The West must grow a backbone to prevent World War III

After Mossad assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh this week, the White House delivered a message. “All parties” must stop “escalatory actions”, said secretary of state Antony Blinken, as the region was heading “toward more conflict”. Joe Biden added that the hit had “not helped”.

If there were two takeaways from the media coverage this week, they would be that warmongering Israel must “de-escalate” and that the Hamas leader was a “moderate”. The second point we can dismiss as propaganda; Haniyeh was a political rather than a military leader, but since the 1980s he had been instrumental in orchestrating and inciting jihad, including the bloody Intifada. He lamented the killing of Osama Bin Laden, led prayers to celebrate October 7, and dismissed news of the “martyrdom” of three of his sons by praising God for their admission into paradise and carrying on with his day.

With foes like these, is avoiding escalation best? To the jihadi ear, the White House’s calls for calm sound like an invitation to push the campaign for Israel’s destruction one step further.

Only a madman would want war. But for thousands of years, we have known that appeasement isn’t the way to avoid it. Here’s Sun Tzu: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Here’s Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus: “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (“If you want peace, prepare for war”.) Here’s Winston Churchill on the third day of the Munich agreement debate: “A bitter cup… will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Who makes this argument now? The West has somehow forgotten that if you shun conflict, it will come for you on the enemy’s terms. To its credit, the White House has despatched a squadron of fighter jets to the Middle East, as well as Navy cruisers and destroyers, and has been assembling the same coalition that defended Israeli skies in April. But if it had done this long ago, we would not find ourselves in this position today.

Despite its overwhelming military might, the etiolated West has lost any sense of “moral health and martial vigour”. It pays lip service to the Jewish state’s “right to self-defence”, but when Israel retaliates, it is accused of warmongering or genocide. In the ears of many Israelis, calls for “de-escalation” sound like requests to bare their necks for the knife.

Strength is the currency of the Middle East. Two days after 12 Israeli children were killed playing football, the talismanic Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, Ismail Haniyeh and Hamas’s military commander, Mohammad Deif, were all confirmed dead. In Tehran, its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was unable to speak for shock. Private congratulations flooded in from Sunni Arab states who were now looking more favourably on an Israeli alliance.

So far so good. But nobody knows whether Iran’s reprisal will herald World War Three or, as is more likely, will be limited, indicating that it has been deterred.

What was left to Israel but brinkmanship? For years, Benjamin Netanyahu pursued a policy known as “the concept”, which involved containing Hamas while concentrating on economic development and building alliances. This was “avoiding escalation” writ large. October 7 put paid to that.

Nine months later, Jerusalem is in the very jaws of the jackal, facing attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq and Yemen. Behind it all is the octopus of Tehran, whose tentacles reach as far as London.

Sooner or later, the West must wake up. Nobody wants war. But how to respond when war wants you?

Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ and author of ‘Israelophobia’