Western civilisation itself is on the line if Israel is forced to lose this war

In turning our backs after vowing support, we are waving a white flag to terrorists the world over

The view that Israel has embarked on a doomed Achillean killing rage in Palestine has become received wisdom in Western polite society. This take is flawed but not surprising, with critics pointing to the sheer scale of civilian casualties in Gaza.

The plight of the Palestinians rattles the conscience of the West, a civilisation that for all its might is grappling with its own imperial legacy and is deeply imbued with a Judeo-christian sympathy for downtrodden Davids faced with the wrath of Goliaths. The killing of British aid workers may point to a chilling breakdown in command and control within the Israeli army.

But in a world of tremendous geopolitical stakes, it is vital to at least attempt ruthless clarity, putting aside all our emotional baggage and human revulsion towards the horror of war.

The stone cold truth is that the West’s abrupt U-turn – at first vowing to lend “rock solid, unwavering support” to Israel and now threatening to withdraw support unless Jerusalem agrees to a ceasefire – has imperilled Israel’s mission to decapitate Hamas.

True, serious questions remain about the coherence of the Gaza campaign. Yet the Israeli Defence Force’s mission to obliterate Hamas as a fighting force is both perfectionally rational and realistically achievable. It has already destroyed half of the terrorist group’s warpower. The next task – to take out the thousands of fighters operating in small cells via an elaborate network of defensive tunnels – will be fiendishly tricky.

Given that Hamas uses innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields in their cold-blooded battle strategy, stashing rockets in schools and hospitals and launching attacks from populated areas, it will be impossible to achieve without tremendous loss of innocent life. The fact remains though that Hamas is immensely defeatable.

The well-worn liberal rebuttal to this is that wars on terror are an oxymoron, and only bloodthirsty neocons are stupid enough to think that it is possible to wage war on world-gripping ideas like political jihad. But this overlooks the West’s thumping defeats of Islamic State.

Indeed, the historic evidence is that military muscle can play a vital role in breaking faith in the fatally seductive idea that lurks behind all terrorist movements. This is that weaker parties can achieve political objectives through subjecting superior powers to violent campaigns of fear. The IRA’S realisation that violence would not achieve their political goals – but only after being rendered militarily inoperable by British intelligence forces – is just one example of the idea fading.

Defeating Hamas is not merely technically possible but existentially vital – for both Israel but the wider West. Hamas is not just some smalltime gang of thugs that is best ignored. Since taking over the Gaza Strip in 2007, it has upgraded from a guerrilla ragtag force primarily engaged in hit-and-run attacks to a modern terror army skilled in asymmetric urban warfare that has been prepared to plunge the entire Middle East into chaos in order to seize power from the Palestinian Authority.

A perceived victory for Hamas would spell the normalisation of a terrorist government as a viable alternative to peaceful democracy in the Middle East. It would plunge Israel into a nasty power struggle between orthodox hardliners and moderates and leave it vulnerable to further incursions by bordering terror groups. This risks distracting Israel from its intelligence and diplomatic work in partnership with the West to tackle by far the biggest security challenge facing the Middle East – Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the West’s prevarications risk fuelling the Gaza “PR disaster”. Israel’s global status as an avatar for oppression backed by the imperialist West epitomises the inability of leaders in Europe and America to counter anti-western worldviews that are both fundamentally misguided and feverishly popular, in part because they do contain sparse grains of truth.

The view, passionately held from the university campuses of London to the townships of Johannesburg, that Israel is an expansionist colonialapartheid regime draws on the undeniable reality that the Israeli authorities routinely restrict the movements of Palestinians and deny them the same rights as their Jewish counterparts.

Proponents of this view point, also to the established fact that Israelis have illegally built settlements on occupied land beyond their internationally recognised borders, with some Orthodox communities declaring a religious claim to the land. But what Israel’s critics overlook is that it is not the result of an elaborate colonial plot, but rather a messy multi-generational struggle to shore up security in a hostile region.

If Israel’s political class has pursued a settlement programme with gusto, it is as a security buffer rather than an imperialistic project. Many of the repressive restrictions in the West Bank came into force after the Second Intifada. If anything Israel is not an grotesque ode to imperialism but a cautionary tale on the compromises on freedom and human rights that a country will make when it is threatened by perma-terrorism.

Perhaps the world would be more open to such a perspective if the West were more assertive about Israel’s right to defend itself. Instead, it has chosen moral cowardice. In suddenly threatening to withdraw arms support after aid workers are killed, it indulges the myth that it is somehow possible for Israel to take on Hamas without heavy Palestinian casualties. And by urging Israel to negotiate a ceasefire before Hamas has been neutralised, the West legitimises the view that Israel is a bully, using monstrously disproportionate force in Gaza, that must be reigned in for the sake of the world’s conscience.

Instead of acting like the leader of the free world, the West is behaving like a civilisation under siege. The world is a darker place for it.

By urging Israel to negotiate a ceasefire before Hamas has been neutralised, the West legitimises the view that Israel is a bully