The post–7 October world is a Rorschach test. Some people see tragedy. Too many see a chance to cosplay revolution, chant in Arabic they can’t translate, and accuse the only army minimising civilian casualties of “genocide”. This is the tidy-up operation — with a broom labelled facts and a dustpan labelled common sense.
The Day the Masks Slipped
Since 7 October, London has learned to plan its weekends around marches. The banners change, the slogans don’t. “Globalise the Intifada.” “From the river to the sea.” It’s billed as peace, sold as justice, and performed like street theatre — with a real body count offstage.
For British Jews (and anyone with a pulse), the point landed fast: this wasn’t a policy debate; it was a celebration. Not “stop the war”, but “finally, the Jews are getting it.” The discovery of a curious new British liberty followed: you can be “openly Jewish” and still be told to move along “for your own safety”. We’ve invented the right to be removed before someone else breaks the law. Marvels of modern policing.
Meanwhile, the narrative clicked into its favourite groove: Israelis as cartoon villains, Palestinians as eternal infants, and Western institutions as referees who can’t tell a mugging from a match.
Manchester: When Rhetoric Meets the Real World
Three days after a car-ramming and knife attack outside a Manchester synagogue — worshippers targeted during services, people left injured, two civilians killed — Peter Tatchell posted a cheery X missive declaring that “Israel & UK are the real criminals” and praising Palestine Action as guardians of law and conscience. Tasteful timing, that.
No, Tatchell didn’t “cause” the attack. Terrorists own their crimes. But words from public figures shape the permission structure — the moral weather — in which those crimes gestate. Branding Jewish fear a “disgraceful smear,” laundering a shock-tactics network as the rule of law incarnate, and then pointing at Britain and Israel as “the real criminals” within days of a synagogue attack isn’t dissent; it’s dereliction. It normalises the idea that Jewish targets here are merely extensions of a foreign battlefield, and that those who intimidate them are engaged in righteous “resistance”. That’s how you turn communal fear into communal flight.
If Tatchell had wanted to be brave, he’d have started with four sentences: “What happened in Manchester was an antisemitic terror attack. Full stop. Protests must be lawful and nowhere near synagogues or Jewish hubs. Solidarity with British Jews is non-negotiable.” Then — only then — talk law. Instead, we got placards, sloganeering numbers, and a recruitment poster for people who confuse vandalism with virtue.
The Numbers No One Wants
Let’s be clinical for Aunt Linda and the policy nerds alike. Israel estimates roughly 14,000 Hamas combatants killed. Even if you swallowed the original, highly elastic civilian tallies pushed by Gaza’s health authorities (an institution under Hamas control, not a Scandinavian audit firm), the civilian-to-combatant ratio sits close to 1:1. In modern urban warfare, the global average hovers near 9:1 — nine civilians for every fighter killed.
Israel’s ratio is historically low; “unheard of” isn’t rhetoric, it’s arithmetic. Yet the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor still managed to copy-paste the blood libel that Israel is “wilfully starving” civilians and “deliberately” killing them — while hundreds of aid trucks rolled in, many promptly hijacked, hoarded or resold by Hamas. Gazans themselves filmed it. Hamas’s black-market takings since 7 October? Astronomical. That’s how food becomes both a weapon and a revenue stream.
The lie works because it’s tidy: Israelis as malevolent geniuses, Palestinians as featureless victims, and the West as eternal sermoniser. It’s a morality play with the set nailed down.
Lawfare Is Not Peace — It’s Paper
International human rights law was born after genocide, drafted (in part) by people who knew pogroms weren’t bedtime stories. The aim was noble. The execution? Over time, catastrophically political. Tyrants do not respect moral memos. Putin didn’t pause at Mariupol to consult Strasbourg. Xi did not ring Geneva before crushing Uighurs. Assad wasn’t deterred by a stern letter from a committee chaired by… well, insert your favourite kleptocracy here.
Courts float; nations carry weight. If you don’t anchor law in a particular demos — a people, a culture, a Parliament that can be sacked by voters — you create a free-floating priesthood of judges who are remarkably easy to capture by fashionable dogma. And guess what the fashion is? The Jewish nation-state as original sin.
So we replace the hard, necessary business of defending free societies with the soft tyranny of process. It’s performative restraint for people who outsource risk — right up until the rockets land.
The United Nations: Hall Monitor to the Mob
The UN is many things. “Impartial” isn’t one of them. The Human Rights Council’s permanent obsession with the Middle East’s only liberal democracy would be funny if it didn’t fuel real-world violence. Resolutions pile up against Israel while actual butchers hold the gavel. Call it Theatre of the Absurd, sponsored by regimes that jail poets and disappear journalists.
