Israel's right to defend itself

Hamas atrocities have exposed fault lines around the world including here in Britain

Towering columns

In The Spectator, John Jenkins and Udi Rosen explain how Hamas was able to launch their invasion and surprise the Israeli intelligence and military services.

Allowing Hamas to build its own state with Gulf cash, PA transfers and revenue from employment in Israel, the theory went, might bring a sense of responsibility. It would also make it wary, at least in public, of taking too Iranian – that is bellicose – a line on general issues of Palestinian liberation. And the judicious adjustment of economic safety valves would regulate any incentives to seek Iranian cash. This month, for example, Israel re-issued permits and reopened the Erez Crossing to almost 18,000 Palestinian workers, a reward for an understanding that Hamas would reduce friction, such as recent ‘civilian’ border protests.

How illusory this all now appears. These protests, it turns out, were not simply a spectacle. They were a test of security and therefore an integral part of the preparations for Saturday’s operation.  Iran may have been consulted in advance and have provided some advice and resources. Hamas will have taken lessons from previous Hezbollah operations, particularly those designed to infiltrate Israel and seize hostages. But Hamas will have planned the exact course of the violence – the targeting of civilians, including women and children, the desecration of corpses, the cold-blooded mass murder – all by itself. And it has taken a leaf out of Da’esh’s book by filming every horror and then broadcasting the footage on social media.

Too many people seem to have persuaded themselves that Hamas was open to negotiations, and – a recurring dream – might be willing to accept a long-term ceasefire (hudna) in return for guarantees of economic easing. This meant ignoring its adamantine ideology, even if a statement of general principles, toning down the virulent and genocidal anti-Semitism of its 1988 Charter – but not abrogating it – was published for western consumption in 2017. These illusions have been shared by some British and American officials and commentators, who have sought to push Israel towards acceptance and conciliation.

For ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman offers practical actions the Government can take to enforce anti-terror law and tackle pro-Hamas demonstrations.

It would be a mistake simply to identify support for Hamas with British Muslims. Some are strongly opposed to it, while many non-Muslims are vehemently supportive. But this simply demonstrates the potential scale of the problem. Backing for Hamas and Hezbollah runs in an arc from the adolescent left (pro-trans, pro-sexual freedom, pro-drug liberalisation) to the Islamist right (anti all of the previous, and pro pre-modern law). This alliance of convenience may be incoherent – united only by its hatred of western liberalism – but it adds up to a number that must run to tens of thousands. At the most conservative of estimates.

The challenge is scarcely new. There are reports that a Jewish school in London has advised its pupils not to wear their school blazers in public. But such schools have required extra fencing, gates and CCTV for many years. The Community Security Trust recorded 2,261 antisemitic incidents in 2021 – “a record high sparked by antisemitic reactions to the conflict in the Middle East that year”. “F*** the Jews… F*** all of them. F*** their mothers, f*** their daughters and show your support for Palestine. Rape their daughters and we have to send a message like that,” men shouted that year from a convoy of cars driven in 2021 through parts of Finchley. There is no reason to believe that the total will be lower in current circumstances.

Suella Braverman has urged the police to use the full force of the law to crack down on support for Hamas. The Met says that it will increase the number of officers on the streets. But there is evidently a gap between what the law says and how it is enforced. So what should the state do when lots of people support a terrorist organisation?

At UnHerd, David Patrikarakos examines how Iran and Russia view the wars in Gaza and Ukraine through the lens of a broader clash between East and West.

For its part, the Islamic Republic has always had an East-West divide as a guiding principle of policy. Its founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini based much of his hatred of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, on what he perceived as Pahlavi’s subservience to the West. Like many unreasonable old men, Khomeini had a binary view of the world. His fusion of Islamism and anti-imperialism found a politically expedient outlet in Islam’s traditional bifurcation of the world into of Haq versus Batel (truth and righteousness against falsehood) and Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb (the realm of peace and belief against the realm of war and disbelief). Onto that he grafted his desire to preserve Iran’s Islamic identity in the face of Western influence: a resistance to what was called Gharbzadegi (literally: ‘West-struckness’).

