Bullshit Eaters

Last year I was invited down to Swindon to appear on Lotus Eaters. Nobody on the right would decline such an invitation because they are influential, and at the time I had some respect for Carl Benjamin. Say what you like about Lotus Eaters, what they have built is a serious accomplishment. I think it’s a seriously impressive operation even if I now think Carl Benjamin is a twat.

As it happens, it wasn’t my best outing. Having driven down from Thirsk, I had a bitch of a headache and appeared on a post mortem show about the New York mayoral elections - a subject I could not be less interested in. The latter part of the afternoon was a long discussion with their in house geo-politics guru, Firas Modad. You can watch the episode for the mere sum of five quid on their website, but it’s nothing I haven’t said here - and I need the five quid more than they do.

Ever since, I’ve been tuned into Modad. He is very obviously a knowledgeable person who brings an interesting perspective to geo-politics as a Druze-Lebanese nationalist. Precisely why Lotus Easter fronts a Lebanese man to provide geo-political analysis for a British nationalist website escapes me. He has a very obvious bias and an understandable antipathy toward Israel.

While that would be otherwise trivial, he is lending weight to the boys of Lotus Eaters who are drifting further towards an anti-Israel position in support of Charlie Downes and the Restore Britain project. Charlie Downes, the de facto deputy leader of Restore, has accused Israel of genocide.

Modad, though, is more reserved in his analysis. He does not believe Israel is committing genocide, but still calls the IDF operation in Gaza a mass murder, verging on ethnic cleansing.

This is where I profoundly disagree. None of this started on 7/10. I've lost count of the number of Israeli incursions and strikes on Gaza in my adult lifetime. That's kinda what you end up having to do when you have a terror enclave on your doorstep that fires barrages of rockets at you (constructed with materials intended for civilian infrastructure).

Israel, though, being the military technology masters that they are, pioneered the Iron Dome, in conjunction with US Patriot technology - meaning that fewer projectiles would ever reach their target, thus diminishing the ability of Hamas to inflict casualties. That meant they didn't have to care so much about rocket sites, thus eliminating the need for military retaliation.

The arithmetic changed, however, when Hamas launched a rape-murder excursion, with the intent of causing as much carnage as possible. That demands a military response just as much as 9/11 did. (we can argue about whether it was the right target).

At this point, it's no longer a matter of tit for tat precision strikes. Palestinians revealed themselves as a deeply sick society. They all celebrated 7/10.

Here you have to understand Israeli psychology. When they say "never again", that is not just a slogan. It is a root command. If Jews are not safe in the land of Israel then they are not safe anywhere. On that basis, they are entitled (and obliged as a nation state) to deploy the maximum level of violence necessary to secure the safety of their own people. This is not an exception I make for the Jews. It is what I would demand of my own government in similar circumstances.

You can bitch and whine about the casualty rate compared with other conflicts but nowhere else has the same population density as Gaza. If you buy into the notion that the party that incurs the greatest losses, and suffers the most casualties, is the most put upon, then by your own logic, the Nazis were right. Britain bombed the shit out of German cities and reduced Dresden and other places to ashes.

While historians can equivocate about Dresden, that's a peacetime luxury. The fact is we were at war, and when you're in a total war, the job of the British armed forces was to kill Germans, be they soldiers or the people assembling their weapons of war. That's how war is. Wars are shitty things, which is why you don't start them.

For a country like Israel, it has been demonstrated time and again that there is no negotiation with genocidal Islamists who indoctrinate their children to massacre Jews. There is no neat and tidy solution to this. These ethno-religious spats are only ever resolved when one side comprehensively wins and in this instance, it cannot be the Palestinians - especially not Hamas.

You can cry about the loss of life. It's sad. War is sad, but this was a war of choice on the part of Hamas. Following the attack on 7/10 this became less a matter of military retaliation and more a matter of military engineering centred on the question of how you ensure that Hamas is never again in a position to mount a similar attack.

When you start thinking in those terms, everything the IDF has done conforms to that engineering logic. If you want to prevent another 7/10 then the command bunkers, smuggling tunnels and weapons caches needed to be completely obliterated, and this is done with bombs, not the power of persuasion and diplomacy. On that basis, I cannot condemn Israel for doing exactly what I would have done in their position - not least because I would not risk a single life of my own people to preserve the life of anyone belonging to a culturally indoctrinated psychopath society.

In this regard, I do not see that Israel has gone overboard. What they have done is no worse than what Turks routinely do to Kurdish towns, and no different in function to what Egypt did in combatting ISIS on the Sanai peninsula. It certainly isn't genocide.

While some might call me a "Zionist" for saying this, my basic position is that I do not place any arbitrary limits on what a nation state is allowed to do to safeguard its own people. But supposing it met the technical definition of genocide, I still wouldn't give a tinker's fuck. There's only one real solution to this and that's for Israel to comprehensively win the Arab-Israeli war, because for as long as Islamists are in control of Palestinian territories, there is no end to this. Ending this in the most expedient way possible is the most humane option - because it's better than another century of containment and tit-for tat retaliation that will result in tens of thousands more deaths.

If you ask me, Gazans had it pretty good on 6/10, and maybe continued co-operation might one day have resulted in Gaza being a peace partner, earning the trust of Israel so that barriers might come down. Hamas, though, had very different ideas. Now Palestinians are paying the price. There are plenty of causes I could shed a tear over, but this isn't one of them. Modad can whine that this war is bad, but it's for him and his fellow travellers to spell out what the alternative was. I'd be VERY interested to hear it.