The West Should Be Thanking Israel

If there is anything like justice in history, some day in the (hopefully near) future, a great many people will look back on this time and thank Israel for saving the West. Just as happened in WWII, one, tiny country is standing firm, alone, against the forces of darkness.

There are differences, of course. Britain, the little island that could in 1939–41, had earlier shamefully sold out even smaller nations like Czechoslovakia, in the vain hope of appeasing the Nazi monster. Today, nearly every Western nation from the United States to Australia is selling out Israel to appease the Islamo-fascist monster. Worse, where at least the Roosevelt administration in the early years of the war supplied Britain with war material, the Biden administration today, along with the UK, France and most of the rest of the West, is trying to starve Israel of armaments.

And all the while, Israel is under shameful assault from the behemoth of the mainstream media and the left establishment. Western governments, in terror of Islamic violence, sit in shamefaced silence while anti-Semitism marches and bellows daily in the streets for the first time since the Third Reich.

How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel? What the Jewish state has done in the past year – for its own defence, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us – will rank among the most important contributions to the defence of Western civilisation in the past three-quarters of a century.

Make no mistake – Israel is almost single-handedly bearing the load of holding back the darkness of jihad, mostly emanating from Iran. Israel is doing the job that the supposed ‘superpowers’ are too gutless, or too corrupt, to do.

Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.

It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority.

Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.

And how have its supposed ‘allies’ responded?

Time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of October 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that.

And then there’s the poisonous Penny Wong. Even as Israel fights for its existence and to keep the flame of liberal democracy alight against the encroaching Islamic darkness, Wong, speaking for the Albanese government, has demanded that the enemies of humanity be rewarded for their grotesque atrocities.

Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to ceasefire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ ‘balanced’ condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.

In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognising a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.

The absolute ignominy of these disgusting cretins cannot be overstated.

In the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism, or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried?

Just as Chamberlain and Daladier did in the 1930s, the craven fools of appeasement think that they can buy off those whose repeatedly stated aim is to slaughter every Jew and Christian in the world, until Islam holds a bloody scimitar over the entire globe.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. (Reminder to some recently confused “conservatives”: The former were the good guys; the latter the real villains.)

We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.

As Israelis solemnly mark a year since October 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.

It’s not much, but months ago I ordered a set of pins from the Australian Jewish Association. I wear them with pride everywhere.

And to remind myself just what an incalculable debt we all owe this tiny nation.