Remember that weird little Covid ritual of 2020, when every Thursday at 8pm people stepped out onto their doorsteps and applauded? Banging saucepans, clapping their hands, they lit up the miserable skies with cheers for the National Health Service. It was mawkish, and orchestrated to the point of theatre. But its aim was to express a kind of collective gratitude for those who had become the most visibly important figures in the national story. Nurses and doctors were held in the highest esteem. They were ‘society’s best’. That’s why all those people applauded.
Crowds of Palestinian Arabs whooped and whistled, and filmed on their smartphones. They called out ‘Allahu Akbar’
Now ask yourself this: what if those same public servants had spent the pandemic not saving lives but taking them? What if, instead of ventilators and vaccines, they handed out RPGs and marched into homes to slaughter the elderly, kidnap children, rape young women? Would you have rushed to your doorstep to catch a glimpse of their return from the carnage? Would you have cheered them if they paraded down your street? Filmed? Spat on the mutilated bodies of their victims they dragged behind them?
What if they’d seized hostages, slung them in the back of pickups, dead or alive, and driven them into your neighbourhood. Would you have rushed out to the high street, past Greggs and Pret a Manger, hoping to catch a glimpse of a bloodied corpse, stripped, defiled, dead? Would your children raise their phones to film it? Would you yell out praises to God as the killers waved to the crowds?
What if, two years later, those same killers staged a grim spectacle, pretending to ‘discover’ the bodies they had hidden and abused all that time? After two long years of suffering, would you come out again to bang your pots and pans? To celebrate, to cheer, to cry out your devotion? Would your neighbours join you in a square to stamp their feet and chant their names? Because that is exactly what is happening in the Gaza Strip.
In recent days, the Hamas ‘Shadow Unit’ pulled the corpse of an Israeli hostage from a tunnel shaft built with stolen money intended for humanitarian aid. Crowds of Palestinian Arabs whooped and whistled, and filmed on their smartphones. They called out ‘Allahu Akbar’ and offered congratulations to the terrorists. They treated the return of murdered Jews as a parade.
Just as they did on October 7th. Then too, the streets filled with celebration. I watched the footage of Gazans stamping on the body of an Israeli man in uniform, kidnapped into Gaza, his head and groin pummelled by a mob drunk on triumph as he was dragged from the back of a regular looking car. I watched the jeering crowds as the naked body of Shani Louk was paraded through Gaza in a pickup, her corpse spat upon jubilantly by children.
Meanwhile in Israel, public respect was shown yesterday for the return of the bodies of Amiram Cooper and Sahar Baruch. Cooper, 84, was abducted alive from his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and later murdered in captivity. Baruch, 25, was taken from Kibbutz Be’eri and killed in Hamas hands last December. Both were finally brought home for burial.
During Covid, Britons cheered for those who saved lives. Since the 7th October War, Palestinians have cheered for those who take them. In fact they’ve been doing it for decades, spurred on by an ever-growing movement of equally sick Westerners and Europeans who take to their own streets to chant and whoop as well – ‘Intifada… Khaybar Khaybar… Death to the IDF… Allahu akbar’ now seemingly heard as regularly on our streets as the once restrained saucepan banging for the doctors.
In other videos, excitedly released by Hamas on the Internet, Palestinian crowds in Gaza gather to watch the execution of fellow Arabs accused of collaboration. They are forced to their knees in the public square and shot dead to thunderous approval: ‘God is the greatest!’ The tumbling, lifeless bodies are recorded on shiny, high-end smartphones (how did they get through the ‘siege’?). In other videos, Hamas brutes casually crush the legs of civilians with blunt tools, breaking bone after bone as the victims writhe and scream on the ground – one for the crime of having been videoed thanking president Trump when he received aid at the American run GHF distribution centre. But these videos are not leaked war crimes, they are public service announcements. Messages to their own society: this is what happens if you cross us.
Would you come out to cheer such activities in Kensington or Westminster? Would you whoop or praise God for this in Didsbury or Moseley? Can you imagine the good people of Stockbridge, Clifton or Cardiff Bay coming out to show their appreciation for such brutality in their streets?
During the pandemic, we in Britain, and many across Europe, rushed to applaud those we regard as heroes. Our instincts, however choreographed, were rooted in something real: admiration for life-saving virtue. It is telling for whom a society chooses to cheer. Gaza chose. Again and again, many cheer the men who burn the future of their own people, destroy the lives of their neighbours with sadistic glee, start wars that devastate their own land – and boast about it.
It is time to talk plainly. Some societies are different. Some values are not only different, they are better. And when a society teaches its children to spit on naked corpses, when it gathers in the streets to exalt murderers, when it builds a culture on death and vengeance, we are not obliged to pretend these are quaint cultural quirks. We are entitled to condemn them. We are right to resist them. Morally, strategically, and civilisationally. And we should support those who do so wholeheartedly, whether in Gaza, Israel, Britain or America.
If we are ever to survive as a people with our own hopes, values, and laws, we must learn again to cheer for the good guys. The only question is: do we still know who they are?
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