What Israel is really up against
It's no exaggeration to see the spectre of Nazism in the Palestinian cause
For several days, all anybody could talk about was President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza would be rebuilt as an American “Riviera”, a real-estate honeypot whose erstwhile inhabitants would be resettled in Jordan, Egypt and other countries where apparently they would build happy and productive new lives for themselves away from the shattered landscape of the Gaza war zone.
Everyone was astounded; people were variously ecstatic, appalled, confused. Was Trump a genius or a lunatic? Did he mean it? What exactly did he mean? Would the Gazans be able to return to this prospective Monaco of the Middle East if they wanted to do so, or was Trump proposing to send them all into exile? Should we take what he was saying seriously but not literally? And if he did mean it literally, how would this actually be achieved?
Then the three Israeli hostages, Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy, were brought out of hell. Now the kaleidoscope was shaken once again. And now grief and horror overwhelmed all else.
The three released captives were unrecognisable from the men who had been seized on October 7 2023 and dragged into the dungeons of Gaza. They were emaciated, sunken-eyed, walking unsteadily. They had been starved and tortured.
We now learn they were shackled inside a dark tunnel with no air or light; chained and unable to stand so that one of them had to be taught to walk again before being released; suffocated, hung upside down and burned; starved and then forced to eat rotten bread, and forced also to decide who among them would eat.
Trump, who was clearly shaken and appalled by these images, observed that that the three men “looked like Holocaust survivors” and said: “I don’t know how much longer we can take that”. He was clearly not just horrified but deeply, profoundly angry.
At long last, this was a morally correct response by a western leader to current Jewish suffering. It was a vitally important response. It was the only decent response.
Because the world has now seen graphic evidence of what Israel is up against.
Trump’s Holocaust comparison is not an exaggeration. The three Israelis were living examples of the nightmarish images that are burned into the collective Jewish memory: the skeletal figures who were liberated from Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps in 1945, victims of monsters who had the same psychopathic aim as Hamas of exterminating the Jews.
While we must always be careful not to downplay and thus misrepresent the unique horror of the Holocaust in both its scale and execution, the treatment of the Israelis is similar to the Nazi programme. It’s not just that the aim is the same. It’s that along with the murder, violence and starvation it also displays the hallmark characteristics of the Nazis — the sadism, the depraved barbarism, the desire to physically and psychologically torture and humiliate these captives just because they were Jews. That’s also what was on such conspicuous display in the pogrom of October 7 2023 when Israelis (and others) were slaughtered, raped, mutilated, tortured, beheaded and burned alive. And other Israeli captives are still being held in those Gaza torture chambers.
Right on cue after Trump made his “Gaza Riviera” remarks, the west’s morally cretinous classes launched a collective cry of “ethnic cleansing” and “collective punishment” of the “ordinary Gaza civilians”. What hooey. The Gaza civilians should be held to account over collective responsibility for the atrocities against the Israelis.
Not only did the “ordinary Gaza civilians” vote genocidal Hamas into power, but they are enthusiasts for the October 7 pogrom and for further atrocities against Israeli Jews. It was “ordinary Gaza civilians” who followed Hamas in pouring across the border fence on October 7 and who rampaged through the Israeli kibbutzim and the Supernova festival site raping, murdering and kidnapping Israelis. It was “ordinary Gaza civilians” who swarmed, taunted, humiliated and abused the Israelis kidnapped into Gaza and who desecrated the bodies of those who had been murdered, treating them as trophies of war.
What’s more, the entire Gaza Strip was turned into a launching pad for genocide with an underground infrastructure composed of hundreds of miles of tunnels to create a parallel world devoted entirely to the mass murder of Jews. If there were any “ordinary Gaza civilians” who objected, they kept a very low profile.
Israeli troops who risked their lives in clearing out Hamas have reported that virtually every house had a terrorist tunnel beneath it, virtually every house possessed a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and virtually every hospital, school and clinic was used as a weapons store or terrorist hub.
The claim of “ethnic cleansing” is even more morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The proposal to displace the people of Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with their ethnic composition. It is because they are an enemy population that not only tried but still intends to destroy another country and murder its citizens.
As the historian Andrew Roberts has written, if people launch aggressive wars and lose them they forfeit by their behaviour all rights to remain in the territory that they have turned into an engine of war.
Post-war population displacements have happened over and over again. After the Second World War, Europe accepted the deportation of some three million Germans from the Sudetenland because of their leader’s complicity with Hitler, and the area was re-populated with ethnic Czechs.
