myself the director of one of those international agencies that foreign governments consult about “reputational damage”. They are in some ways an extension of the public relations industry. You would not ask a PR adviser if he or she agreed with an idea: you would ask them how best to promote and protect it.’

He then goes on to make a very odd statement:

‘Israel is an idea. It is an idea clothed in the necessary trappings of a state but it is also something more than an administration: a compelling idea at the very heart of a state.’

This seems a bizarre and patronising thing to say. Would anyone say it of any other country? Does he mean that it’s ‘an idea’ because it’s relatively new, having been created in 1948? There is something condescending about the term, as if the creation of Israel was a favour bestowed on the Jewish people; a favour for which they should be grateful and acquiescent. You’ve got your country, so if terrorists fire rockets at you and murder civilians round the clock don’t make a fuss, hush up and stay in your place.

There is no mention whatsoever of the brutal pogrom on October 7th of this year when 1400 people were murdered at a music festival in Israeli kibbutzim, nor of the rape, violence and torture that preceded these deaths. There is no mention either of the 200 hostages taken, nor the fact that several of them have already been found dead.

Parris’s message is simple: civilian deaths in Gaza are unacceptable; Israel should desist from further activity and withdraw.

Of course, he is right that the deaths of civilians is ugly and horrific. No one would argue with that except Hamas, whose stated aim is to murder every Jew in Israel before continuing to kill all the Jews worldwide. But you will not find any Jews disagreeing that the death of civilians is distressing and should be minimised; not even the most right-wing, like Benjamin Netanyahu.

In fact, in this war, it has only been the Israeli leaders who have tried to save the lives of Gazan civilians. Weeks ago they air-dropped thousands of leaflets over Gaza urging civilians to move from the North to the South. This movement to relative safety was thwarted by none other than Hamas, the unelected totalitarian rulers of Gaza, who prevented this migration. Why? I can only surmise that they wished to keep their human shield.

It is widely known that Hamas use their own people as human shields. US intelligence revealed evidence that al-Shifa hospital, which was stormed by the IDF last week, is used to store weapons, and video footage has clearly shown caches of guns and knives underneath the hospital. Hospitals and schools are used not only to store deadly arms but to cover the openings to deep underground tunnels and bunkers where Hamas fighters shelter in the knowledge that there will be worldwide condemnation if hospitals and schools are bombed.

In fact, there has already been that tutting disapproval, even when Israel has not bombed such places of humanitarian shelter. A BBC correspondent surmised weeks ago that the bombing of a hospital was by the IDF, and uncritically parroted Hamas’s allegation that thousands had died in this bombing. There was no public peak-time apology when it transpired that the bomb had damaged the hospital’s car park, civilian deaths were far lower than Hamas had claimed, and, crucially, that the missile had been fired in error by Hamas.

But such is the bias to which friends of Israel have become accustomed over the years from watching BBC news. I don’t want to besmirch every news reporter with that accusation, but a few have shown astonishing double standards. Who can forget Nick Beak, sitting at the bedside of a teenager who had been shot seven times by the terrorists during the massacre the day before, and asking her what she thought of people dying in Gaza as a result of Israel’s retaliation? The young woman replied humanely that she didn’t want anyone killed. But was that an appropriate question to ask the victim of a terrorist massacre? It smacks of guilt-tripping a survivor of 9/11 by wagging a finger at them about the West’s past capitalist policies in the Middle East.

Of course, there must always be a reckoning. Of course, there are things that could have been done differently in Israel. 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank was never going to improve Arab-Jewish relations. But attempting moral equivalence in this way is repulsive. Israel is a democracy. Gaza is a dictatorship, run by terrorists whose modus operandi is to kill as many Jewish civilians as possible and whose goal is to eliminate all Jews from Israel.

Since her inception, Israel has been under constant bombardment from her neighbours. After the 6 day war, Israel gained territory by occupying the West Bank. But they did not do this to invade the area and murder Arabs. They did it so that IDF troops could be stationed there to keep watch to prevent further intifada and try and minimise terrorists crossing into Israel with deadly motives.

In fact, as far as the settlements in the West Bank are concerned, if the Oslo Accords of the early ‘90s had been accepted by the Arab leaders, the West Bank would be peacefully resided in by both Arabs and Jews, in separate areas (A, B, C, etc.) So although the supposed liberal left foams at the mouth over ‘illegal settlements’, the situation is not as one-sided as the uneducated may assume.

But let us be generous to the Arabs and agree that the settlements are currently illegal. Do people truly compare building houses and living in another state with the systematic murder of civilians carried out by the Arab terrorist groups who wish to usurp Israel? There have been, and still are, numerous Islamist terrorist groups who have murdered Jewish (and other) civilians in Israel. Iranian-backed Hezbollah make incursions into the north of Israel. And we are all familiar with the wish for a world-wide Caliphate by the grotesque inhuman IS.

