Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips in the Times:

Many have never understood that the past 20 months of events in Gaza, since the atrocities of October 7, 2023, are part of a multi-front war of extermination waged against Israel by Iran through its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the West Bank.

Israelis believe they must totally defeat Hamas as a military force to prevent it from repeating October 7-style atrocities. But they are also agonised over the fate of the hostages, whom Hamas won’t release unless Israel surrenders and whose continued incarceration has gravely hampered IDF operations.

With Iran, by contrast, the issue is straightforward. Emerging from the rubble of their apartments after the missile strikes, already traumatised Israelis say: “We have no choice but to continue with this war if we are not to be annihilated by a nuclear Iran.”

Israel attacked Iran because it believed the point of no return had been reached. The International Atomic Energy Agency said last week that Iran had enough enriched uranium to make nine nuclear bombs and was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations.

After Israel decapitated Hezbollah last year, and with Hamas in Gaza now severely degraded, Iran was staring at the destruction of its “ring of fire” proxy war strategy to exterminate Israel. Nuclear weapons were its last, most devastating resort. So it sped up its attempt to build them.

Very recently, Israeli intelligence learnt that Tehran had been secretly working on weaponising nuclear material into an explosive device, bringing it weeks away from being able to produce a bomb. It also aimed to build 300 ballistic missiles a month. Both of these posed an immediate existential threat that Israel had to counter. The reason for this crisis was that the West, led by previous US and UK administrations, failed to acknowledge the irreconcilable religious fanaticism of the Tehran regime and believed it was amenable to compromise. The resulting US-brokered 2015 agreement could have enabled Iran to get the bomb with only a few years’ delay.

Not that Israel is now getting any support from the UK.

At the weekend Lord Hammond, the former Conservative foreign secretary who helped negotiate that agreement, said that “the Israelis are standing in the way of a new deal” with Iran. Was Hammond seriously suggesting that destroying Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons was “standing in the way” of another deal with people who never even granted access to verify they were fulfilling their promises?

This was on a par in its fatuousness with Sir Keir Starmer’s prim call for “de-escalation” between Israel and Iran. “De-escalating” the attempt to stop the Iranian bomb means allowing Iran to get the bomb. Both the Hammond and Starmer statements are based on the imbecilic western belief that religious fanatics negotiate in good faith and are governed by rational self-interest.

Many in Israel — as in America — have written Britain off as having hopelessly lost the plot under the double whammy of radical, anti-western Islamists and left-wing, anti-western and post-truth ideologies. Israelis perceive to their stupefaction that Israel, the victim of genocidal attack and having gone to greater lengths than any other military to minimise civilian casualties in war, has been demonised in Britain as the aggressor and wanton killer of children. Israel is targeting Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure while Iran is targeting Israeli civilians — a war crime. Yet the usual suspects are accusing Israel of aggression and engaging in “tit for tat” attacks.

If Israel now smashes the Iran-based Shia axis, this will reshape the Middle East for the better and remove an unconscionable threat not just to Israel but to the West too. “When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan — it is a policy,” said Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2023. In Britain, the security service has warned of an “extraordinary threat” of Iranian terrorist attacks.

Israel is doing the West a huge service — for which the Jewish state is paying in blood — that much of the West still obdurately refuses to realise.