The images of missiles and tracer fire over Tel Aviv and Tehran this week herald a new apocalypse in the Middle East. The prospect of a nuclear Iran is terrifying: imagine such a power in the hands of a regime so weak it cannot muster more than a few hundred conventional missiles, most of which can’t penetrate Israel’s defences, and so fanatical it might use it.
Israel is right, in my view, to try to take out Iran’s nuclear programme; they are doing that job for the whole civilised world. Likewise their battle in Gaza against Iran’s proxy Hamas is a civilisational imperative, made incalculably difficult by Hamas’s tactic of blending with and hiding behind the civilian population and facilities.
The counter-tactics of the IDF are of course proper subjects of our scrutiny and, where appropriate, censure; and even if it hampers their war effort Israel should do everything possible to get humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
But at its heart this remains a decades-long struggle between a UN-recognised, democratic sovereign state and a movement composed of local terrorists and foreign despots which wishes to exterminate it and to wage a war of destruction on the West. We must not let our rightful distress at the plight of Palestinian civilians (the principal victims of Iran’s puppet regime in Gaza) or our objection to particular IDF operations obscure the fundamentals of the battle in the Middle East.
