Strategic and moral pusillanimity

Matthew Syed in the Times:

It’s not often I see a story of Hamas celebrating, at least not since the delirious joy that greeted the attack on October 7 when operatives stormed over the border, raped and murdered, seemingly with the kind of glee that most ordinary people reserve for family occasions. I won’t bore (or repulse) you with the stories of young Gazans torturing and maiming while video-calling their parents, hoping for an outburst of filial pride. One can’t help thinking of the words of Umberto Eco’s line in The Prague Cemetery: “People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”

Afterwards, Hamas leaders helpfully came on to the airwaves to explain that they would commit mass murder again and again, if they had half a chance, not so they could kill some Jews, but all Jews, as proclaimed in their charter. This isn’t a series of abstract words but the galvanising force of a group that won power in Gaza through a democratic vote and has since ruled as a totalitarian dictatorship: indoctrinating kids, torturing critics, snaffling the funds lavished on them to build an infrastructure of tunnels and hideouts under hospitals and schools — more labyrinthine than the London Underground — so that any counterattack by Israel would kill as many of their own citizens as possible. Human shields is the conventional term, but scarcely does justice to the requisite evil.

So why were they so happy a month ago after the British prime minister — the leader of a nation of huge symbolic significance, given the UK’s role in the foundation of Israel 80 or so years ago — gave what was billed as a “significant speech” from the lectern at Downing Street? Well, this was the moment that paved the way for the statement on Sunday for the UK to “recognise” a Palestinian state.

An interesting word, that: “recognise”. As I write these words, I am unclear about the borders of this state, its government, how it will operate, or what we are supposed to make of the fact that hostages within this putative jurisdiction are still being held in horrific conditions.

This, by the way, was the Hamas response to Sir Keir Starmer’s statement, perhaps the greatest evocation of glee from within the terrorist group in months. “The fruits of October 7 are what caused the entire world to open its eyes to the Palestinian issue — and they are moving towards it with force,” Ghazi Hamad, a senior operative, said. “That is, that the Palestinian people are a people who deserve a country. The initiative by several countries to recognise a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7. We have proven that victory over Israel is not impossible, and our weapons are a symbol of Palestinian honour.”

So there you have it: Hamas regards the British policy as an explicit vindication of mass murder, of gaining by killing. And it isn’t just this group of psychopaths who see it in these terms. Security insiders tell me that other jihadi networks also regard official British policy as an exoneration of terrorism as they busily recruit across the Middle East via propaganda pumped out daily over social media. One might call it appeasement, although I am not sure this quite does justice to the strategic and moral pusillanimity of what we’re seeing, not just from the British government but the French, Canadians and more….