UNRWA, the agency ostensibly running schools and social services in Gaza, has been repeatedly accused of marinating in Hamas personnel, textbooks and tunnels. Yet the same institution is treated as gospel when tallying casualties and pronouncing blame. When numbers quietly shift — say, halving headline categories — the corrections arrive with less fanfare than a fire drill.
Build a “global arbiter” staffed by states that despise liberalism and you don’t get liberalism. You get the cartel in a blue helmet.
The West’s Split Personality
America on 8 October looked like a Hollywood reboot of moral clarity: carriers in the Med, presidential visits, the famous “don’t” said with a straight face. But the “don’t,” it turned out, was aimed at Jerusalem as much as Tehran. Don’t take out Hezbollah. Don’t risk escalation. Don’t win too fast or too decisively. Also: “Do deliver more aid through crossings being shelled, looted and cynically exploited.”
Britain, meanwhile, rediscovered the Foreign Office’s native tongue: Janus. David Cameron’s remarks — leaning into casualty narratives and aid-blocking myths — weren’t just sloppy; they were accelerants for antisemitism at home. Every time media and ministers portray Israeli intent as malign, attacks on British Jews spike. Cause, meet effect. If he doesn’t know that, he’s unfit. If he does, it’s unconscionable.
Qatar, the Luxury Mediator
Quick thought experiment: on 8 October the White House tells Doha, “You have 24 hours. Expel Hamas leadership, deliver the hostages, or the party’s over — no bases, no diplomacy, no footballing glamour.” Would the war have even started? We didn’t test the proposition because Qatar has been allowed to play both concierge and arsonist. University endowments and stadium sponsorships blur nicely into terror finance.
Real mediation starts with leverage. We’ve been role-playing it with scented candles.
Can You “Defeat” an Idea?
Hamas isn’t an abstraction; it’s a franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood with foot soldiers, payroll and tunnels. You don’t deprogramme that with TED Talks. You degrade it by destroying its capacity to murder. Islamists aren’t inspired by “despair”. They’re inspired by victory. When they smell weakness, they flood the streets. When they taste defeat, recruitment dries up faster than a Qatari apology.
Will the ideas survive somewhere? Of course. So do Nazism and Stalinism. The question is whether the people currently firing rockets and filming snuff videos can keep doing so. That’s not philosophy; that’s security.
Rafah and the “Day After” Paradox
Israel’s immediate objective in Rafah is brutally simple: dismantle the remaining battalions, kill or capture the leadership, and end the rocket-and-tunnel industry. The United States has insisted on a tempo and choreography that prioritise civilian protection — and push more risk onto young Israelis in uniform. It’s the sort of moral trade economists never price: “be precise, be slow, absorb the casualties, and, if possible, apologise before you shoot.”
What happens after? No sane Israeli wants to govern Gaza. The Palestinian Authority can’t be the answer; its curriculum teaches Jew-hatred with the monotony of a metronome, and its police have bled into terror more times than anyone cares to admit. The Americans still dream of a two-state solution as if this were about postcodes, not extermination.
Netanyahu’s “day after” talk gestures at Gazans not aligned with Hamas or the PA, under some regional umbrella with Egypt/Saudi/Emirati involvement. The neighbours, alas, are about as keen as you’d be to take in the bloke who trashed your living room and now wants to manage your building. The Emiratis are the bright spot: pragmatic, modern, and allergic to the Brotherhood. If peace comes from anywhere, it’ll ride in on the same horses as the Abraham Accords: interests, deterrence, trade.
Universalism vs. Nations You Can Actually Live In
Here’s the heart of it. The modern West caught a fever called universalism — the belief that our values are not only superior (they are) but also self-evident and transferable by sheer force of mood music and treaties. Nation-states became unfashionable; borders acquired the moral status of chewing-gum under a school desk. The result? A Europe hooked on law as if it were war, facing adversaries who practise war as if it were law.
Israel is the awkward counterexample: an unabashed nation-state, ethnic and civic at once, defended by people willing to die for the thing itself. That offends contemporary sensibilities that prefer vibes to flags. But history hasn’t retired. It simply moved to a different time zone.
The British Conservative Problem (Yes, Still)
Conservatism is not a spreadsheet. It’s the task of conserving what’s worth keeping: institutions that bind, borders that mean something, traditions that outlast a government press release. Too many Tories traded that for the cult of the market or managerial technocracy. Thatcher fixed the economy; her heirs mistook price tags for patrimony.
