SPECIAL REPORT: Axis of resistance versus light unto the nations – a battle for civilisation
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SPECIAL REPORT: Axis of resistance versus light unto the nations – a battle for civilisation

In his essay marking the anniversary of the October 7 attack, journalist John Ware answers fundamental questions about Iran's relentless quest to annihilate Israel and what it tells us about the origins and outcome of this conflict

Assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh meets Iran's Ali Khamenei in Tehran, 2012/ Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh meets Iran's Ali Khamenei in Tehran, 2012/ Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme heard a Tehran-based academic, Professor Mohammad Marandi, say that the current Israel regime “believes they are a chosen people. They have exceptional rights, and therefore they have exceptional rights to the whole region. It’s not just Palestine today. It goes beyond the borders of Palestine.” 

His interviewer Mishal Husain was criticised for not challenging him. It would be nice to think her lapse was because the statement was so freighted with prejudice, biblical exegesis and humbug that, unusually for her, she was lost for words.

So let me make a stab at it.

It’s true that Bibi Netanyahu’s cabinet includes extremists who see Jews like them as God’s chosen in the supremacist sense.

But Professor Mirandi ventured into malicious territory, and he knew it.

He knew that antisemites habitually corrupt the meaning of “chosenness” in Judaism as being about racial and spiritual superiority, whereas in essence it’s about God holding the Israelites to a high standard so that, as the Prophet Isiah put it, they can serve as a “light unto the nations until the end of the earth.”

Or, to put it at its simplest, God instructed the ancestors of Jews to be “mensches” by helping to make the world a better place.

Sayed Mohammad Marandi

In my experience, most Jews would rather Isiah had never uttered that noble aspiration. To quote Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?”

Professor Mirandi is also guilty of the most blatant humbug. I’ll reveal why in a moment.

But first to the questions and the endless, anguished moral vicissitudes of this conflict that have, like so many others, preoccupied me in the search for answers.

So, as we mark the anniversary of the October 7 – and as both Israel and Iran nudge the Middle East towards the brink of all-out war – I’d like to share my thoughts. This is not easy stuff.

Why has Iran, a majority Shi’ite Muslim country, forged an alliance with Hamas whose members are their religious rivals and who belong to the Sunni sect of  Islam?

On its face, there’s no logical reason why Iran should have been Hamas’s paymaster for three decades. Israel, of course, does not occupy any Iranian territory since their borders are 1,200 miles apart. Furthermore, Iran has shown little commitment to improving the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

If Iran’s grateful Palestinian supporters doubt this, they should ask themselves why so little of the $4bn Iran is reported to have given Hamas over the last three decades has been for humanitarian aid?

The lion’s share of funding has gone on Hamas’s war machine, transforming it from a rag-tag bunch of suicide bombers into a fighting force almost half the size of the British army.

As the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said in 2021: “Our complete gratitude is extended to the Islamic Republic of Iran. They have provided us with money, weapons and expertise. They have supported us in everything.”

Nor are Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Hamas natural bedfellows.

Far from it.

Shi’ite and Sunni Islam have been intermittently at each other’s throats since the Prophet Mohamed’s death in AD 632.

A fundamental doctrinal chasm has existed between these rival sects these past 1,400 years.

Shi’ite Iran believes its leaders are the direct descendants of the Prophet. In 2010 the current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even issued a fatwah demanding that people obey him as the Prophet’s earthly “deputy.”

John Ware

In March 2019, the head of Iran’s Broadcasting Authority Abdolali Ali-Asgari made clear today’s Shi’ite dominated Iran believes its natural and destined place is leader of the Islamic world, even though 90% of the planet’s 2bn Muslims belong to Shi’ism’s rival sect, Sunni Islam. Iranians, not Jews, were in fact God’s chosen people, he said  – chosen to “shoulder the heavy burden of truth and progress in the world” after the Jews “pursued worldly ornaments and behaved unjustly…….they declined and have become wandering [Jews]. However, they have kept the world’s financial power in their hands, of course.”

In other words, the regime that actually sees itself as religiously, culturally and racially superior to every other branch of Islam – and every other faith – is the one Professor Marandi supports in Tehran. And that, of course, is echoed by Iran’s proxy Hizbollah whose machine gun adorned flag carries the inscription “Party of God.”

