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The Battle Israel Faces Is about Upholding Civilization Itself

(Telegraph-UK) Allister Heath - Bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil. Israel's brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hizbullah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group's walkie-talkies, is a stunning boost for the forces of civilization worldwide. A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst antisemitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism. The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America no longer take Israel's side in this existential combat exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration. The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing "escalation," even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. In a rational world, David Lammy, Britain's foreign secretary, would be privately congratulating his Israeli counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever conducted against a terrorist organization, with few civilian casualties, and pledging Britain's help. Pacifism is a deluded utopia that fails to grasp the reality of the human condition. It is madness to criminalize all warfare, and despicable to focus on that conducted by democracies and ignore that advanced by our enemies. Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order implodes and the autocracies triumph. The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and allow it to finish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating Hizbullah. The writer is editor of The Sunday Telegraph-UK.
2024-09-19 00:00:00
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