Khomeini manifested much of these desires in a foreign policy that preached a non-aligned vision of “neither East nor West” (while of course still trying to export the Islamic Revolution abroad). Khamenei has gone further. The messaging coming out of Tehran is, on this point at least, unyielding. Iran looks at the West and sees civilisational atrophy everywhere. Civil strife, unemployment and homelessness are ubiquitous. Abroad, its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria are legion. Politically, it points to the rise of the Brics (Tehran applied to join the group in June 2022 and will become a member on 1 January 2024); the emergence of new trade routes; and the shift in economic power to the Global South. For Khamenei, this is where the arc of history is bending: towards the birth of a new world order in which three civilisations — a Russo-Slavic civilization led by Russia, an Islamic civilisation led by Iran’s Shia Islamists and the Chinese Han civilisation — are all in conflict with a declining West.

Putin is more rhetorically circumspect, but his thoughts are equally clear. “The trend toward multipolarity in the world is inevitable,” he declared. “It will only intensify. And those who do not understand this and do not follow this trend will lose. It is an absolutely obvious fact. It is as obvious as the sunrise. Nothing can be done about it.”

For the New Statesman, Phil Tinline reflects on what drives the collapse of political consensus and whether Sir Keir Starmer can bring about political transformation.

The years 1945 and 1979 were transformative because they brought the redistribution not just of money, but economic power: taking back control once again from the guilty men. Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s ex-director of policy, thinks Labour leaders “realise there is not an endless public appetite for big state spend. People want action on the causes and the root problems with markets, not just subsidies for their worst effects.” She sees a turn to thinking about “how we start to put citizens at the front of this, rather than the extortionate profits, putting the shareholder at the centre – wherever they may reside”. Why, she asked, are these people “more important in the British economy than your average working person?”

But are Labour’s plans sufficient? Angela Rayner promises a New Deal for Working People, including “fair pay agreements”, starting in social care, and bans on zero-hour contracts and fire-and-rehire. There is some willingness within the party leadership to enforce regulation of the privatised utilities more firmly. Labour has sworn to dismantle planning barriers to housebuilding. At the summer conference of Blair’s Institute for Global Change, speakers suggested cajoling pension funds to invest in UK infrastructure, and compelling the food industry to stop feeding people junk, which stores up vast costs for the NHS. But since then there have been Labour’s pledge-softenings and row-backs.

The transformations needed to address Britain’s everyday nightmares also involve getting the state to work better – and another often-made promise: “Our view is you’ve got to do something to change where power lies, open it up,” said the shadow cabinet minister, “so the regions of England where a lot of the poverty is, can start to get back control” – of infrastructure, transport, economic development.

In The Times, Trevor Phillips suggests that Sir Keir Starmer is too cautious in his approach and has not sealed the deal with voters.

It is suggested that Labour’s poll lead will deliver a Blair-level parliamentary landslide. That is nonsense. For the two years ahead of the 1997 election, Blair’s polling advantage rarely fell below 20 per cent. For the past year, Starmer’s lead in the polls I trust the most almost never reached that level.

Add to that the effect of inescapable political gravity. Pollster after pollster has pointed out that governing parties tend to recover their support by up to ten points. Blair started the long election campaign more than 25 points ahead and ended with only 13 per cent more of the popular vote. Boundary changes have added something like 20 safe seats to the Tory column. In 1997, Blair could count on Scotland delivering 40 seats; today, Starmer would be happy to win half that number.

What I suspect worries Mandelson more is that the indefinable magic around the New Labour project has stubbornly refused to emerge from the Starmer team. He recognises that there is a major difference between then and now. Blair could count on growth to deliver some of his promises; Starmer knows there will be no money, and it is to his credit that he won’t promise what he knows he can’t deliver.

For ConservativeHome, James Johnson picks apart the liberal fallacy that the British Conservatives are turning into a US-style Republican Party.

Lewis Goodall spoke of the radicalisation of the Tories as part of a “hostile takeover” of the right, following in the footsteps of the American conservative movement. Is this really true? Suella Braverman’s speech met the most outrage, but this was a child of immigrants using language no more controversial than that of ministers in the New Labour years.

The Tories’ immigration policy is hardly radical: it is a disincentive scheme, being explored by others in Europe, which has not even got off the ground. On legal immigration, the Conservatives preside over one of the more liberal systems in the western world, with sky-high numbers to boot.

And are we really going to argue that the ‘meat-tax’ is any worse than Labour telling old people there was a ‘dementia tax’ coming for them in 2017? What topped it all off? A speech by a mild-mannered man with a “Dada” wristband on, announcing three technocratic policies on rail, education, and smoking. A regressive, hard-right government this is not.

People like Goodall will argue that this is nonetheless a slippery slope. That even a small step is still a step along a road to the divisive politics of America. But in both America and Britain it is not the right that run the risk of leading us down that road. It is the left.