Yes, there are instances of settlers behaving abhorrently, indulging in racist abuse towards Arabs. But in a democracy, the full force of the law can be brought down on them. A settler who kills an Arab will be tried in an Israeli court. Despite Netanyahu’s attempts to align the judiciary with the government, Israel still enjoys an independent justice system. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched to maintain this integrity. They too value justice, even if it brings their own to the hand-cuffs of the law.

Gaza has not been occupied by Israel for years. Yes, the flow of goods into it is surveyed by Israel, but only because Hamas, who have ruled without a mandate for 17 years, insist on spending the billions provided in aid by the UN and other organisations on arms and missiles rather than hospitals and schools. Objecting to this surveillance is like objecting to a metal detector at the door of the airport.

Why, in all the years that millions and millions have been flowing into Gaza and the West Bank, has no one asserted that aid needs to be conditional - that it will stop if it is sidelined to buy armaments. Why has no one at the UN demanded that the schools built with their aid money must be secular and promote rights for girls and women, gays, Jews? Why has no one insisted that the money will stop if the blood libel against Jews is continued and further generations inculcated into the brainwash of victimhood and hatred for the Jews? Is the UN really that useless? Is it happy continuing to fund terrorist groups at the expense of uneducated children and the sick and disabled? Is it happy for Muslim countries receiving aid - Pakistan, take note - to promulgate misogyny, homophobia and misogyny with Western money?

Parris’s chastisement of Israel is sanctimonious - he believes he is the voice of reason, pleading for the lives of the little children. But what a naive and simplistic idea a ceasefire is. Parris does not offer any suggestions of alternative ways to stop Hamas from pursuing its aim of murdering all the Jews in Israel. He seems to be implying that Israel should turn the other cheek. His rhetoric is that of the pacifist. But war, though deadly, is sometimes necessary. What would Parris have advised when Hitler began invading neighbouring European countries? Turning a blind eye? I can imagine him tutting over Dresden - such a beautiful city, and all those people. Yes, indeed, horrendous suffering for those affected - those killed and injured, their families and friends - but what exactly was the alternative? Hitler still managed to murder 6 million Jews and around 5 million others (POWs, Russians, Poles, the disabled, Romany, etc) and that was with both Britain and the US fighting them with all their might.

Parris is admonishing Israel for fighting to survive as the *only* predominantly Jewish country in the world (there are more than 50 Muslim countries) and yet offers no other solution to the, well, Arab Final Solution.

His piece is astonishingly mealy mouthed. Take this bit, which reminds me of a squirming child trying hard not to spit out the truth:

‘The second is huge and acute: and it’s what is now happening in Gaza. Let me remind you of my opening caveat. The case for this incursion may be militarily sound — who knows? I don’t. Collateral death and destruction may be unavoidable. Again I don’t know. Judged against the atrocities to which this incursion is a response, the revulsion that many across the West feel at the ruin of Gaza may be unfair, even hypocritical. Yet again, I don’t know.’

Yet again it is followed by the obligatory ‘but’:

‘But this I do know: the revulsion is strong, unavoidable, irremediable and unforgettable. That’s just a fact. The state of Israel is losing friends and sympathy while the world’s idea of Israel, that noble, founding, motivating, justifying idea, is being spoiled. Unfairly? Perhaps. But spoiled. We are witnessing a slow puncture, and you can almost hear the hiss of escaping air.’

Having stated that when he was young he embraced the gain in land Israel made after the 1967 War, he then shows what he really thinks by condemning it. Passive aggressively. Astonishingly, he also criticises Israel’s development of nuclear weapons.

Is this man completely uninformed? Does he not know that many of the brains behind nuclear fission and the creation of the atomic bond were Jewish? Why on earth does he think that this knowledge should have been been transferred to the UK and US by those Jewish geniuses and not to the only country in the world that feels like theirs?

Does he not know that the Jews have been expelled from every single Muslim majority country in the world? Has he not heard of the rising tide of antisemitism in the West; the paradoxical wave of hatred for the *victims* rather than the perpetrators of the October 7th pogrom? There have been more than 1500 antisemitic events in France and more than 1000 in the UK since October 7th.

Parris ends by quoting from the Bible, the sanctimonious cherry on the pointless hectoring lecture. But he doesn’t realise that peace is something that you sometimes have to fight for. We can all sympathise with the plight of Muslim civilians around the world, often condemned to theocratic or autocratic dictatorships and an absence of human rights. But we also have to recognise that to enable these citizens to benefit from such progress requires new leaders; leaders who will prioritise secular values, full human rights for women and all minorities, democracy, and, crucially, an end to the irrational hatred and victim complex that causes lives to be wasted in vengeance and archaic religious fairy tales rather than working to enjoy the present and the future.