Sunni Muslims more modestly believe religious authority comes from the Quran and the Prophet’s traditions.

At heart, what Iran’s unholy alliance with Sunni Hamas is really all about is part and parcel of its efforts to convince the rest of the Muslim world of the legitimacy to its supremacist claim.

What better way of doing this than by actively helping to liberate Islam’s third holiest site, the Al Aqsa Mosque, while the rest of the Sunni Arab world stands by and does next to nothing?

“We place all our capabilities at your disposal in the battle for the defence of Jerusalem”, Iran’s most powerful military commander Major General Qassem Soleiman told Sinwar in 2017.

In truth, the Palestinians have become pawns in Iran’s overarching strategy– not just in its quest for the approbation of the entire Islamic world, but also its wider goal of increasing Islam’s influence on the world.

What it is not is what your average London based fanboy of the Hamas-Hizbollah “resistance” would say it’s about, just “doing something to stop (Israel’s) genocidal regime.”

So is Iran’s alliance with Hamas the latest chapter in the clash of civilisation?

It certainly feels like it.

Without Iran as Hamas’s paymasters, Hamas could never have carried out October 7. This has precipitated today’s looming regional conflagration in which the West will have to choose just how far its support for Israel extends.

Until the Islamic revolution in 1979, Tehran had enjoyed civil relations with Jerusalem with three El-Al flights a week between the countries.   But since then, Iran has seen the West, Jews, Westernised Muslims and Iranians as seeking to prevent it from fulfilling its divine mission of spreading Islam to the world.

Why so little of the $4bn Iran is reported to have given Hamas over the last three decades has been for humanitarian aid?

In the Khomeinist narrative, Zionism was created to divide and subjugate Muslims. “From its inception, the Islamic movement has been afflicted by the Jews for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda”, wrote Ayatollah Khomeini in 1970.

The visceral antisemitism that’s now endemic to Iran came with the Ayatollah on his flight home to Tehran from exile in Paris on 1 February 1979.

Yet even the deeply antisemitic Khomeini has been no match for his successor as current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. A study by the Tony Blair Institute in 2019 showed that whilst hostility towards Israel’s existence appeared in only 40% of Khomeini’s speeches, it was present in 90% of Khamenei’s speeches (and 100% in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s).

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

In Khamenei’s fevered brain, ISIS was created to divert criticism of Zionism (a smear that also attracted some notable UK based anti-Zionists) and the Saudi royal family are the descendants of Jews. According to Professor Meir Litvak who specialises in the study of modern Shi’ism and Iran at Tel Aviv’s Department of Middle Eastern and African History, this paranoia has its roots in a belief that Jews created Wahhabism in order to destroy Islam from within, and that  Israel was created by the West in order to fragment the Muslim world and pave the way for the domination of Islam.

Indeed, the Iranians believe Sunni Islam is “the Islam of the primitive Bedouins” explains the Farsi-speaking Professor Litvak.  When I was last in Tel Aviv, he showed me a large collection of Iranian published Wahhabis – caricatured to look like Jews associated with the full gamut of antisemitic tropes: evil eyes, snakes, blood libel, etc. “When you want to slander someone in Iran, you invent Jewish origins”, explains Litvak. “In Iran, Jews are a metaphor for evil”.

In January 2022, referring to 7th century battles fought between Muslims and Jews, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commander of the Navy, General Alireza Tangsiri told Iranian TV: “Are the Saud clan really Muslims? They are the same Jews who were in Arabia back then.”

What about the UK? How strong is the Iranian regime’s influence here?

Following the protests in Iran against the regime that began in September 2022, the IRCG violently oppressed not only its own citizens in Iran but attempted to do the same to Iranian dissidents in the UK (some of whom joined thousands of Jews in Hyde Park yesterday waving Israeli flags and placards with the faces of hostages still held by Hamas.)

The regime publicly called for the capture or killing of dissidents trying to hold it to account for its widespread human rights abuses which, as the then UK security minister Tom Tugendhat revealed included “very real and specific threats towards UK-based journalists…and their families” working for the prominent Persian language news channel, Iran International.  So severe were these threats that the station relocated to the US.