Brexit voters weren’t pining for spreadsheets; they wanted home to feel like home. Boris saw that for five minutes, then detonated his credibility. What remains is a party that can’t say what Britain is for, only what it might discount this quarter. The vacuum hums, and the cultural left pipes in the muzak: borders are embarrassing, tradition is xenophobia in tweed, and the future is a tribunal.
When a party billed as conservative can’t articulate why borders, shared stories and the rule of law matter, voters either stay home or find a bloke with a pint who will.
The Demography of Hope (and Why Israel Isn’t Dying)
Most Western countries are quietly vanishing. Replacement rates sit around 1.5 children per woman, and that’s on a good news day. Israel is the outlier, hovering closer to four. No, it isn’t just the ultra-Orthodox (though their numbers are part of the mix); it’s a society that knows what it is, believes it’s worth perpetuating, and acts accordingly. Women are educated and working; career gates are open. The difference is cultural: continuity is a virtue, not a punchline.
You can’t lecture a nation into higher birth rates with tax credits and hashtags. You cultivate meaning. You lower cynicism. You build a future worth being born into. Funny how that works.
Why Tatchell’s Script Fits the Bigger Play
Peter Tatchell’s post wasn’t an aberration; it was a perfect miniature of the West’s confusion:
Victim-perpetrator inversion. After an antisemitic attack, point at Israel and Britain as “the real criminals.” Voilà: you’ve erased the victimhood of Jews at home and outsourced guilt to someone else’s cabinet table.
Protest-brand laundering. Elevate a network notorious for criminal damage into avatars of “upholding the law,” and then fold their theatrics into the language of human rights. It’s vandalism with a veneer.
Casualty absolutism. Decline any nuance about sources, categories or combatant ratios; declare a number and skip directly to “arrest the leaders”. Courtroom cosplay, minus the cross-examination.
Moral outsourcing. Treat domestic Jewish safety as a public-relations inconvenience, not a civic duty. That’s how synagogues become “sites of tension” rather than houses of worship.
In miniature, it’s the same move seen at the UN, the ICC and too many Western chancelleries: outsource courage to process, emit universalist platitudes, and hope the problem politely stops being a problem. It never does.
What Serious Would Look Like
1) Name the war correctly.
It isn’t a dispute over fence lines. It’s a decades-long campaign to eliminate a Jewish state. Stop talking as if swapping a neighbourhood map will detoxify eliminationist ideologies.
2) Rebalance “law” with actual security.
Courts should restrain, not replace, democratic defence. If international tribunals can’t tell aggressor from defender, sovereign democracies must — and act accordingly.
3) Use leverage like you mean it.
Allies who incubate terror leaders aren’t interlocutors; they’re assets to be squeezed until they squeak. Qatar understands power. So should we.
4) Stop laundering Hamas narratives.
If your casualty figures come from people who hide in hospitals and stage funerals, maybe hold your headline for an afternoon. If aid regularly ends up in tunnels and on black markets, stop treating “more trucks” as theology.
5) Rebuild national confidence.
Teach Britain’s story without the ritual self-loathing. Borders aren’t racist; they’re the frame that keeps the painting from falling off the wall. Reform policing so “openly Jewish” isn’t treated as a provocation.
6) Protect Jewish life here, visibly.
Synagogues need security and space, not protest routes curated for maximum intimidation. “Not near schools and shuls” shouldn’t be controversial; it should be the law.
7) Reward family formation.
Stable families aren’t a lifestyle boutique; they’re civilisational infrastructure. Encourage marriage, make childcare sane, and stop pretending the birth-rate crisis will fix itself by Tuesday.
8) Back the coalition that actually wants peace.
The Abraham Accords weren’t a fluke; they were grown-up diplomacy. Expand them. Isolate the Brotherhood axis. Treat “aid” that feeds war as war by other means.
The Bit Where I’m Supposed to Be Pessimistic
I’m not. Not because things are rosy — they’re a bit of a dog’s breakfast — but because civilisations can pivot faster than pundits predict. Britain has pulled back from cliffs before. The West can rediscover the unfashionable virtues that built it: courage, loyalty, duty, truth. Yes, I know — very un-2025. But you can’t meme your way out of a malaise. You need leadership that speaks human, not policy brief.
Everything is still to play for. The other side is loud, not inevitable. The street looks strong because our institutions look weak. Reverse that, and a lot of the noise dies down. We won’t reach “Imagine” — we’ll reach something better: a world where free nations can defend themselves without asking permission from panels stacked with their enemies.
The future belongs to the camp that believes it has one. Israel behaves like it does. Britain should try it. Worst case, we bore fewer holes in our own lifeboat. Best case, we remember what the boat’s for — and why it’s worth keeping afloat.
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