Jake Wallis Simons

Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’ Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

It would be hard to imagine that almost exactly six months after October 7, I would find myself saying this, but Israel is either on a path to defeat or has lost the war already. The way in which the Jewish state – the regional military superpower, enjoying huge military support from the global superpower – is being forced to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is a cautionary tale for the West. It is often correctly said that Israel is on the frontline of the struggle against jihadism. Well, pay attention: the collapse of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which after the October atrocities was the most justified imaginable, is a harbinger of what may lie ahead. Let’s look at the facts on the ground. At the height of the war, there were hundreds of thousands of troops in Gaza.

The last time I saw Amichai Chikli, he was struggling to put on a suit jacket at the Israeli embassy in London. 'Do I really have to wear one of these things just to make a speech?' he muttered. He got it on by hoiking it over his shoulders like a rucksack.  That was last September, when the Israeli diaspora affairs minister visited London to mark Rosh Hashanah. Chikli had sparked controversy with comments about Tel Aviv’s gay pride parade ('vulgar'), the Palestinian Authority ('neo-Nazis') and George Soros ('his actions and investments are feeding the flames of anti-Semitism'). But the hotheaded minister finds it as easy to restrain his rhetoric as he does to put on a jacket.

If the by-election in Rochdale, one of the poorest constituencies in the country, is about anything other than Gaza, it is about the Labour party. After all, it is being contested by three former members of the faithful who went, each in his own inimitable way, off the rails. George Galloway, the bookies’ favourite, was booted out of Labour after railing against 'Tony Blair's lie machine' and calling on British troops to disobey orders in Iraq. His subsequent career has burrowed ever deeper into the cesspit of Muslim-adjacent firebrand posturing, expressed in regular appearances on Iranian and Russian state television (and once in the Big Brother House where he pretended to be a cat).

Much has been made of the supposedly peaceful nature of the weekly Palestine marches. But public order comes at a price. Yesterday, it emerged that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote to the Home Secretary to request more funds for police officers, pointing out that Scotland Yard was facing a £240 million funding gap because of the demonstrations. Since 7 October, he wrote, more than 28,000 officer shifts had been consumed by policing the protests in London.

Whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or atheist – and whatever your nationality – there is ample reason to stand up to the death cult that has worn the face of Al Qaeda, Islamic State and Hamas. We’ve had suicide bombs of our own in Manchester and London. We’ve also had our fair share of beheadings and stabbings on our streets. Muslims have, globally, been the biggest victims of jihadist attacks; now is the time for all people of good will to stand against such gratuitous nihilism in the streets of London.  We have seen this already in Israel. On 7 October, up to 70 Arab-Israelis were murdered by the Islamist killers. That same day, Bedouin Arabs from the nearby town of Rahat risked their lives to save scores of Jews from the music festival and Kibbutz Be’eri.

A prominent member of Hamas’s political bureau has been causing something of a stir on the internet in recent days. In an interview with the Lebanese television channel LBC, Ghazi Hamad vowed that given the chance, his group would repeat the October 7 massacre until Israel ceased to exist. It went viral. To many people, the habits of bears in woods might spring to mind. But the context made the clip fly. In recent weeks, the public debate in the West has descended into an appalling maelstrom in which gullible westerners insist on projecting their own values onto Hamas, while increasingly small ranks of the sane try to snap them out of it.

Supporting the Palestinians is a reasonable thing to do. Flying their flag is not an act of hatred. Expressing sympathy for their hardships is not bigotry. There is nothing invalid about arguing for their national self-determination.  The problem has always been the proximity of the Palestinian cause to the Jews. Is accusing the ‘Zionist lobby’ of pulling the strings of politics a reasonable expression of support for the Palestinians? Is accusing Jews of ‘white supremacy’, even though a majority of Israelis are non-white? Is trying to lynch them at an airport? If, as I argue, Israelophobia is the newest version of the oldest hatred, then it is as adept as it always has been at using the language of legitimacy as a Trojan horse.

Like 9/11, the massacre in southern Israel changed everything. From the great movements of Middle Eastern geopolitics and international alliances to the sweep of modern Israeli and Arab history, life has been split into the before and the after.  In Britain, nowhere has this been felt more keenly than the Jewish community. There have been a great many bitter lessons, but one overshadows all the others. Before the massacre, we thought we had many more friends here.  In the aftermath of the massacre, it is finally dawning on Jewish progressives that their oldest friend doesn’t care for them at all I’m talking about the political left. In recent decades, the Jewish electorate has been drifting rightwards.