What about the regime’s political presence here?

Britain also has its share of Khomeinist apologists here, notably the Islamic Centre of England in London’s Maida Vale. The ICE and its director, Hojjat al-Islam Seyyed Mousavi, are the official religious representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the UK. The ICE is distinct from the Iranian Embassy in London, which is the official diplomatic representation of the Government of Iran.

The ICE trustees allowed a candlelit vigil to be held at its premises eulogising the aforementioned IRCG Quds force commander Major General Soleimani following his assassination by a US drone in 2020 . The Pentagon said Soleimani as “actively developing plans to attack US diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”

Then there’s Massoud Shadjareh, the 72-year-old chair of the London based Islamic Human Rights Commission, (IHRC Ltd) established in 1997 which says it is “an independent campaign, research and advocacy NGO that struggles for justice for all peoples regardless of their racial, confessional or political background promotes human rights and equality.”

Shadjareh is reported at the ICE vigil for General Soleiman to have said, “We aspire to be like him.”   He also co-authored a paper in 2008 in which he wrote: “We are all Hizbollah” and described Ayatollah Khomeini as “a torch of light for the whole of mankind”.

Shi’ite Iran believes its leaders are the direct descendants of the Prophet. In 2010 the current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei even issued a fatwah demanding that people obey him as the Prophet’s earthly “deputy.”

A request from the Jewish Chronicle to respond to these allegations was met with a torrent of florid and intemperate language: “half-truths and innuendos… your journalism is a facade … you have previously distorted facts …. whitewashing Israel’s crimes… you reflexively malign… client journalism… you…work relentlessly to vilify… no doubt what you intend (to) create fear in the Muslim community… We will not be cowed into silence… we will be publishing this reply in full for the sake of transparency and honesty.”  And yet nowhere did Shadjareh respond directly to the specific allegations.

The IHRC is one of the organisers of the Al Quds march in London – an event which for years became a hate fest against Jews as marchers brandished scores of Hizbollah flags chanting “Khaybar, khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Mohamed Sa’ Y’ud” (Watch out Jews, the army of Mohamed is returning).  The flags were banned in 2019 after the government designated Hizbollah’s political wing a terrorist organisation.

When it comes to the question of human rights, the  name – the Islamic Human Rights Commission – is something of an oxymoron since its focus on human rights abuses is on countries other than Iran  which has one of the world’s worst human rights records. Among the multitude of abuses most recently listed by the US State Department are the following:

• 798 executions in 2023, up 37% from 2022

• Enforced mandatory dress code

• 22,000 detained in connection with the 2022-23 civil protests

• Arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government and its agents

• Enforced disappearance

• Torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government or on behalf of its agents

• Intensified restrictions on religious freedom, particularly against members of the Baha’i community

• Harsh and life-threatening prison conditions

• Absence of judicial independence

• Unlawful recruitment or use of child soldiers

• Arrest and prosecution of journalists

• Restrictions on internet freedom

• Restrictions on the right to leave the country

• Restrictions of religious freedom

• Inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections

Shadjareh has made it clear he has no time for what he calls the Western “formulation of human rights theory”.  The concept, he argues, is “politically motivated” – its genesis having been ”led by advocates with narrow political agendas of their own.“  Which particular advocate does Shadjareh have in mind?

A “leading Zionist”, of course, the late professor Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. Lauterpacht’s offence was giving “precedence” to the human rights of “the individual” when Lauterpacht proposed an International Bill of Rights of Man in 1945 and which Shadjareh blames for culminating in the Universal  Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN three years later. Thereafter Lauterpacht became one of the leading international jurists of the 20th century.

Shadjareh, by contrast, says the West has the concept of human rights back to front. He emphasises that in Islam the rights of the individual “belong first to Allah, then the community and then the individual. Compare this with the western conception of Human Rights in which the individual is given precedence, and thus has the absolute right to be as permissive as he wants, without society having any collective right to be moral.”

Tehran as Iranian leader spoke last week

He appears to want our social order to be subject to “divinely granted rights”, for it is these rights “revealed for human beings” that the IHRC says it champions,  rather than the man-made variety of laws that pertain here and all over the West. He is also reported to have denied that human rights abuses take place in Iran.  Is that I wonder because the IHRC doesn’t consider the long list of abuses published by the US State Department to qualify as abuse given that they are a function of Iran’s divinely ordained Sharia legal system?

