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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10/12/in-israel-i-saw-dire-state-of-burnhams-foreign-policy/
Israel's People Know Instinctively that Freedom Needs Defending
(Telegraph-UK) Charles Moore - Those who run modern countries such as ours should be thinking harder about what Israel today is. Zionism is ignorantly equated with racism by Britain's Green party. In fact, it closely resembles other forms of 19th-century nationalism which took root in countries such as Ireland, Italy and Greece - the key difference being that Zionism is for a people who lacked a home. Since 1948, they have had one, sovereign under international law. The modern Zionist task is to make it secure. This is not extreme: it is simply necessary, and incredibly difficult. We need to understand this and defend it. As one senior Israeli political figure put it to me: "People in the West love victims, but not strong ones." Perhaps if Israel had wept but not acted after Oct. 7, 2023, it might have won more sympathy. Yet if it had not hit back, it would have been overwhelmed. Supporters of Hamas's day of atrocious murder, torture, kidnapping and rape refer to it as "the al-Aqsa flood," al-Aqsa being the Muslim term for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, "flood" referring to the hope that all Israel would be inundated by marauders killing every Jew they could find. The reason they failed was that Israel possessed superior force and, in its people, a much better-disciplined will. Almost regardless of their political allegiance, its people know instinctively that freedom needs defending. British people ought to admire that: it is how our nation survived in 1940. The writer, a member of the House of Lords, is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Spectator, and Sunday Telegraph.