Don't Forget The UK Too!

The American betrayal of Israel. Astoundingly, the US is feeding its beleaguered ally to its enemies. MELANIE PHILLIPS MAR 22 Haman convinces Ahasuerus to kill all the Jews; medieval illustration As some of us have long feared and has now become undeniable, Israel is fighting not one but two wars of defence against a malevolent foe. The first is against the axis of Iran and its proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen. The second is against America. The Biden administration is to construct a pier off the Gaza shore to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. This week, Israeli TV’s Channel 14 reported that, astoundingly, the Americans have handed over the financing and management of this pier to Qatar, the founder, funder and protector of Hamas and therefore the godfather of the October 7 pogrom. Channel 14 said the Qataris demanded that the new pier be built by a Gaza company named Al Hissi, which is controlled by Hamas. Giving Qatar control of this pier would ensure Hamas continues to exist, enrich itself and attack Israel with an open route into Gaza. As Yigal Carmon, the founder of MEMRI, has written in horror: “The US has flipped sides, from Israel to Qatar.” America could end this war tomorrow by telling the Qataris that unless they instruct Hamas to surrender and release the hostages, Qatar will forfeit its preferential treatment by the United States and will henceforth be treated instead as an international pariah. Instead, America is feeding Israel into the Qatari jaws. The outcome, writes Carmon, will be escalation into a total regional war by Iran not only against Israel but America. America’s action is so preposterous it’s hard to believe. Yet in any event, the Biden administration has already pivoted from supporting the destruction of Hamas to working for its ultimate victory. The administration has been relentlessly pressuring Israel to admit more and more aid into Gaza, accusing it falsely of stopping the trucks and ignoring the fact that most of this aid is being stolen by Hamas to enable it to survive at the expense of the needy civilian population. The United States is determined to impose rule in post-war Gaza by the Palestinian Authority, despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, Fatah, has exulted at the October 7 pogrom and declared that it will continue such attacks. The administration is determined to impose upon Israel a Palestine state, even though this would become another “Hamastan” and place central Israel in grave danger of October 7-style attacks on steroids. And with Israel now poised to attack the last redoubt of Hamas in Rafah, which is key to the defeat of this genocidal enemy, America is subjecting Israel to intense pressure to abandon this final front of the war. A common explanation for this shocking American reversal is that, in this election year, President Joe Biden has to play to the anti-Israel gallery in the Democratic Party. Maybe so; but rather more significant is the endemic hostility to Israel within the administration — and above all its pathological hatred of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the administration is astonishingly trying to push out. New York Magazine has reported an Israeli expert frequently consulted by US officials saying, “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.” The National Threat Assessment by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence presents Netanyahu’s opposition to “territorial compromise” with the Palestinians as a threat to peace, and envisages that public protest may oust him from power by “a different, more moderate government”. This is not only an outrageous attempt to oust the democratically elected leader of a sovereign country. It’s also based on a fundamental error. The Biden administration doesn’t understand that, despite widespread opposition to Netanyahu over his domestic record, Israel is united in support of going into Rafah to defeat Hamas. It’s also united, post-October 7, in opposition to a Palestinian state. But having invested Netanyahu with diabolical qualities, American liberals believe that if only he could be removed Israel would meekly fall into line with US demands. This was illustrated last week by the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. In a shocking statement, he called for an Israeli election “once the war starts to wind down” to oust Netanyahu. Far worse, Schumer parroted the blood libels being used to demonise Israel by its enemies. Claiming to be one of the Jews who “love Israel in our bones,” he stated in the next breath: “I’m anguished that the Israeli war campaign has killed so many innocent Palestinians. I know that my fellow Jewish Americans feel the same anguish when they see the images of dead and starving children — and destroyed homes.” Every civilian death in wartime is tragic. But “so many innocents” is based on Hamas casualty figures that inflate the numbers and totally omit the Hamas forces they include. Even more nauseatingly, Schumer smeared Israel still further by intoning: “We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.” The suggestion that Israel is no better than Hamas is a pernicious lie spread by those who want Israel gone. In fact, Israel’s ratio of civilians to combatants killed is fewer than 1.5 civilians for every one combatant, far better than any other country’s army has ever achieved. Israel is not just fighting to defend itself against genocide. It is on the front line of the west’s defence against its enemies and the defence of civilisation against barbarism. Western liberals can’t acknowledge this because they can’t allow their unchallengeable orthodoxies of Palestinian powerlessness, “peace processes” and western iniquity to be destroyed. So they have turned on the Jews. Jewish suffering has to be erased because it gets in the way of the narrative. That’s why the eruption of Palestinianism throughout the west is so shattering. People wonder why the forests of Palestinian flags at the incendiary anti-Israel demonstrations are in themselves so intimidating. It’s because the Palestine cause is not two states side by side. Palestinian identity consists entirely of the intention to eradicate Israel by the hijack and appropriation of Jewish history. Palestinianism stands for the erasure of Jewish national identity and wiping the Jewish people out of their own historic homeland. That’s why anti-Israel thugs have ripped apart a painting in Cambridge University of Arthur Balfour, the British prime minister who gave his name to the 1917 declaration of British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It’s why people across the west have been ripping down the posters of the Israeli hostages. They are all trying to rip Israel and the Jews out of their headspace and their world altogether. That’s why the betrayal by Schumer and American Jews who still support the Democratic Party and its Israel-bashing agenda is so devastating. According to the Oxford University Press Dictionary of American Family Names, “Schumer” derives from a German word that means a “good-for-nothing”. Schumer claims instead that his name derives from the Hebrew shomer, or “guardian”; and so he boasts to be the shomer of Jewish values. “What horrifies so many Jews especially,” he said, “is our sense that Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear”. How dare he. He is not a shomer. What has horrified so many is that Schumer and other liberal American Jews who are taking aim at Israel’s “right-wing” are using “Jewish values” as a shield behind which they are betraying Israel and the Jewish people and delivering them to their enemies. Along with the shills for Israel’s surrender in the Biden administration, they present an obscene and disgusting spectacle. “In every generation,” say the Jews at Passover, “they rise up against us”. To the enemies of the Jewish people today — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — we must add the Biden administration, Chuck Schumer and the liberal Jewish fifth column. Jewish News Syndicate