Like the Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrival in Paris from Tehran in 1979, Shadjareh brought more than just his belongings when he arrived in London.

How is the Islamic Human Rights Commission Ltd funded and how has it responded to Israel’s attack on Hamas and Hizbollah?

Accounts show that IHRC Ltd has received almost £1.73m over the last six years  from a  trust registered with the Charity Commission with the identical name (IHRC Trust). The trust is also based at the same London address as the IHRC Ltd. It says most of its income comes from private donations.

Over those six years HMRC gave the IHRC Trust a gift aid refund of £375,000. That aside, it’s hard to understand what Massoud Shadjareh and those who share his world view are doing here in Britain.  His public disdain for our values seems so visceral.

The IHRC’s latest demand, in the wake of Israel’s assassination of Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, is to the new Home Secretary to de-proscribe both Hamas and Hizbollah  as terrorist organisations. Both are part of Iran’s network of militias and political groups which Iran calls the “Axis of Resistance.”

What happened to Iran the last time it fought a war?

It was with Iran’s neighbour Iraq from 1980-88 after the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussain invaded in the wake of the Islamic revolution in an attempt to re-assert control over the Shatt al-Arab waterway which Iraq had ceded to Iran in 1975.

Both sides claimed victory but in truth it was a stalemate at a cost of half a million lives, soldiers, civilians – and child soldiers.

Here’s a New York Times dispatch about the front line of the Iran-Iraq war in February 1984 on Iran’s routine use of children as suicide bombers:

“Their ticket to Paradise is the blood-red headband and the small metal key that they wear into battle. ‘Sar Allah,’ (‘Warriors of God’), some of the headbands read in Farsi script, identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against Iraq declared by their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The headbands and the keys are worn by young boys, aged 12 to 17, who are recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive indoctrination in the Shi’ite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent weaponless into battle against Iraqi armour. Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. Across the back of their khaki-coloured shirts is stencilled the slogan: ‘I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven.’”

So on past performance, we can see why the looming war between Israel and Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” feels civilisational, a Western facing country again confronting a Jihadist culture whose history is antithetical to everything Western people value in the 21st century – principally life itself.

And yet the Iran-Hamas-Hizbollah-Houthis axis, mistaken for ‘resistance’ to colonial oppression (rather than being seen as itself a colonial enterprise), garners increasing support among many in the West who consider themselves human rights supporters. Others, who otherwise condemned October 7, have concluded that the scale of deaths, mainly from Israeli air strikes, (reportedly 42,000 in Gaza, of which some 18,000 Israel claims are members of Hamas)   has simply put Israel beyond the pale.

There is therefore a live question, the answer to which no longer seems cast iron certain: if this conflict develops into a middle east conflagration, will the West actually commit to Israel, in what way, and to what extent?

The Sunday Times asks “Who Do You Want To Win?” Why the answer is not as obvious as it might seem.

Brooding over the spectre of a full-scale war between Israel and the “axis of resistance”, the Sunday Times columnist Matthew Syed posed this question: Who do you want to win?

Let me anticipate the response from certain readers: Israel doesn’t deserve to win, I hear them say. How could you possibly want Israel to win given the tens of thousands of uninvolved Palestinian and Lebanese civilians Israel’s jets have killed, to say nothing of the hardship and deprivation of so many more who’ve been displaced, many of them having also lost their homes?

For the uninvolved, there are no words. This war – like all wars – has been unbearable. And for those watching the intimate horror of its consequences daily out of Gaza, and now Lebanon where everyone is a cameraman with their phones, it is entirely understandable to respond to the clips of lifeless children exhumed from bombed rubble by believing that the perpetrators must be evil. But why is it that blame is assigned without qualification to Israel, and not to Hamas, who have run their own brutal theocracy in Gaza for almost two decades, and who began this particular holy war by initiating a massacre on Israeli soil on October 7 2023?

The fact is that all wars are hideous because war means fighting and fighting means killing. It’s also true that all the killings of this war are not an answer to Syed’s question: which side do you support?

