Brendan O'Neill: The West’s reckless dishonesty over Lebanon

Why won’t the political and media establishment tell us the truth: that Hezbollah started this awful war?

If a keffiyeh-adorned posh kid on a leafy campus were to hold forth on the Israel-Lebanon clash without once saying the word ‘Hezbollah’, none of us would be surprised. To the West’s à la mode loathers of Israel, the Jewish State is responsible for every ill in the Middle East, and its foes are always blameless. But for a world leader to do it, to pontificate on this bloody battle without mentioning the ruthless terror outfit whose rocket fire started it, is unforgivable.

Step forward President Emmanuel Macron. On Friday, in the aftermath of Israel’s pagers attack on Hezbollah militants and the firing of missiles by both sides, he said France stands with Lebanon and feels ‘grief for all civilian victims of [the] attacks’. He said he’d spoken to the key parties to the war, ‘from Israel to Iran’, and told them to de-escalate. There was one party he neglected to mention, however. Which is odd given it’s the party that started the war by raining rockets on Israel from 8 October 2023 onwards – in solidarity with the racist pogromists of Hamas – and in the process drove 60,000 Jews from their homes, destroyed land and massacred children. As the Times of Israel put it: he ‘made no explicit mention of Hezbollah’.

As oversights go, it’s a shocker. It’s like gabbing about the West’s intervention in Raqqa without saying ‘ISIS’ or lamenting 9/11 but forgetting to mention a certain Islamist death cult. Is it any wonder that in a reportedly tense phone call between Macron and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the latter said ‘instead of putting pressure on Israel, it’s time for France to increase pressure on Hezbollah’? Or at least to mention Hezbollah. That would be a start: saying out loud the name of the Iranian proxies who’ve been battering the Jewish State with missiles for a year in a show of support for the worst act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.


Macron’s post-pagers commentary may have been bizarre but it wasn’t surprising. In handwringing over a war without referring to the war’s instigators, without namechecking that self-styled ‘Army of God’ whose destruction of Israeli homes and murder of Druze children gave rise to this latest round of hostilities, he was doing what many in the West have done. Namely, ripped this battle from its historical and moral context. Depicted it as an act of unilateral Israeli evil. Worse, absolved Hezbollah, implicitly, of responsibility for this horror show by either playing down its role or outright redacting its name from their pompous virtue-signalling.

In much of the mainstream media, and across social media, the Israel-Lebanon clash is being moralised over in an inexcusably one-sided way. Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon yesterday, which reportedly left more than 500 dead, have been branded salvos in a war of aggression. It’s a ‘dramatic escalation’, says the Washington Post, making you wonder why it didn’t say something similar when Hezbollah killed those 12 Druze kids in Israel in July. Radical voices are fuming over Israel’s ‘massacres’ in Lebanon. This insane nation is bent on ‘another slaughter of the innocents’, says one observer. And of course the protests have begun. In Sydney, Chicago, Berlin. Nothing – literally nothing – gets the virtuous beating the streets as much as the Jewish State pushing back against the terrorists who visit violence on its people.

The myopic focus on the civilians hurt or killed by Israel’s pagers ruse and missile strikes also puts a distorted spin on what’s happening. Yes, civilians in Lebanon have perished, and that is awful. It’s one of the reasons some of us opposed Hezbollah’s violent taunting of Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom – not only because it represented a grotesque violation of Israeli sovereignty and a reckless disregard for Israeli life, but also because it promised future war in which the Lebanese would suffer, too. And yet, Israel’s strikes on Lebanon are not attacks on civilians, far less a ‘slaughter of the innocents’. They’re firm pushback, after months of provocation, against the racist proxy army of a powerful foreign state.

Another thing that gets redacted in the facile sermonising of Israel’s haters is the question of who Israel is targeting. It’s Hezbollah, the soldiers of that anti-Semitic army that views the Jewish State as a ‘cancerous growth’ that must be excised from the Middle East. You wouldn’t know it from the MSM’s pained and infantile coverage, but Hezbollah has named more than 500 of its members who’ve been taken out by Israel in recent months. That’s not a slaughter of innocents – it’s payback for terrorism. Last week’s pagers attack was expressly targeted at the Hezbollah militants who use such archaic devices. And the strikes on Lebanon in recent days have eliminated many Hezbollah operatives, including a top commander: Ibrahim Aqil.

No one denies the horror of civilian casualties. But it is a flagrant lie to call Israel’s actions in Lebanon a war on civilians. It’s a war on terrorists, and it’s been a year brewing, ever since Hezbollah chose to bombard Israel to rub salt in the wound of Hamas’s pogrom. In more normal times, the French president, and the US president, would be thanking Israel for its removal of a terror commander like Aqil. After all, Aqil is widely suspected of assisting in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings that killed 241 US and 58 French military personnel. It is a testament to the moral disarray of the West’s elites, if not their outright moral collapse, that they’ve responded to the just killing of a West-hating mass murderer by tut-tutting at those who brought him to justice. So where Macron bemoans Israeli aggression in Lebanon, Joe Biden’s America is ‘like a deer in the headlights’, says one DC think-tanker. Way to commemorate your servicemen and women that Aqil helped to butcher, France and America.

The media’s ruthless decontextualisation of the Israel-Lebanon clash is a kind of war censorship. It might not be as brutal as war censorship of old, when stuffy officials would simply starve the public of inconvenient facts. But in failing to situate this war in the post-7 October persecution of Israel by the anti-Semitic proxies on its borders, and in failing to give an honest account of the numbers of Hezbollah militants successfully injured or killed by Israel, the media give us a warped, borderline fraudulent take on these tensions. They turn a war on terrorists into a war on people, whitewash Hezbollah’s culpability and further inflame the fashionable Israelophobia of the graduate elites. It is a reckless dishonesty. And it is motored by a patrician urge to feed the people a pre-approved moral narrative rather than the truth.

As to the noisy left, for whom Israel is pursuing yet another ‘slaughter of innocents’ in Lebanon, where were you when Hezbollah’s missiles forced 60,000 civilians to evacuate their homes in northern Israel? And when Hezbollah’s missiles started fires that destroyed thousands of acres of land in Israel? And when a Hezbollah missile killed the Druze children? If you said nothing about all of that, we don’t care what you think about what’s happening in Lebanon. If you had told me a few years back that one day the self-styled anti-racist left would be silent when tens of thousands of Jews were forced into internal exile by militant anti-Semites, but would fume and rage when the Jewish State fought for the right of those Jews to return home, I’d have struggled to believe you.

The terrible truth is that Israel has little choice but to seek the weakening of Hezbollah. Both economically and spiritually, Israel cannot tolerate the wholesale evacuation of the north of its country. Nor can it risk ‘another 7 October’, which Hezbollah had been mulling. Back to Macron: what would he do if tens of thousands of French civilians were driven from their homes and many French children were slaughtered by a foreign-sponsored army across the border in Belgium? I wager he would take action, and that he would expect his allies to at least name the terror group that menaced France in such dire fashion. That’s all Israel wants too, M Macron.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.