Keir Starmer’s moral cowardice has been totally exposed

Blower 6.2.25
Blower 6.2.25

It was after 11pm on October 7 2023, and I was heading home after a day at Telegraph HQ chronicling the deadliest anti-Jewish pogrom since the Shoah.

As I arrived near Marble Arch, I spotted fireworks shooting into the sky. My heart sank. A large group had gathered at the top of Edgware Road, partying and waving Palestinian flags.

It was unfathomable. Jihadi Einsatzgruppen, genocidal rapists, sadistic child-killers and paragliding kidnappers had broadcast their barbaric crimes live on social media throughout the day, and yet these people – in England, in our supposedly enlightened age – were celebrating, rather than protesting the atrocities. What was wrong with them, and what is wrong with us?

The 7/10 massacre clarified almost everything. It sorted the good from the evil. It uncovered fissures at the heart of our societies, and fundamental flaws in our approach to multiculturalism.

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It exposed the moral depravity of many of the West’s leaders, and of swathes of its over-credentialed but under-educated elite. It revealed the emptiness of woke ideology, of the post-war human rights edifice, of the anti-national brigade and of our theologically ignorant age. It shattered the delusion that history had ended, that anti-Semitism was a relic of the past, that humanity had moved beyond its basest instincts.

Yet 7/10 is turning out to have been a historic catastrophe for the terrorists. Hamas has been decimated, Hezbollah decapitated, and the Syrian regime annihilated. The Iranian Mullahs are on the brink. Israel has bounced back thanks to its people’s resilience.

Then there is Donald Trump: 7/10, and the Left’s reaction to it, was one of the factors that propelled him to power. He has pulled out of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), resumed unrestricted arms sales to Israel, slashed USAID, decreed a crackdown on anti-Semitism in America, ordered the expulsion of foreign citizens (including students) who back extremists such as Hamas and reimposed maximalist sanctions against Iran, pledging to prevent it from going nuclear.

Trump’s latest gambit is his explosive plan – which may be the opening phase in negotiations with the Arab world – to take over Gaza, expel or destroy Hamas, move its population to neighbouring nations, rebuild it and turn it into a new Riviera. Is this really the endgame the geniuses at Hamas, Hezbollah and their paymasters in Tehran had in mind when they decided to slaughter innocent Jewish women and children?

Whether or not Trump’s plan materialises, taboos have been shattered, and the Foreign Office approach to the Middle East is about to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Its strategy, and that of Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and the UN is, scandalously, to memory-hole 7/10 and to revert to business as usual as soon as the hostages are released. Hamas will retain power in Gaza – with the corrupt, ineffective Palestinian Authority magically empowered in parallel – UNRWA will dole out cash, future attacks will be met by calls to “de-escalate” and Western politicians will virtue-signal their support for a two-state solution, victim-blaming Israel for not conceding enough while supporting ICC cases.

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The alternative is to accept that the central problem at least since the Balfour Declaration has been the refusal by Palestinian elites to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Time and again, including in 1937 with the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan or in 2000 under Bill Clinton, the Palestinian leadership has been offered a state and has rejected it, while the Israelis have made massive compromises; time and again, armies or terrorists have attacked Israel to try and destroy it.

A special kind of status was invented, policed by the abominable UNRWA, applying only to Palestinians: they, and are all of their descendants, remain stateless refugees forever, regardless of where they live. This is designed to make sure they retain the “right to return” to Israel, thus guaranteeing its eventual destruction.

The Palestinian elite’s ideology is rejectionist, rather than nationalist: they define themselves as against Israel’s existence. Eliminating the Jewish state is their sole raison d’etre. They would only support a one-state solution from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea, which would mean Israeli Jews subjugated, expelled or murdered.

There is a precedent. Virtually all Jews – some 900,000 – were forced to flee the Middle East and North Africa after 1945, ending up in Israel, in France and elsewhere. Islamists and Arab nationalists have persecuted, expelled or massacred every minority group in the region, including Christians, Kurds, Sabean-Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, Yazidis, Baha’is and Druze. Unlike in the UK and Europe, the story of the Middle East has been one of reverse multiculturalism, of declining diversity, of regime-imposed ethnonationalism and homogeneity.

The only exceptions are Israel, of whom 18 per cent of its citizens are Muslim (and 3 per cent Arab Christian or Druze); and some Gulf states, which have welcomed Christians, Hindus and even Jews as gastarbeiter and freeholders (but rarely as citizens).

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Trump understands this. He has no time for idiotic orthodoxies. During his first term, he cajoled several Arab states to recognise Israel’s right to exist via the Abraham Accords. He wants to rebuild Gaza. He cares about ordinary Palestinians, and believes that reconstructing their economy and giving them modern homes would help deradicalise them.

There are problems. All recent attempts at US-led nation-building have backfired, most recently the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Trump’s election was driven, in part, by a rejection of the “neo-con” vision by working class voters tired of serving as cannon fodder. Would it not be more sensible to involve other friendly countries?

Trump’s supporters would retort that taking over Gaza would be different as it would be a real estate project. But is Trump really advocating compulsory mass deportations, which would end in tears? Plenty would happily leave voluntarily at the first opportunity, but what of those who want to stay put? It is unclear whether Jordan or Egypt’s fragile politics can survive the influx of too many Gazans.

So much for the details. Trump is the first Western leader who grasps that the irredentism of extremist Palestinian leaders is the real block to peace. If anybody can pull off a miracle, it is him.