Gaza is not, as the progressive classes claim, “sovereign” territory; it has never been the sovereign territory of anybody. Nor is it the Gazans’ “home”; as Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has so aptly observed, if the Arabs of Gaza are “refugees” — as we have been told ad infinitum — Gaza cannot be their home. QED.
In fact, many if not most Gazans have long been desperate to live elsewhere but have been effectively imprisoned by an Arab world determined to keep them as far away as possible — both to enrage world opinion against the Jews, and because they are known to be trouble personified.
Ethnic cleansing is what actually happened after 1948 to the Jews of the Middle East, 800,000 of whom were driven out of Arab lands in which Jews had lived for centuries — driven out purely because they were Jews. And ethnic cleansing is what the very same people who are levelling this claim at Trump are themselves demanding when they insist that Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria should be removed from their homes there in accordance with the Palestinian demand that there should be no Jews in “Palestine”.
For it’s not just Hamas that is the menace to civilisation. It’s the whole Palestinian cause. The Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank mount a never-ending attempt to murder Jews in the disputed territories and in Israel. The depravity of the October 7 pogrom was nothing new: in 2011, Ruth and Udi Fogel and their three children were slaughtered in their beds in their house in Samaria, and their baby was virtually decapitated, by an Arab from the territories of the “West Bank”.
Fatah, the biggest faction in the supposedly ”moderate” Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly extolled the October 7 massacre. PA police officers have been involved in terrorist plots against Israeli Jews. The PA, which pays “salaries” to the families of terrorists who murder Jews, pumps out Nazi-style demonisation of Jews with which it indoctrinates its children to murder Jews and steal their land.
In short, Palestinian society is entirely constructed around a poisonous and murderous hatred of Jews and the desire to remove them from the face of the earth.
The emaciated figures who staggered out of their Gaza hellhole have illuminated the obscenity of the way in which so much of the west has behaved — trying to minimise, sanitise or excuse what the Palestinian Arabs have done to the Israelis; representing them as victims of the Israelis they have so viciously attacked; and demonising the Israelis with murderous falsehoods for the apparent crime of defending themselves against this genocidal onslaught.
Now we can see the monstrosity of the way the Biden administration bullied and blackmailed Israel into allowing Hamas to survive.
Now we can see the moral depravity of all those in the west — including Biden, Sir Keir Starmer and other western politicians, NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and the wretched prelates of the Church of England — who have accused Israel of causing starvation in Gaza. The Gazan mobs who menaced the terrified Israeli hostages as they were released were well fed, plump, even obese; it’s the Israeli hostages who have been deliberately and murderously starved — by the people who have been promoted as victims by the west’s Israel-bashers.
This moral bankruptcy towards Israel is nothing new. It has characterised the so-called civilised world for almost a century. The Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine should have been dispersed after 1948 when their side lost the war of extermination that was mounted to destroy at its rebirth the fledgling State of Israel.
Instead, those Arabs were fashioned into a weapon against Israel’s existence by being turned preposterously into permanent refugees. The entirely spurious claim of a Palestinian national identity was cooked up in the 1960s between the terrorist leader Yassir Arafat and the Soviet Union as a strategy to destroy the Jews’ homeland, steal from them their own history in the land and re-label it “Palestinian” history, and fry the brains of the west in order to undermine it and soften it up for its destruction. That strategy has been carried out to the letter.
And the west, led by Britain from the 1930s onwards, has consistently rewarded and incentivised mass murder against the Jews while upending international law by promising those waging this genocidal war a part of the Jews’ own historic and legally pledged homeland as the route to “peace” in the Middle East.
The only moral course of action, the only way this century-old war to exterminate the Jewish homeland will be brought to an end in a just way, is to say to the Palestinian Arabs that it’s all over. They will never get a state; they don’t deserve a state; they never wanted a state, other than as a springboard to destroy Israel; and if they persist in their aim to destroy Israel and kill Jews, they will be treated henceforth as pariahs.
And so should all who support them be treated. The obscene Palestinian cause is worn as the badge of conscience by the west’s progressive classes. That illustrates instead their repudiation of conscience. The Palestinian cause has destroyed the moral compass of the west.
If Trump’s musings about a “Gaza Riviera” signal an equivalent strategy towards the Palestinian cause as a whole, he won’t just reshape the Middle East in a way that will bring it peace and justice. He will start to haul the west out of the moral abyss into which it has fallen.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk .