Are they really coming home? The Jewish world scarcely dares believe it. Is this long nightmare finally over?
Under the deal that’s been agreed, Hamas will release the 20 Israeli hostages who remain alive and the bodies of another 27 over the next few days.
For the rest of the world, this crisis started with the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on October 7 2023, when some 1200 Israelis were slaughtered and more than 250 were kidnapped into Gaza. For the Jewish world, this horror began on the festival of Simchat Torah which starts on Monday evening.
It is a festival of rejoicing. For the past two years, however, it has been celebrated in the shadow of grief and horror. If the hostages return as now anticipated, this will relieve the agony felt by Israel and the Jewish world and provide an element of much-needed closure on that particular chapter of this story.
There will be rejoicing over the hostages’ return. How could there not be? But we in the Jewish world will also remember all those who were murdered, tortured, raped, starved, burnt alive. The grief and the trauma will never leave us. Many families in Israel have been shattered by the loss of loved ones; the young conscripts who emerged from Gaza alive but with limbs missing; the young fathers who have returned from the war so haunted that they are almost like strangers to their dismayed families; the children who can’t adjust to their IDF soldier fathers having vanished and then returned.
Most viscerally, the belief that Israel is the one and only refuge from the enemies of the Jewish people has been damaged. Just as with the Nazi Holocaust, the Jewish world has been changed by this forever.
Commentators have rushed onto the air waves to declare that the war is now over. This is distinctly premature. Even if the hostages return, this is certainly not the end of the story.
This is merely the end of the first phase of what may turn into a truly epoch-defining moment. We have yet to see if the war in Gaza is over. That depends on whether Hamas disarms.
If they don’t, Israel now has carte blanche from America to finish the job of destroying Hamas as a military and governing force. Without the hostages whose plight has held Israel back for the past two years, the Israel Defence Forces will find that job far easier.
Once that is achieved, the great hope is for a third phase which would be truly historic — not just the end of the war with Hamas, but a regional peace in which the Arab world finally ends its century-old war of extermination against the Jewish national home in the land of Israel.
If any of this momentous development takes place, let us be very clear what and who have brought this about. Hamas and its Iranian patron have been brought to their knees by a combination of two implacable forces: Israel and US president Donald Trump.
It was Israel’s unrelenting military pressure that did it. Despite all the pressure on Israel for an immediate ceasefire throughout this entire period, to his undying credit Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu persisted with the war. As a result, the IDF defeated Hamas in more than three quarters of Gaza, and crippled Iran by decimating its proxy army Hezbollah in the course of a few astonishing hours.
But Israel’s coup-de-grace was its bombing raid against Hamas targets in Qatar’s capital, Doha. Scorned by Netanyahu’s foes — both inside and outside the country — as a botched operation and debacle because it failed to kill its intended targets, it nevertheless proved to be the deciding factor in securing the deal that’s been achieved.
That’s because it served notice on Qatar that Israel could hit it with impunity in its capital city, and that therefore the game was up. Qatar could no longer continue to play both sides, pretending to be the honest interlocutor between Israel and Hamas when it was sheltering and funding the terrorist group’s leaders and was shoring up its rejectionist strategy. So the raid persuaded Qatar to put pressure on Hamas to surrender its most devastating bargaining counter — the Israeli hostages.
From this we can all see what some of us have long argued — that this could have happened two years ago if America’s Biden administration had put pressure on Qatar instead of turning the screws on Israel as it so unspeakably did.
As it is, the price Israel is having to pay for the hostages’ return is appallingly high — the release of 250 Palestinian Arab terrorists serving life sentences for the murder of Israelis, plus another 1,700 Gazans imprisoned since the October 7 attacks. The fear that these men are being released in order to perpetrate more such atrocities against Israelis is very real.
But none of this would have been possible without Trump. His personal pressure on Qatar, Egypt and Turkey was undoubtedly significant. What was absolutely crucial above all, however, was his unwavering support for Israel in doing what it needed to do in Gaza, in Iran and in Doha. He came to understand what so many in the west refuse to acknowledge: that Hamas are genocidal fanatics with whom any negotiation is a fool’s errand.
This victory is down to both Trump and Netanyahu. You don’t have to approve of either of these men, you can be appalled by many things Trump does, you can hold Netanyahu ultimately responsible for the flawed strategy that allowed October 7 to occur — but this achievement is theirs.
That will stick in the craw of the legions of malcontents who wish them both ill. But let us be in no doubt about something else. This momentous development is the most profound and savage rebuke to all those people in the west who have unremittingly worked for the last two years to deny Israel a victory.
It is a rebuke to the UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney and Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese, who have lent their names to the most dishonest, malevolent and vicious campaign against an alleged ally that the so-called civilised world has ever experienced.
