Imagine if, following an Allied raid on Nazi positions, the newspapers the next day told us about nothing but the civilian casualties. No mention of the fascists who were killed. No utterance of their names, no information about their ranks. Instead, just pained commentary on the suffering of the innocents who tragically found themselves swept up in this act of war.
This is one of the most blistering assaults on Hamas’s terror army since 7 October
We would think that strange, right? We would consider it a reneging on the journalist’s duty to tell the truth about war. Well, that’s how I feel perusing the coverage of Israel’s resumption of its military crusade against Hamas. Open a paper or dip into social media and you could be forgiven for thinking this is a blindly barbarous assault in which only the guiltless have perished. It’s not true.
In reality, Israel appears to have landed a brilliant blow on the new fascism. It seems to have taken out some of Gaza’s most nefarious radical Islamists. Its surprise strikes that ended the two-month fragile ceasefire eliminated men who played key roles in the armies of anti-Semites that subjected the Jews of southern Israel to such horrors on 7 October 2023. People need to know this.
It is thought that at least five senior commanders in Hamas have been killed. This reportedly includes Mahmoud Abu Wafah, Hamas’s highest-ranking security official. And Bahjat Abu Sultan, the head of Hamas’s feared internal security agency which visits such tyranny on dissenting Palestinians. The Israel Defense Forces believe they also took out Issam Da’alis, Hamas’s de facto prime minister in Gaza.
If these accounts are accurate – and Hamas appears to have confirmed that they are – then this adds up to one of the most blistering assaults on that terror army since 7 October. The removal of Hamas’s PM, its security chief, its top domestic bruiser and other commanders represents the decapitation of this racist movement that poses such a threat to the Jewish nation and to civilisation itself. Surely that deserves more coverage?
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has confirmed that its military spokesman, Abu Hamza, was also killed. PIJ is a deranged Sunni Islamist army devoted to the destruction of Israel. It gleefully took part in 7 October’s carnival of anti-Semitic violence. Does it not warrant a headline or two that Israel has successfully slain the leader of a militant group that is hell-bent on wiping the Jewish nation from the face of the earth?
If this many big-name militants were killed, we can be fairly certain that other combatants perished too: their bodyguards, the heavily-armed men who no doubt attend to Hamas’s security chiefs. Yet you have to go looking for this information. In much of the coverage, and certainly among the hyperbolic Israel haters of the online left, Hamas is all but invisible. We’re left with the impression that Israel has only killed innocents, and only intended to.
There is a curious reluctance to discuss Israel’s wars in the way we discuss other wars. When it comes to the Jewish State and its fight against the Islamist armies that surround it, we rarely hear about battles, belligerents, units, victories, defeats – all the stuff of conflict. Instead, we’re fed an infantile morality tale in which Israel is a genocidal maniac and Gaza an unimpeachably blameless land peopled entirely by innocents.
Of course we should be told about civilian casualties in Gaza. There appear to have been many over the past 48 hours. The agony of non-combatants is war’s worst feature. But a myopic focus on civilian suffering can obfuscate the truth of war as much as ignoring civilian suffering can.
It was bad when in the past we downplayed the pain of innocents in warzones and just coldly focused on battlefield victories. But now, at least where Israel is concerned, the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. Now the truth of war – a war Hamas started, let’s not forget – is buried less by a squeamish refusal to cover civilian suffering than by a furious and sometimes pornographic obsession with civilian suffering.
We are actively discouraged from coolly discussing Hamas’s culpability, the question of Jewish security and the idea of ‘just war’, and expected merely to emote. When it comes to the Jewish nation’s wars, you must park your critical faculties and just feel. It is a catastrophic failure of the human duty of moral examination. ‘Truth is the first casualty of war’, they say. It is also the first casualty of the rash, saccharine Israelophobia that is so rife now.
We end up in a situation where Israel can score stunning victories over murderous Islamists and people don’t even know it happened. I envision an alternative universe, one where the left has yet to fall down the well of post-truth lunacy, where activists are not only lamenting the loss of Palestinian life, as we all do, but also cheering Israel’s wins against the neo-fascists of Hamas. Have many innocents suffered these past few days? Yes. Has the fascist project of destroying the Jewish homeland been dealt a devastating blow? Also yes.
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