Mick Hartley

A powerful editorial from the JC – With a genocidal enemy, diplomacy is not an option:

The first casualty of war is famously the truth. Nowhere is this more evident than when Israel is forced to defend itself.

For 17 months, the media breathlessly parroted Hamas casualty figures with less scepticism than a Bank of England report would receive. Few news outlets ever questioned Hamas’s miraculous ability to tally hundreds of deaths within minutes or to instantly determine which were civilians and which were terrorists, sorry, “militants”.

When Israel resumed its offensive, the media fell right back into form, treating Hamas's claims again as undisputed facts. Even when these reports do acknowledge the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, they usually omit the standard disclaimer that the numbers “could not be independently verified”—a caveat reserved almost exclusively for Israeli statements. Trust the terrorists and doubt the Middle East’s only democracy; that's the not-too-subtle subtext….

Which brings us to the biggest untruth of all: the delusion that diplomacy could actually resolve this conflict. Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Simon Walters, expressed this fiction best (or worst). “I have worked in and around conflicts for thirty years, and grew up in Northern Ireland during the height of the terrorist campaigns. One of the main lessons I take from that experience is that at some point the fighting has to stop and diplomacy begin. That point is now,” Walters posted on social media. The facile comparisons between the IRA and Hamas distort the realities of both conflicts.

Even evil exists on a spectrum. As Andrew Roberts argues, the IRA, for all its bloodshed, never committed the barbarism Hamas unleashed on October 7 or sought the destruction of Britain. It demanded territorial change, which made a political solution possible.

Hamas, by contrast, is explicit in its genocidal intentions. So what's the diplomatic solution–meet them halfway?

It's the same old story: the delusion that inspires such mind-bogglingly stupid comments about diplomacy is based on the cherished belief that this is another war about territory which can be resolved through getting round a table and talking. But Hamas aren't interested in diplomacy: they're an Islamist group bent on the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews – because for them this is all about Islam. They say it often enough. It's no great secret. But for the media and the political class, this goes against the story they're telling themselves and telling us. So they ignore it, and keep to the same old  blame-Israel line.