Why is that not an answer, I hear Israel’s critics snap back? In the case of Gaza, the civilian death toll is so great, it’s genocide. And its heading that way in Lebanon, the death toll is rising so fast.

Except that what has happened is not genocide, the lawful definition of which (by reference to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) requires “the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group…”  Contrary to some media reporting, the International Court of Justice did not make a ruling last January on whether the claim by South Africa of genocide against Israel was plausible. Rather, the ICJ decided that Palestinians had a “plausible right” to be protected from genocide.

The commitment to the annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state is irrespective of settler expansion, settler violence, checkpoints or any other abuses of Palestinian human rights.

Moreover, in both Lebanon and Gaza, the death toll circulated does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants although several leading respected military analysts have said they are satisfied that the IDF’s operations and rules of engagement have been rigorous compared to the British Army and our western allies.   That is, the Israelis are managing, despite the combatants hiding deliberately within civilian populations, as well as, if not better than other armies. Furthermore, the fighting was not initiated by Israel but Hamas and Hizballah.

The IDF’s multiple advance warnings by leaflet drops, and tens of millions of phone calls and text messages give the lie to genocide.  Are these imperfect warnings? To be sure. Some warnings have turned to be too short as the IDF seek to strike the right balance between surprising its enemy and minimising collateral injuries and death. And deciding that balance is playing God.

That’s what happens in war: the Generals, the lawyers advising them on what merits an air strike, and the politicians defining the war aims do play God: weighing up the value of enemy death and destruction against the likely collateral damage in innocent lives. Because war IS a fight to the death, until one or other side gives up. That is the risk you take when you start a war, especially in a battlescape as crowded and complex as Gaza with its 300 miles of tunnels. And Hamas and Hizbollah started this one, knowing full well that in starting it, they risked tens of thousands of lives because of its unique complexity.

Has the IDF been sufficiently restrained? Have they always struck the right balance?

The Americans think not, and the sheer number of women and children who have died in air strikes especially lends weight to that. There have almost certainly been war crimes by individual soldiers, as there almost always are in all wars. But has Israel committed genocide? Unequivocally not. The intention is simply not present.   And in this contest over values, intention matters.

OK,  but isn’t Israel the real aggressor?

A Saudi owned newspaper has reported that the October 7 Hamas led attack had been nine years in the planning, with a decision to implement the plan in 2021 – a full two years before October 7 . Months before the attack, surveillance soldiers warned of Hamas activity on the Gaza border. The attack was not provoked by anything Israel had done in the immediate preceding days.

Nor was Hizbollah’s opening rocket salvo on October 8 into northern Israel the following day provoked by anything the IDF did. Some further 9,000 rockets have followed. Over 200,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes on Israel’s northern and southern borders.

That may be a fraction of the Palestinians and Lebanese who’ve been displaced. But when war breaks out, it’s not a numbers game. It’s each side’s goal that counts. And Israel’s goal is not to kill Muslims but rather to protect its borders and get 200,000 citizens back to their homes where they can be sure they are not going to be burned, shot, raped or rocketed. Meanwhile, We know the aims of Hamas and Hizbollah are openly declared: the annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state.

Continued bombing of Hamas and Hizbollah is surely not the solution?

A problem inheres in the notion of ‘solution.’ For Iran and its proxies, Isreal needs to be destroyed, not because it occupies this or that portion of the land, but because it exists. Therefore, the solution to Israel’s security and survival has to involved the destruction of Hamas and Hizbollah and their military infrastructure since both these organisations designated as terrorists are both committed to the destruction of Israel.  “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region,” says Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei. “It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

This commitment to the annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state is irrespective of settler expansion, settler violence, checkpoints, IDF excesses by poorly disciplined units, or any other abuses of Palestinian human rights. And here is the Hamas leadership saying the same thing – no ifs or buts: “The Al Aqsa Flood [Hamas’s name for October 7] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve and the capabilities to fight”, said Hamas Politburo member Ghazi Hamad on Lebanese LBC TV on 24 October 2023. “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”   Several other Politburo members repeated this threat. Should Israel have just waited for the repeat pogrom?

Polling shows that overall support from Palestinians for the October 7 Hamas attack remains high – around 66%.