Wonky thinking

Onward’s Future of Conservatism Project, led by Gavin Rice and Nick Timothy, has published its first paper The Case for Conservatism with a foreword from Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove. Together, they make the case for a pragmatic and popular conservatism that can deliver British renewal by serving families, communities, and the nation.

The aftermath of deindustrialisation and ultra-globalisation has left Britain highly dependent on a narrow range of sectors. Global offshoring has disrupted communities and increased regional divides. Voters in these communities deserve better.

The compact between social classes is also under strain. Younger people need support to get on the housing ladder. Economic growth needs to be spread more equitably. Migration brings benefits, but the pace of cultural change can disorientate, while also increasing pressure on public services and pushing down wages for lower earners.

These are pressures facing every developed nation - but we need to show the United Kingdom can continue to be the best country in the world when it comes to shaping a more genuinely inclusive future.

As conservatives we know history does not march in one direction. Whether in political history or global economics, choice is possible - this is the gift of democracy. Neither an over-mighty state nor the undemocratic dominance of markets should determine our fate, but the sovereign decision-making of the British people, via their representatives, acting in their social and economic interest.

Britain has significant underlying strengths. We retain a leading role in advanced manufacturing, life sciences, research and innovation. We have globally competitive service industries. We are a country people want to come to live and work in, enjoying a level of freedom and security others can only dream of. We have a history of which we can be proud. We champion the beliefs of freedom, tolerance and liberal democracy, rooted in the bonds of nationhood, community and the common good.

Our nation state does not need to wither before impersonal global forces, or be out-competed by hostile trading partners and aggressive powers. It is possible to achieve both faster growth and a fairer social contract. Individual freedom can only find its fulfilment in the bonds of community. A state that is active, not absent, need not lead to the stagnation of welfarism. Rather, it can enable the kinds of private sector growth that will lead to better jobs and prosperity across all regions, communities and classes.

We believe conservatism has the intellectual resources and the strategic pragmatism to embrace change and provide new answers. Our well-tested beliefs, applied to new contexts and challenges, will prevail. Prosperity and fairness can co-exist. Individual, community and nation depend upon one another.

Jeremy Adelman took a deep dive at Project Syndicate into the history of neoliberalism viewed through new biographies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. The story of their lives sheds light on how much of the revival of market economics was driven by ideas or self-interest.

It would be hard to imagine two characters more different. Side by side, Hayek, the Old World near-aristocrat, and Friedman, the Jew who graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey, made an odd couple indeed. The former was raised in the sunset years of liberalism, whereas the latter started his career during the Great Depression. The former was utterly insouciant about family, whereas the latter was the devoted husband of an equally brilliant wife and co-author, Rose Friedman…

…Friedman’s brashness contrasted with Hayek’s stuffy Olympian style. Friedman’s tendency to interrupt speakers and draw them into argument drove Hayek to distraction, and Mont Pèlerin summits left him ever more disaffected as Friedman’s star rose in the movement.

But there was also a deeper divergence between the two men, one that is playing out now within the Republican Party in the US and across the global right. Then as now, neoliberals split wildly in outlook. Friedman was optimistic about the market’s resilience and the tendency of individual wants to corrode any government effort to manage them. Hayek, especially in Road, came to the opposite conclusion: consumer-citizens would invite government control to allay their uncertainties as their wants mounted. Both inclined toward a belief in the inevitable outcomes of History, only to deliver opposite prophecies of what History held in store.

Still, they shared a basic faith in the efficiency of the market and the importance of private property to a free society. They thrived when declinism was the Zeitgeist; both believed that liberalism was perennially on the ropes and in need of rescue. Left unguarded, the marketplace was the innocent child waiting to be pounced upon by the wolves of statism, socialism, and social engineers.

How to think about these neoliberal thinkers depends on one’s perspective. With the lens pulled back, they merge into a tradition that defends private property over public goods, markets over the state, and choice over security. Zoom in closer, however, and discrepancies appear. It is the fate of the biographical genre to bring the lens right up close to the subject and blur the background. As a result, the importance of specific neoliberal ideas to the broader movement is not always clear.

My own read is that both Hayek and Friedman were fully aware of the utility of their ideas for particular interests – and, to a certain extent, serving such interests was the point. Their commitment to objectivity in economics inevitably chafed against – some would say melded with – the objectives of their patrons.

Book of the week

We recommend Mill and Liberalism by Maurice Cowling this week. Leading the Peterhouse school of history, Professor Cowling worked with conservative historians to reshape how high politics could be understood. In this account, Professor Cowling deconstructed Millian liberalism and its legacy.