For the past two years, they and others with a similar world-view — and all four of them desperately trying to appease a Muslim population that is threatening their own countries no less than Israel — have been essential to Hamas in its strategy of psychological and diplomatic war against the Jewish state. These four leaders have led their countries in gaslighting Israel and the Jews, shedding crocodile tears over the hostages and over the rampant Jew-hatred in their own countries, and disseminating wall-to-wall lies and falsehoods produced by Hamas that have been swallowed by the west to defame, demonise and delegitimise Israel as a means to its eventual destruction.
This victory over Hamas has been achieved despite Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese; achieved in the teeth of everything they have been so dishonorably doing to ensure that Israel lost this desperate war of survival; and against the background of the Jew-hatred convulsing their own population that they did absolutely nothing to stop and a great deal to foment. Any claim to any moral authority that these four leaders ever had has been shot. No-one should anyone view anything they say with respect ever again.
The war against the Jews is far from over. Iran is re-arming and regrouping. Israel will probably have to go to to war against it once again. Qatar remains an enemy not just of Israel but of the west, which it is assiduously subverting through the Muslim Brotherhood that it leads. And the war against the Jews being waged by the haters of Israel and the west within the west will not only continue but may become ever more frenzied as western countries fall apart through social and cultural division and the accelerating crumbling of their own identity.
In the coming days, the Jewish world will hopefully rejoice at the return of its people from their underground tomb where we all feared they would be lost forever; but it will also mourn.
It will mourn those who have been lost on October 7, in the hellish dungeons of Gaza and in this terrible war.
And it will also mourn what we have so shatteringly learned in the past two terrible years: that when the Jews were faced with a second Holocaust, openly declared by Iran and Hamas, the world either didn’t care or was actually cheering it on.
We learned that far too many in the west were determined to deny the Jews the status of victims. Deny they had been victims of anything; ever. Deny that they were victimised now, on October 7 and in the war of self-defence that followed.
Instead, these western “progressives” were determined to stick it to the Jews, to blame them for their own extermination, to accuse them of being the prime source of evil in the world. They appropriated the word “genocide”, the term invented to describe the unparalleled evil that happened to the Jews under the Nazis and was now being openly threatened against the Jews once again, and instead accused the Jewish state of committing that monstrous crime by waging its war of defence against it.
They have stolen the word “genocide” from the Jews just as the Palestinian Arabs try to steal from the Jews their own homeland and their own history in the land of Israel. The west has aided the genocidal “Palestinian” agenda by turning Israel into the Jew among nations.
For this the west will never be forgiven. The Jewish people owe Trump a debt of gratitude. The four horsemen of the anti-Jewish apocalpyse, Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese, deserve nothing but contempt.
Israel is hopefully now emerging from a long nightmare. Western nations are descending into theirs.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
It is a festival of rejoicing. For the past two years, however, it has been celebrated in the shadow of grief and horror. If the hostages return as now anticipated, this will relieve the agony felt by Israel and the Jewish world and provide an element of much-needed closure on that particular chapter of this story.
There will be rejoicing over the hostages’ return. How could there not be? But we in the Jewish world will also remember all those who were murdered, tortured, raped, starved, burnt alive. The grief and the trauma will never leave us. Many families in Israel have been shattered by the loss of loved ones; the young conscripts who emerged from Gaza alive but with limbs missing; the young fathers who have returned from the war so haunted that they are almost like strangers to their dismayed families; the children who can’t adjust to their IDF soldier fathers having vanished and then returned.
Most viscerally, the belief that Israel is the one and only refuge from the enemies of the Jewish people has been damaged. Just as with the Nazi Holocaust, the Jewish world has been changed by this forever.
Commentators have rushed onto the air waves to declare that the war is now over. This is distinctly premature. Even if the hostages return, this is certainly not the end of the story.
This is merely the end of the first phase of what may turn into a truly epoch-defining moment. We have yet to see if the war in Gaza is over. That depends on whether Hamas disarms.
If they don’t, Israel now has carte blanche from America to finish the job of destroying Hamas as a military and governing force. Without the hostages whose plight has held Israel back for the past two years, the Israel Defence Forces will find that job far easier.
Once that is achieved, the great hope is for a third phase which would be truly historic — not just the end of the war with Hamas, but a regional peace in which the Arab world finally ends its century-old war of extermination against the Jewish national home in the land of Israel.
If any of this momentous development takes place, let us be very clear what and who have brought this about. Hamas and its Iranian patron have been brought to their knees by a combination of two implacable forces: Israel and US president Donald Trump.
It was Israel’s unrelenting military pressure that did it. Despite all the pressure on Israel for an immediate ceasefire throughout this entire period, to his undying credit Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu persisted with the war. As a result, the IDF defeated Hamas in more than three quarters of Gaza, and crippled Iran by decimating its proxy army Hezbollah in the course of a few astonishing hours.
