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This week, the former hostage Mia Schem gave her first television interview. The 21-year-old French-Israeli tattoo artist described how she had been shot, groped and dragged into Gaza by her hair, where she was operated upon by a vet without anaesthetic and kept like an animal in a zoo. “I went through a holocaust,” she said.
This was not the first time her voice had been heard. Before her release at the beginning of December, she had appeared in a Hamas video parroting propaganda. “People very good, very kind to me,” she had said with fear evident in her eyes.
By normal standards, the notion that the savages who butchered babies and carried out bestial sexual violence would be credibly described as “very kind” by a hostage under duress would be dismissed. But in a world of Israelophobia, the clip went viral.
Millions of viewers began to see Hamas as noble freedom fighters maligned by the duplicitous and bloodsucking Jews. By the time the poor woman was able to tell the truth, the damage had been done.
This grim vignette is emblematic of how the West has been played by Hamas. In a climate of Israelophobia, morality has been turned on its head. Hamas attempts an act of genocide, yet that same crime is pinned on Israel. Hamas butchers hundreds of innocents, yet Israel gets the blame.
The terrorists know exactly what they are doing. For years, they have dealt with UN officials, NGO representatives and the international media. They understand the Weltanschauung of such circles. They know that they need only enable a supply of videos of civilian casualties and the credulous journalists, sneering diplomats, jihadi sympathisers and useful idiots will do the rest.
As a result, the disinformation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – Israel has been falsely accused of that since Soviet times – is accepted as fact. During a lesson on Lord of the Flies, my daughter’s English teacher cited the actions of the IDF, not Hamas, as a recent modern example of the “savagery” that killed Piggy.
That is not to downplay the suffering in Gaza. A just and defensive war is as hellish as any other, and every decent heart aches for peace. But our emotions are being manipulated to draw us onto the side of darkness. The truth remains the truth: Israel is acting as any other democracy would in impossible circumstances.
The Ministry of Defence does not produce a Ukraine-style daily briefing on the true facts of the Gaza conflict. It should. But even if we accept Hamas’s figures, Israel’s combatant-to-civilian death ratio in the Strip is believed to be 1:2. This is broadly in line with British and American forces in urban warfare, even though Gaza, with its hundreds of miles of tunnels filled with zombie jihadis with no fear of death, presents an unprecedented challenge. In clashes in Lebanon, Israel has killed about 146 combatants and 19 civilians, a ratio unmatched in modern warfare.
For Hamas, every innocent casualty is a victory. As far back as 2008, it was collaborating with Iranian planners to design hospitals and schools that could hold missiles. The logic is simple: the martyrs live on in Heaven, the media broadcasts heartrending footage, and the world ratchets up pressure for a ceasefire. Then October 7 can be planned again.
By the same token, every death is a tragedy for Israel. It has done well to prevent the toll from mounting higher by warning civilians before attacks. As John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, remarked: “There are very few modern militaries in the world that would do that. I don’t know that [we] would do that.”
In this age of soggy thinking, it has proven depressingly easy to flip the public into the darkness. With Israelophobia on its side, Hamas hasn’t even bothered to keep its strategy secret. Controlling emotion is what counts.
Jake Wallis Simons is the author of Israelophobia and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle
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