We’ve Forgotten the Lesson of 1945

Are some people just so irredeemably evil that extermination is the only moral option? When it came to Germany’s Third Reich, the only answer, as Churchill said, was ‘Victory – victory at all costs… for without victory, there is no survival.” Churchill’s ally, Roosevelt, echoed the sentiment: “The peace of overwhelming victory.”

Both recognised that there could be no half-measures, this time. The Allies in 1918 had stopped well short of crushing Germany, sowing the seeds of future disaster. Through the 1930s, appeasement only encouraged them to seize more and to perpetrate ever-greater enormities. This time, they realised, the defeat of evil must be total: no ‘cease-fire’ and no ‘pragmatic’ peace. And with victory must come the thorough cleansing of Nazism from Germany.

Evil must be eradicated. That’s all there is to it.

Hamas is evil. But Hamas is not just the swivel-eyed maniacs in green headbands waving rifles. Hamas is Gaza and Gaza is Hamas. The Big Lie of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement is to claim that Gaza and Hamas are two separate things. They are not.

Anyone who argues otherwise is deluding themselves – or trying to delude you.

Hamas did not parachute in from Mars. Gazans voted them in. For two decades they ruled without an Israeli civil administration in the way, pouring aid into tunnels, turning water pipes into rockets and weaponising television as murder-indoctrination for children. They rebuilt the place in their own image: a total terror society whose organising purpose is the killing of Jews. That is not a metaphor: it is the charter, the curriculum, the parade and the poll.

When Israel let Gazans work inside the Green Line, the courtesy was repaid with maps and lists. On October 7 the green headbands went first. Behind them came the civilians, clambering over Jewish corpses to loot kitchens and drag hostages. In the months that followed, not one ordinary neighbour walked into a Red Cross tent and whispered where the captives were. Hostages have since described being held, starved, raped and displayed by people who were not, in any useful sense, ‘fighters’. They were the neighbourhood.

With all the atrocities Hamas has committed, self-documented, all the horrors, of all the lies it has told, all the evil it has employed and deployed, with all the words written about Gazans deserving freedom, the images, footage and interviews coming out of Gaza since the ceasefire began two weeks ago show a strong and continued alignment.

I have watched, in dismay to be honest, interview after interview of Gazan civilians – men and women – proudly boasting of some kind of “victory”, and that the next step is to wipe out Israel.

Many stared defiantly into the cameras, boasting about how they hid hostages themselves. These innocent civilians.

Is this a people radicalised ­beyond redemption? Douglas Murray has little doubt that, in the decades since Hamas took control of Gaza, it engineered a people utterly steeped in hatred. A generation that cannot divorce its identity from the destruction of Jews.

Returned hostage Liri Albag was filmed, pale and swollen, wearing an ill-fitting pretend uniform and what looked like a dog collar in a Hamas propaganda video released on January 5. After 15 months as a hostage, she has told the world there are no innocent Gazans.

“Dad, there are two million terrorists there, make no mistake. I sat with children aged eight and four who were cursing the Jews.”

These are the people Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese want to reward with a state. Their blatherskite that Hamas can have no role in a future Gaza is nothing more than empty bloviating. Hamas is Gaza. No one knows this better than its Arab neighbours. There’s a reason no Arab League state will take ‘Palestinian’ refugees again; Egypt’s gate has stayed shut. So has Jordan’s. All have bitter experience of letting these psychotic barbarians in the gate.

The wary antipathy of the Arab states show that none of this is about race. It is about a culture that has spent a generation manufacturing martyrs from the cradle. Where mothers take their children to Israeli hospitals – in the hope that they’ll survive and grow up to kill Jews.

Denazification took years after a war that had already smashed the regime. Ten million party members still had to be processed out of a population of 70 million. Gaza has not even reached the smashed-regime stage. The tunnels are still there. The proud interviews are still there. The children who curse Jews are still there.

Churchill and Roosevelt were not interested in a pragmatic peace with a total-war cult. They wanted the thing dead and the soil turned. Hamas made Gaza a total-terror society. Treating that as a problem that can be solved with appeasement is how you get 1939 again.