Jake Wallis Simons

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.

What do people think of Hamas? In recent days, this has been something of a vexed question for many in the West, particularly those on the left. Among progressives, Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘friends’ have long been romanticised as Robin Hood types. But Robin Hood didn’t burn babies, didn’t rape and mutilate young women, didn’t take toddlers hostage, didn’t execute Holocaust survivors in the manner of Islamic State. The events of 7 October brought many liberals face-to-face with an uncomfortable test: do they have the mental agility to revise their opinions?  By comparison, let’s look at how the Arab world has answered that same question.

There was long been a swell of sympathy for Hamas in the West. A certain leader of the opposition, you will remember, referred to them as his ‘friends’ and said that the UK government classifying them as a ‘terrorist organisation’ was a ‘big, big historical mistake’. He did not condemn Hamas this week. And he is not alone. The mass rallies on the streets of Britain in recent days have shown the level of support for a barbarism that for years has been quietly accommodated in this country.  If Gaza is an ‘open-air prison’, the true jailers are Hamas It is depressing how few people on that side of the argument have changed their position in the light of the savagery in Israel.

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February last year. By the end of March, the streets of cities all over the world were spontaneously draped in blue and yellow. It was a moving moment. The outpouring of solidarity seemed to reveal that the instinct to stand up to tyranny has not yet been forgotten in the complacent and self-indulgent decades that followed the second world war. But it also felt rather vicarious. We live in an age in which the drive to express national pride has been driven underground by memories of empire in Europe and the shadow of slavery and segregation in America. For many, especially on the left, imported Ukrainian nationalism has become a kind of patriotism by proxy, a sublimated expression of a repressed desire.

My fiancée wants to put a sign up outside our house demanding that the speed limit be reduced to 20mph. I’d rather she didn’t. Drivers have enough to cope with already. Such is the peer pressure emanating from the neighbours, however, in collaboration with my fiancée, that the decision is likely to be taken out of my hands. Shortly, I fear, I’ll be master of a house with '20 is plenty' sign on the gate, accompanied by a picture of a snail. Just because sticking up for motorists worked in Uxbridge doesn’t mean it will work across the country I offer this vignette because the government is reportedly mulling a crackdown on councils that seek to impose 20mph speed limits, 'bus gates' – bus-only shortcuts – and 'low-traffic neighbourhoods' (LTNs).