By Melanie Phillips, JNS
The Oct. 7 attack fired a starting gun for what the Islamists believed was the final push to destroy not only Israel but the West itself.
If anyone thought that the return to their homes of the 20 living Israeli hostages meant the end of Israel’s Oct. 7 war, they can’t have been paying attention.
U.S. President Donald Trump himself said repeatedly that the war had ended. Then he noticed that, true to form, Hamas was reneging on aspects of his own 20-point ceasefire deal.
In particular, it has failed to return all of the bodies of the hostages it murdered and has also refused to disarm. Instead, it instantly started to kill its enemies among Gaza’s clans to show that it was not defeated and still able to control the population.
How this will play out is currently unclear. Trump has said, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them.” What “we” presumably means in this context is that the Israelis will be permitted to finish them off—thus making the adulation Trump has received for “ending the war” from all those prime ministers and presidents lining up to grovel at his feet in Sharm-el-Sheikh look distinctly premature.
Far from feeling defeated, Hamas knows that it has been handed a powerful card for its continued survival—the Trump administration’s infatuation with Qatar. Astoundingly, Doha is now very firmly one of Trump’s supposed guarantors for making a permanent peace.
Qatar is hated by the other Gulf States because, as a Muslim Brotherhood jihadi regime, it’s the fount of Islamist extremism that threatens these states’ own security. It’s also the sponsor, funder and protector of Hamas. So not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is alarmed that Qatar will restore Hamas to Gaza and undermine attempts to deradicalize the population of the coastal enclave, which is a central pillar of this peace plan.
In addition, if anyone thought that a fragile peace in Gaza would mean an end to the war against Israel and the Jewish people, which has been raging out of control in the West for the past two years, they also haven’t been paying sufficient attention.
The so-called protests calling for a ceasefire and aid to the Gazans aren’t ending just because there’s a ceasefire and aid is flooding into the Strip. Perish the thought! The protest organizers say the ceasefire is very nice but irrelevant. Their aim remains as it always was: the destruction of Israel.
And so the hate marches have continued. The demonstrators have recalibrated their language. They’re no longer able to plug the “starvation” or “famine” hoax, now that everyone can see crowds of well-fed Gazans on the streets, restaurants mysteriously heaving with delicacies and even the very latest iPhone 17 on sale.
But they’re still clinging to the poisonous fiction of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. And to replace “ceasefire now,” they’re going to focus relentlessly on Israel’s “apartheid,” “occupation” and “settlers,” as well as call for boycotts, divestment and an end to Israeli “colonialism.”
One British pro-Palestine student group said its work was “not over” until “Zionism is completely eradicated.” Eradicating Zionists surely can’t be far behind.
The unprecedented campaign against Israel and the Jews was always about far more than Israel’s behavior in Gaza. The Islamist-led demonstrations that started on Oct. 7, 2023—while Israelis were still being butchered and kidnapped, and weeks before the Israel Defense Forces went full force into the Gaza Strip to battle Hamas—weren’t protests at all. They were a call to arms.
The Oct. 7 attack fired a starting gun for what Islamists believed was the final push to destroy not only Israel but the West. Those demonstrators were in a state of euphoria. They believed that the invasion of Israel and slaughter of its inhabitants had blown an enormous hole through Israel’s impregnability. They were on their way to destroying first Israel and then the West. And they still believe they are on the path to victory.
Those organizing the refocused Western hate fests are buoyed because, while war against Israel and the Jews has experienced a setback in the Middle East, it has had no pushback at all in the West.
On the contrary, liberal Western governments—the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia—have been enthusiastically joining in the diplomatic war to destroy Israel through demonization and delegitimization based on the script served up to them by Hamas, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the Palestinian Arab-Israeli online magazine +972, Ahmed Moor gloated this week: “Jewish supremacy in Palestine—the core tenet of Zionism—is increasingly regarded as illegitimate across the globe. It is far too early to declare that the Zionist era in Palestine is over, but October 2025 portends a different future. If the genocide has rendered Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, it has also made the world newly inhospitable to Zionism.”
This is expressing itself in ever-more jaw-dropping Western moral sickness. Videos on social media show Gazans being brutally tortured and murdered by Hamas. Western “pro-Palestinians” have either been silent about this treatment of the people they claim to support or have even applauded their execution as “collaborators” with Israel.
They have not only been lionizing the terrorists released from Israeli prisons but calling them “hostages,” thus equating genocidal mass murderers with the victims of their regime.
CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour went one better when she claimed that the Israeli hostages were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” The subsequent outcry forced her to issue a mealy-mouthed apology.
In Britain, an Oxford University student was filmed whipping up a crowd into a chant of “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground!”
He has now been suspended from the university and arrested. But calls to destroy Israel and murder Jews have been tolerated at these hate marches for the past two years while the police and government ministers bleat about “free speech.”
The reason for this lunacy is that the Jews are at the very core of the crisis of Western identity. Liberal universalists hate Israel as a Western nation-state, and because they believe that the Jews are behind capitalism and its associated supposed oppression and colonialism. Isolationists on the American right hate Israel because they believe that it sucks the United States into foreign wars, thus demonstrating that the Jews are a global conspiracy to put others at risk for their own benefit.
In Tablet magazine, Michael Doran writes: “The antisemitism of left and right is not a noxious gas seeping out of the soil and wafting into politics. It is being weaponized—cleverly and deliberately—by organized forces for political warfare. Progressives festoon their bigotry with banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion, demanding Jews disown Israel. Meanwhile, [Tucker] Carlson updates the Protocols to paint Jews as the hidden hand behind the empire, insisting the covenant be cut so American patriots can smash unelected concentrations of global power.”
Doran writes that the obsessional argument over Israel is, at base, an argument over the identity of America, which was originally cast in Israel’s image.
This is no less true of Britain, whose constitutional monarchy was drawn up by its 18th-century Puritan evangelical creators explicitly using the template of the ancient kingdom of Israel—the same template used by the same people who became the founding fathers of America’s constitutional settlement. And Judaism also lies at the very foundation of the West’s moral codes.
That biblically based culture has been under relentless onslaught for decades by liberal universalist Western elites. The result has been the replacement of morality by ideologies based on the false division of the world into the powerful and powerless. This opened the way for Palestinianism, which casts the fictitious “Palestinians” falsely as the indigenous people of the land of Israel who were displaced by the alleged Jewish interlopers—the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom.
The Islamist Palestinian cause, which has taken the place of Vietnam as the acme of progressivism, has opened the way in turn for the Islamization of the West.
This is a movement, through Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, to replace the Jews and Christians with Islam—and it’s now got the wind in its sails. Does Trump realize this? Israel does. The West’s craven elites certainly don’t.
