Brendan O'Neill: The West is complicit in Hamas’s torture of the hostages

The recognition of Palestine is a sick reward for Hamas’s anti-Semitic atrocities.

We know why Hamas would drag two Jews underground and starve them: because it is an army of anti-Semites founded with the express intention of persecuting Jews. We know why it would humiliate the Jews further by taunting them on film, forcing one to dig his own grave for the cameras and capturing the other weeping in ravenous pain: because it revels in the psychological torment of what it views as a ‘lesser people’. And we know why it would marshal these two skeletal men – Evyatar David, 24, and Rom Bravslavski, 21 – to the end of horrifying the people of Israel: because its sole motivation is to wound, ideally fatally, the Jewish State.

But here’s my question: how do we explain Hamas’s lack of shame over what it inflicted on those two Jews? What lies behind the pride with which it paraded its crimes before the world media? To mimic the Nazis and jail Jews for being Jews before reducing them to raw-boned shadows of their former selves – that’s one thing. But to boast about it, to publish the videos, to show the world the inhuman consequences of your fascistic delirium – that’s another thing entirely. Why is Hamas so content to revel in its aping of the racist hysterias of the past?

It’s because it feels emboldened. It senses that it enjoys a kind of moral impunity among the opinion-shaping classes of the West. It knows our activist classes and influencers have supped so giddily on the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia that even this, even these dystopic images of Jews half-starved by armed anti-Semites, will not be sufficient to steer them back to moral reason. It knows that this horror, too, will be blamed on Israel. The enslavement of young David and Braslavski to the twisted cause of hurting the Jewish nation is a testament to the evil of Hamas. Hamas’s cockiness in releasing sick images of their suffering is a testament to the moral disarray of us.

As soon as I saw the grim clips of the two emaciated Jews, I knew this was a boastful display by Hamas of the cultural power it enjoys over many in the West, of its virtual untouchability in a world driven half-mad by hatred for Israel. In one clip, Mr David feebly wields a spade to scoop up a little dirt in the dank tunnel he’s been jailed in for 667 days. ‘What I’m doing now is digging my own grave’, he says. In another, Mr Braslavski is shown on a makeshift bed, writhing in famished agony. He sobs as he describes his predicament. Humanity should be horrified both by the torture of these Jews and by the confidence with which their torturers have displayed to the world their evil deeds.

Hamas knows it is treated as a blameless entity by the many in the West. It knows that while it is not seen as morally spotless – the cultural elites occasionally issue perfunctory condemnations of its war crimes – it is seen as the less wicked party to this war. It knows it is often wholly erased from commentary on the conflict, everywhere from the BBC to CNN to the cesspit of Israel-hate that is social media. It knows its ongoing warmongering is rarely mentioned, that the deaths of its terrorists in combat are all but memory-holed, folded into the broader claim that Israel has ‘murdered 60,000 people’. It knows the Gaza calamity is widely – and falsely – viewed as an evil of Israel’s making.

It openly revels in this blamelessness bestowed on it by our Israelophobic intellectuals. ‘We are the victims of the occupation… therefore nobody should blame us for the things we do’, said one of its leaders, Ghazi Hamad, shortly after the pogrom of 7 October 2023. And, in certain circles, no one does. On campuses, on marches, on the left, in the liberal press, the cry goes out: Israel is the sole author of the Gaza horror. As that army of Ivy League brat radicals at Harvard University said on 7 October itself, Israel is ‘entirely responsible’ for all violence in the Middle East.

Hamas’s release of those Nazi-like images of two Jews it abducted, starved and then humiliated for the titillation of the world’s anti-Semites was an assertion of the mad power it enjoys over the Gaza narrative. It knows that no matter the depths of depravity it sinks to, still the story will be that Israel is the problem. It knows it can send a 6,000-strong army to invade Israel, rape Israeli women, kill Israeli civilians, kidnap Jews and subject them to fascistic abasements, and still the influential of the West will point the finger at the Jewish State. David and Braslavski’s suffering was arguably intensified by this ethical disorder in the West – certainly Hamas was exploiting that ethical disorder when it released footage of their suffering in the full knowledge that many would just look the other way.

Worse, Hamas senses that its crimes are not only forgiven but rewarded, too. That it released the clips of David and Braslavski in the days after Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney said they would recognise the State of Palestine was striking – and sickening. Hamas has clearly got the message that persecuting Jews has benefits. That carrying out a pogrom can be fruitful. That killing more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis has its rewards. Including the reward of nationhood. Starmer’s promise to recognise Palestine proves ‘victory’ is ‘closer than we expected’, gloated Hamas. Ghazi Hamad went further, cheering Starmer’s promise as ‘one of the fruits of 7 October’.

What Starmer, Macron and Carney have done is unforgivable. Yes, all three paid lip service to the importance of disarming Hamas. But to confer statehood on a territory that is still part-ruled by these barbarous militants who take pleasure in the persecution and murder of Jews is a grotesque betrayal not only of Israel but of basic decency, too. The footage of David digging his grave and Braslavski sobbing in pain should haunt Starmer, for Hamas views his promise of recognition as a prize for such savagery. It believes its brutish violence helped to hurry along the process of statehood. And it is right to. How can Western leaders call for the release of David and Braslavski even as they decorate with statehood the monsters who abducted them? It is perverse.

It feels like Hamas is holding not just 50 Israelis hostage but the West itself. Every press release of this monstrous movement is taken as good coin by our media. Its atrocities are overlooked, even forgiven, in the maniacal rush to damn Israel as the world’s wickedest state. Even clear, self-published footage of its crimes against humanity has not been enough to arouse the influential from their Israelophobic stupour. Now we know: our cultural elites didn’t only take the wrong side in this war started by Hamas – they emboldened that side, too.

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