You have to wonder what world Matthew Parris lives in. Why are we closing our eyes to Gaza’s horror?
Why does the world look away? Are we simply bored, or do we flinch from the wreckage, the famine and the blood in Gaza? Are these horrors beyond the bandwidth of modern Britain as we burble about the woes of Prince Harry or the loss of heating allowances and wallow in a military victory that almost nobody today can even remember? VE Day was 1945.
This is 2025. As we speak, two million human beings face starvation at the hands of our close ally, Israel. As we speak, all hell is being rained down — rained down now. Within days, new atrocities may be imminent in a promised new offensive. Yet this hell on Earth has all but dropped from our headlines and we British continue to supply military kit, share intelligence and more. Why?
Look away?? Every day Gaza makes the headlines, as the BBC and the rest of the media report on the latest horror – copied straight from Hamas sources. Every day we hear about starvation in Gaza, though everyone knows that Hamas steals the food for itself. Almost every weekend there are marches through London calling for intifada, "Free Palestine", "From the river to the sea". They get huge news coverage. Universities have become hotbeds of antisemitism as condemnation of Israel, and of Jews, is de rigueur.
There's barely room for anything else. Genocide in Xinjiang – how's that going? No one knows. China keeps a tight lid on it, and no one's really that interested. Arabs slaughtering black Africans in Sudan? They've been doing it for years. Well, for centuries. Nothing to see here. Horrors in the Congo? Again, no one cares. But it's Gaza, for Parris, where we need to wake up and pay more attention.
Ah yes, Matthew Parris — wringing his hands in moral anguish from the safety of a columnist’s perch, serenading us with high rhetoric and selective outrage.
Apparently, we’re no longer allowed to mention why Israel is at war — that would be “whataboutery.” October 7 is now a parenthetical formality, a polite cough before we return to calling the Jewish state a genocidal menace. Don’t worry, though — he’s “taken that as read.” How brave.
He speaks of “moral support” and “lost innocence,” as if Israel were a trust fund teenager who’s disappointed mummy. Not a democratic nation facing a jihadist terror group that uses civilians as human shields and schools as rocket sites.
He offers not a single workable alternative to military response, only an airy command: “Stop!” Stop what? Defending themselves? Existing? The luxury of moral clarity is always easier when you're not facing existential threats or genocidal neighbours.
The final insult is the historical amnesia: a lecture on “ethnic cleansing” delivered without a word on the Jewish expulsions from Arab lands, or on Hamas’s founding charter. No nuance there, oddly.
So let’s be clear. You can criticise Israeli policy — many Israelis do. But this isn’t journalism, it’s a sanctimonious sermon soaked in selective empathy and historical blindness.
Mick Hartley 
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