Wishful thinkers have sometimes earnestly sought to persuade Jews there is hidden ambiguity from Israel’s sworn enemies in these unambiguous declarations, that they would settle for Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders. October 7 has finally exploded that myth.  Even if retreating to the Green Line did bring peace, it would in any case be unthinkable for any Israel government Left or Right. A 9-mile waistband at its narrowest point would allow an invader to split the country advancing simultaneously north and south.

The notion that the “Free Palestine” protests dominating our streets this past year were only about freeing the West Bank has also been shown to be largely mythical.  Abhorrent slogans at many of these demos have  proved that for many – perhaps most – of the Keffiyeh clad hate mobs “From the river to the sea” means exactly what it says. Here, for example, at the weekend in their own words was the “Manchester contingent on London Free Palestine demo” promoting their banner: ”MCR (Manchester) don’t want no two state we want 1948.”  However, in 1948, six Arab armies invaded the newly established Israel in order to free it of Jews. They failed. Do these Mancunians actually understand that returning to 1948 means genocide of the Jews?

Missiles launched from Iran towards Israel streak across the night sky as seen from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Surely Israel’s sustained bombing of Gaza and Lebanon will only generate more hatred amongst Palestinians and the Lebanese and therefore more “resistance”? 

It probably will, except there’s not much room left for more hatred than already exists. Polling shows that overall support from Palestinians for the October 7 Hamas attack remains high – around 66%.

What about the way Israelis now view the Palestinians?  We don’t hear much sympathy for their death and destruction of their homes which has been many times worse than was inflicted on Israelis on October 7?

There is some truth in this and here’s why: the sadism and exhilaration with which Hamas carried out killings of soldiers and civilians on October 7, was also perpetrated by ordinary Palestinians who flooded through the border fence after Hamas and took part in the abuse and murders, and thereafter hid, abused, and killed Israeli hostages in Gaza.

This has dulled Israeli empathy. Similarly, there was no great empathy by the British public for German civilians in 1945.

Israelis are still traumatised, and one can understand why.  The following are sample clips from Hamas’s own cameras included in the IDF’s latest compilation of footage shown to me and other journalists last week but considered too dark for public release. Despite claims from some who see Hamas as “resistance fighters” that there is little or no evidence of Hamas targeting civilians on October 7 – a truly preposterous claim – this IDF compilation has been updated 24 times – and counting – because material continues to be recovered:

“Shoot them! This one’s alive” says a Hamas gunman breathless with excitement at finding some prey who’d desperately hoped to survive when others around him hadn’t. A burst of gunfire follows. “Bring more magazines…” says another killer looking round for more prey.

”You dog” spits out a gunman firing into his victim. “We didn’t kill this one” says another as, in the darkness, his flashlight catching the frozen face of a young female soldier cowering under a bed. She cries out, a childlike ear-piercing scream of excruciating terror. “Shoot her in the head” says the killer. So, he attempts to, but still isn’t sure he killed her. “Be patient” says his accomplice”, then snaps: “In the head! In the head!”  There is so much of this unspeakable stuff. Seeing people shot in cold blood is not new. Seeing people shot by men literally quivering with excitement and can barely get their words out because they’re spoilt for targets, really is.

Finally, there is compelling evidence that women and men were subject to the most sadistic sexual violence and mutilation, including of genitals before being slaughtered. There appears to have been a pattern of the most appalling abuse. Flat out denials from Hamas we expect.  Attempts by some journalists mostly in alternative media outlets to discredit the emerging evidence, are frankly obscene.

What about the inevitable political solution? All wars have to end with diplomacy one and the that solution must surely be two states, but Benjamin Netanyahu has done nothing to advance this let along any kind of political solution.

True – on all counts, although it’s worth reminding that both the Palestinian leaders Presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbass rejected two states, the former in 2000 at Camp David, and the latter in 2008.

Continuing with the status quo will lead to more bloodshed and oppression of Palestinians (although a fair bit of that comes from their own Palestinian Authority, but is rarely reported here).  The status quo will also worsen and the pariah status for Israel, and encourage more antisemitism, and more pogroms.

