Exposing Hamas is worth losing friends over
An old friend from Cape Town recently told me they don’t want to meet when I visit next month. Many Jews will have experienced this – a friend who stayed silent in the face of the worst terrorist atrocity in Israel’s history, only to excoriate Israel on social media in the following weeks.
Losing friendships is distressing, but nothing compared to watching raw footage of the October 7 massacres at a London screening I facilitated. The crimes, many filmed by Hamas terrorists, show humanity at its lowest. Purveyors of sickening terror joyfully invoke God’s name while bringing death and defilement to His creatures.
Any opinion that ignores or downplays Hamas’s evil is disconnected from reality and has nothing to offer the search for peace. Yet some deny or cast doubt on these barbaric acts. They justify or “explain” them. Others, like my friend, condemn the atrocity of October 7 when pushed before then condemning Israel’s response. They emphasise “context”, with the apparent implication that Israel had it coming. As if killing parents in front of children, using a severed head as a football, rape, and parading and defiling corpses is an inevitable, reflex reaction to Israeli actions.
Context is indeed important. Here is some: Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005. Hamas brutally controls Gaza and has attacked Israeli civilians time and again. Israeli measures to contain this terror are painful for Gazan people and open to strong debate. But the terror precedes the response, not the other way round.
My friend accuses Israel of “genocide”, but offers no idea of how better Israel should protect its citizens. Hamas knew that Israel’s response would be harsh and, embedded in hospitals and schools, knew civilians would suffer, though the numbers quoted seldom acknowledge the thousands of Hamas terrorists among the dead.
But Palestinian suffering is part of Hamas’s plan to make peace impossible and destroy Israel. Hamas showed us what “from the river to the sea” means and how it would carry it out. To chant it on demonstrations is either credulous or genocidal.
My friend is upset when marches in London, Cape Town or elsewhere are accused of anti-Semitism. But Jews see the banners, hear the chants and understand that we are targets.
I agree that demonstrating for Palestinians is not anti-Semitic. For decades I have championed the Palestinian right to self-determination and have been an outspoken critic of Israeli governments for obstructing that right. Ironically, I have lost friendships because of it. I maintain that attempting to “manage” the conflict rather than resolve it has been disastrous. A government that boasted that it alone could deliver security has been exposed. I am confident the Israeli public, out protesting in huge numbers before Hamas started this war, will deliver better leadership before long.
Palestinians have legitimate grievances and aspirations but that is not Hamas’s agenda, which is to murder Jews and destroy Israel. Believe them when they say they would do it again. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in charge would be preposterous.
Its Israeli victims have included outspoken voices for peace and Palestinian rights, like Vivian Silver, a lifelong peace activist whose murdered body was identified weeks after the attack. Or Oded Lifshitz, 83, a peace activist and retired journalist, still held hostage, who spends his retirement driving Palestinian children from Gaza for treatment. Such people have done more for Palestinians than thousands shouting “intifada” on our streets, or those who simply march without any care under whose banner they do so.
Yet Israel, the Palestinians and the international community must renew the vision of two states for the two peoples who live in the land. My late friend President F W de Klerk once told me that his epiphany was not just that apartheid was unconscionable, but that you cannot choose the leaders you negotiate with. You deal with the leaders their people choose. The Palestinian people must decide who that leadership will be, and I hope they make the right choices.
But I am struck by an unpleasant realisation: my friend can choose not to talk to me when our world views and moral compass diverge. But Israel does not have that luxury.
Sir Mick Davis is a former chief executive of the Conservative Party and former Chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council