But Israel’s coup-de-grace was its bombing raid against Hamas targets in Qatar’s capital, Doha. Scorned by Netanyahu’s foes — both inside and outside the country — as a botched operation and debacle because it failed to kill its intended targets, it nevertheless proved to be the deciding factor in securing the deal that’s been achieved.
That’s because it served notice on Qatar that Israel could hit it with impunity in its capital city, and that therefore the game was up. Qatar could no longer continue to play both sides, pretending to be the honest interlocutor between Israel and Hamas when it was sheltering and funding the terrorist group’s leaders and was shoring up its rejectionist strategy. So the raid persuaded Qatar to put pressure on Hamas to surrender its most devastating bargaining counter — the Israeli hostages.
From this we can all see what some of us have long argued — that this could have happened two years ago if America’s Biden administration had put pressure on Qatar instead of turning the screws on Israel as it so unspeakably did.
As it is, the price Israel is having to pay for the hostages’ return is appallingly high — the release of 250 Palestinian Arab terrorists serving life sentences for the murder of Israelis, plus another 1,700 Gazans imprisoned since the October 7 attacks. The fear that these men are being released in order to perpetrate more such atrocities against Israelis is very real.
But none of this would have been possible without Trump. His personal pressure on Qatar, Egypt and Turkey was undoubtedly significant. What was absolutely crucial above all, however, was his unwavering support for Israel in doing what it needed to do in Gaza, in Iran and in Doha. He came to understand what so many in the west refuse to acknowledge: that Hamas are genocidal fanatics with whom any negotiation is a fool’s errand.
This victory is down to both Trump and Netanyahu. You don’t have to approve of either of these men, you can be appalled by many things Trump does, you can hold Netanyahu ultimately responsible for the flawed strategy that allowed October 7 to occur — but this achievement is theirs.
That will stick in the craw of the legions of malcontents who wish them both ill. But let us be in no doubt about something else. This momentous development is the most profound and savage rebuke to all those people in the west who have unremittingly worked for the last two years to deny Israel a victory.
It is a rebuke to the UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney and Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese, who have lent their names to the most dishonest, malevolent and vicious campaign against an alleged ally that the so-called civilised world has ever experienced.
For the past two years, they and others with a similar world-view — and all four of them desperately trying to appease a Muslim population that is threatening their own countries no less than Israel — have been essential to Hamas in its strategy of psychological and diplomatic war against the Jewish state. These four leaders have led their countries in gaslighting Israel and the Jews, shedding crocodile tears over the hostages and over the rampant Jew-hatred in their own countries, and disseminating wall-to-wall lies and falsehoods produced by Hamas that have been swallowed by the west to defame, demonise and delegitimise Israel as a means to its eventual destruction.
This victory over Hamas has been achieved despite Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese; achieved in the teeth of everything they have been so dishonorably doing to ensure that Israel lost this desperate war of survival; and against the background of the Jew-hatred convulsing their own population that they did absolutely nothing to stop and a great deal to foment. Any claim to any moral authority that these four leaders ever had has been shot. No-one should anyone view anything they say with respect ever again.
The war against the Jews is far from over. Iran is re-arming and regrouping. Israel will probably have to go to to war against it once again. Qatar remains an enemy not just of Israel but of the west, which it is assiduously subverting through the Muslim Brotherhood that it leads. And the war against the Jews being waged by the haters of Israel and the west within the west will not only continue but may become ever more frenzied as western countries fall apart through social and cultural division and the accelerating crumbling of their own identity.
In the coming days, the Jewish world will hopefully rejoice at the return of its people from their underground tomb where we all feared they would be lost forever; but it will also mourn.
It will mourn those who have been lost on October 7, in the hellish dungeons of Gaza and in this terrible war.
And it will also mourn what we have so shatteringly learned in the past two terrible years: that when the Jews were faced with a second Holocaust, openly declared by Iran and Hamas, the world either didn’t care or was actually cheering it on.
We learned that far too many in the west were determined to deny the Jews the status of victims. Deny they had been victims of anything; ever. Deny that they were victimised now, on October 7 and in the war of self-defence that followed.
Instead, these western “progressives” were determined to stick it to the Jews, to blame them for their own extermination, to accuse them of being the prime source of evil in the world. They appropriated the word “genocide”, the term invented to describe the unparalleled evil that happened to the Jews under the Nazis and was now being openly threatened against the Jews once again, and instead accused the Jewish state of committing that monstrous crime by waging its war of defence against it.
They have stolen the word “genocide” from the Jews just as the Palestinian Arabs try to steal from the Jews their own homeland and their own history in the land of Israel. The west has aided the genocidal “Palestinian” agenda by turning Israel into the Jew among nations.
For this the west will never be forgiven. The Jewish people owe Trump a debt of gratitude. The four horsemen of the anti-Jewish apocalpyse, Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese, deserve nothing but contempt.
Israel is hopefully now emerging from a long nightmare. Western nations are descending into theirs.
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment