I have known Melanie Phillips for some time. In fact, she was at one point my home desk news editor at the Guardian.<\/p>\n
Strange though it may now seem, Phillips in that era epitomised the anguished North London liberal, existentially unsure about whether to obey the dictates of her heart or her head.<\/p>\n
Phillips is by no means the only former Guardian colleague to make the journey from soft liberal left to hard Islamophobic<\/a> right, from an Ed Miliband figure to a Michael Gove<\/a>. But unlike some I could mention, this rite of passage had little to do with money.<\/p>\n Phillips thought it could help her better serve the cause of Israel<\/a>, which is now, according to her, under more threat than ever before.<\/p>\n For her, the current idea of Israel is very different from the one she proclaimed at the Guardian, where she was fully at home. It had always been a Zionist newspaper.<\/p>\n The Guardian\u2019s most prominent former editor, CP Scott, was the first major figure in the British<\/a> media in the early 20th century to espouse<\/a> the Zionist cause of Chaim Weizmann, an alliance that set the stage for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.<\/a><\/p>\n But Phillips has gone far beyond the realms of liberal Zionism. She recently gave<\/a> a chest-thumping account of what she thinks is at stake at a conference in New York City, entitled \u201cRage Against the Hate\u201d.<\/p>\n All the hate seemed to be coming from the platform, but there was no parody intended in the title.<\/p>\n Phillips declared that it was time to reveal a few home truths. These words are the inevitable precursor to a PR disaster for supporters of Israel, which is what her speech has since become.<\/p>\n Very much in the mode of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Phillips declared that there was no such thing as Palestine<\/a> or Palestinians. In fact, the only indigenous people around were the Jews, who were the only people with any historic, legal or moral entitlement to this land.<\/p>\n To say this while activists in Britain are being arrested for shouting \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d<\/a> as an allegedly pro-Hamas chant, hands their defence lawyers a get-out-of-jail card.<\/p>\n Because what Phillips is claiming is that all the land from the river to the sea is Jewish. And as she knows, but the Crown Prosecution Service appears not to, \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d has been Likud policy since 1977.<\/p>\n For Phillips, Jewish supremacy is too big a civilisational deal to be confined to territorial borders. It also crosses religious boundaries.<\/p>\n Phillips branded<\/a> Christianity a Jewish sect that had \u201cgot slightly out of hand\u201d, to much laughter from her audience, and suggested that all the core values of the West were Jewish.<\/p>\n Phillips branded Islam a \u201cdeath cult\u201d. She said: \u201cBy adopting the language and the moral inversion of the Palestine cause, the West has bought into the agenda for its own destruction at the hands of Islam. This is a death wish by the West, and if you have a death wish, you cannot fight a death cult, which is what the West is facing in the forces of Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n For Phillips, a permanent war that pitches seven million Israeli Jews against 450 million Arabs and 92 million Iranians<\/a>\u00a0is somehow not big enough.<\/p>\n Like Israel\u2019s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, or Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Phillips now wants to turn a conflict principally over land into a religious war – and take on in the process two billion Muslims.<\/p>\n But it was when she tucked into Jews in the diaspora that the wheels truly came off the apple cart. To wield a large scalpel over the very umbilical cord on which Israel depends takes some doing – even for her.<\/p>\n Phillips reminded diaspora Jews that their first loyalty was to Israel. She said they were not just Americans or Britons with Judaism added on; they were part of the \u201cJewish nation\u201d, and that should come first. Everything else was secondary.<\/p>\n Diaspora Jews, according to Phillips, were too soft, too appeasing, too frightened of global public opinion, altogether too Talmudic – which she defined as being too defensive. And Israel should no longer continue \u201cmowing the lawn\u201d<\/a> – a euphemism for Israeli wars that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians – but plough up that land altogether.<\/p>\n She declared that it was time for Jews to go on the offensive; to reclaim the Tanakh, the Hebrew bible full of stories of Jews in antiquity, \u201cfighting real battles and killing real people\u201d.<\/p>\n The war in Gaza<\/a> was nothing less than the resurrection of the Tanakh Jew, the return of the heroic Davidic warrior, Phillips proclaimed in triumph.<\/p>\n And so it turns out that Israel\u2019s genocide<\/a> in Gaza was not a righteous war of self-defence at all, after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, but the resurrection of a biblical prophecy as spelt out in the Tanakh.<\/p>\n In ripping away the last fig leaf that concealed the purpose of Zionism, Phillip\u2019s \u201chome truths\u201d contained one truth, which is now difficult for anyone on any side to deny: that henceforth, the state of Israel is and will be in a permanent state of war.<\/p>\n This message is exactly what Palestinians need New Yorkers to hear.<\/p>\n For decades, liberals fed willingly at the trough of Israeli myths – principally that Israel would be at peace if only they could find Palestinian moderates to talk to.<\/p>\n Now, they are being told the very opposite: that it is Israel\u2019s biblical destiny to regain a land well beyond its current borders, because all of the land belongs and has been assigned to them by God himself.<\/p>\n Messages like these have already lost the Democrats, but it is from the Christian isolationist wing of Trump\u2019s MAGA support base that Israel has the most to fear.<\/p>\n There is no love lost for Palestinians among this influential group. But they now well and truly get the fact that a messianic Israel permanently at war means a US that is also permanently at war, with large numbers of American troops pinned down forever in the Middle East.<\/p>\n With speeches like that, Phillips, and others like her, will ensure that Israel\u2019s current nosedive in popularity<\/a> among diaspora Jews in the US will hit ground at an angle of 90 degrees.\u00a0For this reason alone, I would heartily encourage her to keep talking.<\/p>\nReligious war<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The only truth<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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<\/a><\/div>\nFalse ceasefires\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n