Mill, the godfather of English liberalism, emerges from these pages considerably less libertarian than is sometimes suggested. He emerges considerably more radical, and, without straining words unduly, may be accused of more than a touch of something resembling moral totalitarianism. His emphasis on social cohesion and moral consensus at all periods of his life was of the greatest consequence; whilst commitment to elevate character and make moral reasoning self-critical leaves less room for variegated human development than some writers have imagined. Because his opinions have become part of a prevailing orthodoxy, their aggressiveness is less obvious than when he wrote: because they express, even in victory, disarming intentions of universal benevolence, they are often taken to be more comprehensive than they were. Mill's doctrine was liberal: but his liberalism was neither comprehensive nor libertarian: it attempted dogmatically to erode the assumptions on which competing doctrines were based. One competing doctrine was Christianity: in Mill's hands, Liberalism was not compatible with it. Liberalism, no less than Marxism, is intolerant of competition: jealousy, and a carefully disguised intolerance, are important features of Mill's intellectual personality.

On Liberty, therefore, has been one of the most influential of modern political tracts chiefly, on this view, because its purpose has been misunderstood. On Liberty, contrary to common opinion, was not so much a plea for individual freedom, as a means of ensuring that Christianity would be superseded by that form of liberal, rationalistic utilitarianism which went by the name of the Religion of Humanity. Mill's liberalism was a dogmatic, religious one, not the soothing night-comforter for which it is sometimes mistaken. Mill's object was not to free men, but to convert them, and convert them to a peculiarly exclusive, peculiarly insinuating moral doctrine. Mill wished to moralize all social activity—religion and art no less than politics and education—and to mark each with his own emphatic imprint. Over the last two centuries erosion of Christendom has been a European, not just an English, phenomenon; but it has been English nevertheless: Mill, no less than Marx, Nietzsche or Comte, claimed to replace Christianity by 'something better'. Atheists and agnostics, humanists and free-thinkers may properly give thanks to Mill. He, with Lord Russell and Matthew Arnold, is, in England, their great tradition; irony is not involved in calling on him.

The impact of Mill, however, has not been on them alone. Over the last sixty years, innumerable public figures who would have deplored Mill's religion if they had understood it and whose purposes had nothing in common with his, have used Mill's language in order to leave the impression that they have. To use liberal language has been taken to be intelligent: to reject it evidence of stupidity. And it has been the language which has mattered, and been remembered, whilst the object to which Mill put it has been lost…The chances of the political game make strange bedfellows. The body of the old Liberal Party was Christian and non-conforming in general temper, but used Mill's slogans notwithstanding. Nor is it clear how much of the socially respectable, theologically committed Christian conservative bloc, which offers Mill's slogans as liberal conservatism today, has any understanding of the irony involved in the use to which it puts them.

Quick links

A 324% increase in anti-Semitic incidents over four days has been reported to the Community Security Trust.

An Israeli flag was thrown down and replaced with a Palestinian flag by protesters who climbed the top of Sheffield Town Hall.

Sympathy for Israelis has risen by 11 percentage points since May to 21%. Sympathy for Palestinians has fallen to 15% but 45% do not know who to support…

…and 39% oppose flying the Israeli flag from UK government buildings with 31% in favour.

After denouncing Hamas’s invasion of Israel, the EU stopped all aid going to the Palestinian Authority, but U-turned and resumed making payments.

The French interior minister Gérald Darmanin promised to expel foreign nationals who have committed antisemitic acts.

Polling showed 45% of people want government to invest more in public services while 16% believe the current level of spending is just right.

Former permanent secretary to the Treasury Nicholas Macpherson said governments “should have taken advantage [of low interest rates] and borrowed more when times were more stable...and invested more.”

IMF prediction of weak GDP growth for the UK based on out of date expectations of interest rate rises.

Workers in extreme poverty dropped from 26% to 6% between 2000 and 2022.

The government is prepared to deport 4,000 migrants if courts give the go-ahead for the Rwanda scheme.

The production of new industrial facilities in the UK is 50% faster than in the 2010s.

The number of electric vehicle charging points has grown to 50,000 and is expected to reach 100,000 in August 2025.

Labour’s plans to remove fossil fuels from UK electricity by 2030 is backed by 50% of the public but opposed by 50% of Conservative voters.

Support for a wave of new towns is backed by 53% of the public as well as 47% of Conservative voters and 65% of Labour voters.

Luxembourg’s centre-right party won the election on Sunday and ousted Prime Minister Bettel.