I was listening to the radio a few days ago when Turn, Turn, Turn came on. The Byrds peace-and-love era anthem is inspired by Ecclesiastes and contains the lyric “A time to kill, a time to heal.”
I had also just read an eloquently argued piece in the Sunday Times by a devout Israelophile saying, in effect, that Israel should stop its operation in Gaza, so the Byrds’ words resonated, and I wobbled briefly.
I began wondering if it was, indeed, “a time to heal”; time to agree with some of the member of the Board of Deputies and progressive rabbis.
Then I went to see the brilliant, heart-breaking, eviscerating documentary 8 October with its footage of the 7 October massacre and raw testimony from survivors of the invasion by 6,000 Hamas terrorists. (A documentary that can’t get a UK release, by the way.) And I remembered why the pusillanimous rabbis and 36 hand-wringing deputies are not just misguided but completely wrong. Why even the devoted Israelophile is wrong. But most of all, why that joint declaration by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada is not just shameful but a craven capitulation to terrorists. Surely they must be aware that the nihilist, fundamentalist Iranian surrogate running Gaza has been controlling and manipulating food aid from almost the moment Israel launched its offensive in response to 7 October? And have done so knowing that it would generate exactly the kind of headlines it has generated.
Jan Shure
Surely they must also be aware that Israel has no alternative but to destroy Hamas? And not just because of the savagely brutal slaughter, butchery, and mutilation of 1,200 non-combatants (including many, many babies, infants and women) that occurred on Israel’s sovereign territory.
Not just because of the abduction of more than 200 more citizens, also including babies and infants.
Not just because of the Iranian-made missiles launched from Gaza that rained down on Israeli population centres for a decade before 7 October.
Not just because Gaza had a terrorist infrastructure as complex as the London Underground system.
It has no option because, besides all that, Hamas has vowed to commit similar brutal atrocities again – and on a larger scale. And no country would tolerate that – certainly not the UK, Canada or France if, say, Cornwall, British Columbia, or the Cote d’Azur suffered similar murderous massacres.
Israel is fighting this war in Gaza for the same reason it has fought all the other wars waged against it since its birth 77 years ago. For the right to exist
If Israel stops now, all the death and pain on both sides will have been for nothing. Hamas will regroup and entrench more deeply and more injuriously into the fabric of Gaza. The Palestinians will again become human shields in the service of the geo- or theo-political objectives of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.
Israel is fighting this war in Gaza for the exact same reason it has fought all the other wars waged against it since its birth 77 years ago. And for the exact same reason, it has fought 70-plus years of lethal terrorism. For the right to exist in its ancestral homeland, where Jews have lived continuously for more than 4,000 years – a homeland, incidentally, which comprises a little under 22,000 square kilometres compared with the region’s Islamic nations, which occupy some eight million square kilometres – which might suggest to the intelligent, fair-minded observer (or national leader) that if there is any colonisation in the region, it is not by Israel.
Despite such realities, however, Israel’s defence of its citizens has been persistently framed as “colonisation”, “oppression”, or “gratuitous aggression”, creating a nexus of anti-Israelism visible on college campuses and UK streets. One might have hoped, however, that even if their less well-educated citizens were unaware of the geopolitical realities, the leaders of the UK, Canada and France would be and would resist the pressure to make such venal statements.
On the other hand, their craven capitulation may simply be the inevitable outcome of a campaign that began some 30-plus years ago that used the Palestinian cause as a way to advance fundamentalist-Islamist objectives when the need arose – such as applying pressure to rein in Israel as it is poised to destroy Hamas.
While I realise mention of a campaign makes me sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, FBI tapes – heard on 8 October – confirm that such a campaign was launched in Philadelphia in 1993. And although I have no proof – MI5 and other espionage agencies have declined to share their intelligence with me –I think it’s safe to assume similar Islamist cabals gathered in other Western cities – notably London, or Londonistan as it was dubbed in the ‘90s – to create similar campaigns which, in the UK at least, were augmented with lavish endowments and donations, consultancy fees or sinecures from oil-rich Arab states.
After three decades of distortion, disinformation and media bias, with a large cohort invested in a fake narrative and large Muslim populations in the UK and France, it was entirely predictable that the three leaders would act precisely as they have – and precisely as they were expected to.
So it is not time to stop or heal. Despite the shocking cost – or perhaps because of it –the answer to whether Israel should stop must be a resounding no.
