The nightmare scenario arrives
The West needs to shake off its conviction that Israel is the driving force in the region; it is Iran that pushed it to war.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son and can be purchased on Amazon. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
( JNS) The final chapter in the Iran nuclear crisis may now be upon us.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress that there were “plenty of indications” that Iran was actively moving toward a nuclear weapon.
There had been numerous reports that Israel is preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear sites in the coming days. Washington withdrew non-essential staff from its Baghdad embassy and approved a voluntary evacuation from U.S. embassies and locations throughout the region.
The expectation of imminent attack became a real attack - by Israel. We were not watching another episode of brinkmanship or yet another negotiating ploy.
What Israel said was certain is that Iran had reached the nightmare point that was feared for so long—that it was about to assemble a nuclear weapon and had a plan to attack and destroy Israel.
Israel couldn’t tolerate that. Once President Donald Trump decided that the United States won’t join an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Israel did it alone, even though that meant it might settle for damaging the nuclear sites rather than totally destroying them. Meanwhile, it has attacked more than nuclear sites and much of Iran's command echelon has been eliminated.
Since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the West has refused to acknowledge that Israel has been subjected to a seven-front war of extermination waged by Iran and its proxies.
This denial goes back decades. Even though the Iranian regime declared war against America and the West from the moment it came to power in 1979, political and media discussion of the Iranian issue remained wholly inadequate and infested by disinformation spread by the regime through all-too gullible policy elites.
The fact that Iran insisted that it won’t abandon its right to uranium enrichment, or that the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog had now declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years, makes precious little difference to such people.
This is because the narrative upon which the West is fixated holds that
a. Israel is the driver of events in the Middle East, and tha
b. its war against the Palestinian Arabs is the principal cause of instability and violence in the region.
This wildly deluded narrative is fueled by a staggeringly successful propaganda campaign of falsehoods, distortions, demonization and dehumanization of the Israelis—and increasingly of anyone who supports the idea that the people they are fighting are evil and must be destroyed.
On Wednesday night, a bus carrying U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid workers in Gaza was ambushed by Hamas gunmen near Khan Yunis. At least eight Gazans were killed, many more were injured, and it was feared that hostages had been taken.
The GHF blamed Hamas for the attack. Hamas, which faces the loss of its power over the people of Gaza if they can access the aid that the terrorist group has been stealing for the past 20 months of the war, had issued threats against GHF operations, warning that “collaborators” and aid workers could be targeted.
When Israel is falsely accused of killing Gazans queuing for aid or innocent aid workers, the United Nations rushes to denounce it, and the Western media pile in to present the Israelis as inhumane monsters. But the United Nations said nothing about the murderous Hamas attack on the GHF, while the head of the world body’s refugee agency, UNRWA, instead denounced the GHF’s aid operation for “putting lives at risk.”
As for the media, which accepts even preposterous Hamas claims on their face value, it treated the GHF account as a claim that needed to be verified.
The attack demonstrates that Hamas is not yet beaten. The war is not over; the hostages remain in captivity, massively complicating Israel’s attempt to defeat Hamas as a military force.
But for the West, Hamas isn’t the issue. Instead, it holds Israel to be responsible for what happens in Gaza because it views Israel as the illegitimate aggressor and the Palestinian Arabs as its hapless victims.
In painting Israel as the regional villain, Western elites and the media class have been key players in the psychological war to destroy Israel, which has persuaded hundreds of thousands of people that lies are truth and truths are lies.
This week, five governments claiming to be allies of Israel showed they are also part of that hideous onslaught. The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway announced sanctions against two members of Israel’s ruling coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
These sanctions will have vanishingly little impact on the two men themselves. Their real purpose is to treat Israel as a pariah in order to soften up the world to accede to its eventual destruction.
As with the rest of this infernal campaign, the foreign ministers’ statement was based on falsehoods and willful distortions. Its principal complaint against the two Israeli ministers was that their “extremist” rhetoric was inciting the Israeli residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, or the “West Bank,” to violence against the Palestinian Arabs.
This “violent settlers” meme has now achieved critical mass as a principal tactic for further demonizing the Israelis with the lie that they are illegitimate colonizers of “Palestinian” land.
Now, a new report by the Israeli land-use watchdog Regavim has demonstrated that the “violent settler” claim is yet another blood libel.
Regavim’s researchers scoured the United Nations database, which purports to document all violent incidents in Judea and Samaria and serves as a major source of information for foreign governments and media.
This revealed that more than 98% of the incidents classified as “settler violence” were actually clashes between Arabs and the Israel Defense Forces in which no Israeli civilians were involved. Moreover, many incidents reported as “settler violence” were, in fact, incidents in which Jewish civilians acted in self-defense.
Other reported incidents of “settler violence” involved Arab terrorists who were killed or wounded while carrying out attacks against Jews; legal infrastructure projects carried out by the State of Israel; and even lawful, peaceful, supervised visits by Jews to Temple Mount in Jerusalem, visits to historic sites by hikers and tourists, and other perfectly ordinary, non-violent activities.
The report observes of the U.N.’s “settler violence” claims: “Virtually all of the information is received solely from Palestinian Arab sources, with no independent corroboration; many of the incidents are pure fabrications, while others are highly distorted misrepresentations of events.
“The sum total of these ‘incident reports’ creates a false base of information that portrays Jewish residents and IDF troops as aggressors, and the State of Israel as an apartheid state that is committing war crimes.”
This shatters the “settler violence” canard, which has dehumanized the thousands of Israeli residents of these territories who have been attacked or murdered by Arabs over the years.
The victimization of Israelis living in these territories doesn’t fit the liberal narrative of Israeli aggression. Western liberals treat the U.N.’s lies as unchallengeable truths because they view the global humanitarian establishment as the avatars of Western morality and conscience.
“Progressives” view human rights as their religion, the United Nations and trans-national courts as its priesthood, and reports published by the likes of Amnesty or Human Rights Watch as holy writ.
The entire global humanitarian establishment has become a weapon to bring about Israel’s destruction. So the more “progressive” the government, the worse this gets.
It’s no coincidence that Britain, Canada and Australia, which have liberal or left-wing governments, are viciously hostile to Israel and are hosting some of the most extreme and pervasive Jew-hatred in the West.
Yet the only violence the foreign ministers of these countries can see in Judea and Samara is by Israelis.
Now that Israel has launched its surprise attack on Iran, the West’s “progressive” classes will doubtless find cause to be enraged not at Iran—the most severe and immediate threat to civilization—but at Israel, its principal designated victim.