However, recent polling shows there’s currently no appetite for a two-state solution amongst ordinary Palestinians and there arguably never really was. Most say they still support armed struggle  as have their leaders since the 1920s. Which Palestinian leader ever supported a two-state solution? Not even Arafat, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace together with Yitzhak Rabin, following the Oslo Accords, but then reverted to funding suicide bombings.  Netanyahu has also set his face against a Palestinian state, and nor is there at the moment majority support for one on the Israeli side  although it’s generally believed that – unlike Netanyahu – a majority would support two states provided they were persuaded that the PLO in Ramallah had genuinely reconciled itself to co-existing with a Jewish state.

Women mourn during the funeral of their relatives at the Druze town of Majdal Shams. Twelve children and young people were killed when a rocket fired by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon hit a football field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Credit: Ilia Yefimovich/dpa/Alamy Live News

President Abbas, aged 89 next month, may have just told the UN assembly in New York “We recognise Israel”  but neither centre right nor centre left Israelis regard that as being matched by the rejectionist domestic narrative emanating in Arabic almost daily from PLO elements and media outlets in Ramallah. For two-states coming out of its decade long coma, there will need to be seismic changes on both sides and a gigantic leap of faith, but someone has to set that ball rolling and Netanyahu appears to have prioritised his own survival against doing that for fear of the religious and nationalist extremists he relies on to keep him in office, resigning in protest.

The worry among Israel’s allies is that all they see from Netanyahu is military achievements, and nothing on the political front. “My biggest fear would be that that Israel doesn’t know when to stop and its military achievements don’t become political achievements” warns Ambassador Dennis Ross, who played a leading role in shaping US involvement in the Middle East peace process in the 1990s.

The worry amongst Israel’s allies is that all they see from Netanyahu is military achievements, and nothing on the political front.

He’s right, although making a sustainable peace with the PLO will be easier said than done, given the amount of incitement in Palestinian textbooks and media, from imams and from politicians that goes on in the West Bank– again largely unreported here.  Nonetheless, unless Israel takes its military wins and at least tries to turn them into a political outcome, Israel can forget about Saudi help in rebuilding Gaza and this crisis will go from bad to worse. And that would be a huge, missed opportunity. The Saudi Crown Prince, known as MBS shares with Israel an understanding of the threat to stability posed by the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is of course, its Palestinian offspring.

However, Before any of that can be considered, Israel has first to secure a decisive military win not just with Hizbollah but also Iran. The regional war clouds are gathering – a war between two different civilisations.

One side – the Jewish side – values life over death, despite paradoxically having killed so many on the Arab/Iranian side, which in the past has set greater store by martyrdom and Paradise. But it should not be overlooked that the Iranian side is also involved in the war in Yemen, in which 350,00 have died so far – nine times more than in Gaza. And that’s aside from Iran’s disastrous war with Iraq in the 1980s, or Hizbollah’s support for President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, which has so far claimed 580,000 lives and counting.

So, what is the answer to that question: Who do you want to win?

Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s response has provoked the most profound moral angst and confusion amongst so many.

No conflict in my lifetime has been anything like so divisive, as this phase of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A toxic polarity has infected not just the public realm but our homes, amongst friends, family and colleagues at work.

Which returns us to Matthew Syed’s question: Who do you want to win?

The people of Israel and the rest of the West – with, yes, many iniquities, injustices and sometimes double standards?

Or Iran, its Ayatollahs, Hamas, Hizbollah and the Houtis, proud members of what they  call the “Axis of Resistance”?

The answer, surely, depends on who you consider more likely to become the permanent enemy of civilisation:

The Jewish country, that is a speck on the map and aims to remain Jewish despite being surrounded by 22 Arab countries and 57 Muslim countries worldwide?

Or the Iranian axis, which openly aims to foster Islamist Sharia law worldwide?

To put it another way: which side shines the brighter, more positive light for the world’s future?

The values that have flowed from the Prophet Isaiah’s invocation to the Israelites to act in a way that is a “light unto the nations”?

Or the values we are told have informed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s “torch of light for the whole of mankind”

Last Friday before the entire world, Ruhollah Khomeini’s heir Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blessed Hamas’s October 7progrom as not only “correct” but also “rational and legal.”

Mankind has surely got its answer.

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