'Home truths' from Melanie Phillips convey one message: Israel will always be at war

I have known Melanie Phillips for some time. In fact, she was at one point my home desk news editor at the Guardian. 

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.

Phillips is by no means the only former Guardian colleague to make the journey from soft liberal left to hard Islamophobic right, from an Ed Miliband figure to a Michael Gove. But unlike some I could mention, this rite of passage had little to do with money.

Phillips thought it could help her better serve the cause of Israel, which is now, according to her, under more threat than ever before.

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.

The Guardian’s most prominent former editor, CP Scott, was the first major figure in the British media in the early 20th century to espouse the Zionist cause of Chaim Weizmann, an alliance that set the stage for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

But Phillips has gone far beyond the realms of liberal Zionism. She recently gave a chest-thumping account of what she thinks is at stake at a conference in New York City, entitled “Rage Against the Hate”.

All the hate seemed to be coming from the platform, but there was no parody intended in the title. 

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.

Religious war

Very much in the mode of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Phillips declared that there was no such thing as Palestine 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.

To say this while activists in Britain are being arrested for shouting “from the river to the sea” as an allegedly pro-Hamas chant, hands their defence lawyers a get-out-of-jail card.

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, “from the river to the sea” has been Likud policy since 1977.

Phillips now wants to turn a conflict principally over land into a religious war - and take on in the process two billion Muslims

For Phillips, Jewish supremacy is too big a civilisational deal to be confined to territorial borders. It also crosses religious boundaries.  

Phillips branded Christianity a Jewish sect that had “got slightly out of hand”, to much laughter from her audience, and suggested that all the core values of the West were Jewish.

Phillips branded Islam a “death cult”. She said: “By 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.”

For Phillips, a permanent war that pitches seven million Israeli Jews against 450 million Arabs and 92 million Iranians is somehow not big enough.

Like Israel’s 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.

The only truth

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.

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 “Jewish nation”, and that should come first. Everything else was secondary.

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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 “mowing the lawn” - a euphemism for Israeli wars that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians - but plough up that land altogether.

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, “fighting real battles and killing real people”.

The war in Gaza was nothing less than the resurrection of the Tanakh Jew, the return of the heroic Davidic warrior, Phillips proclaimed in triumph. 

And so it turns out that Israel’s genocide 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.

In ripping away the last fig leaf that concealed the purpose of Zionism, Phillip’s “home truths” 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.

This message is exactly what Palestinians need New Yorkers to hear.

False ceasefires 

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.

Now, they are being told the very opposite: that it is Israel’s 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.

Messages like these have already lost the Democrats, but it is from the Christian isolationist wing of Trump’s MAGA support base that Israel has the most to fear.  

There is no love lost for Palestinians among this influential group. But they know 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.

With speeches like that, Phillips, and others like her, will ensure that Israel’s current nosedive in popularity among diaspora Jews in the US will hit ground at an angle of 90 degrees. For this reason alone, I would heartily encourage her to keep talking.

An Israel permanently at war will hardly be news to Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, because that is what they have experienced every day since the so-called ceasefire deal.

To date, more than 300 Palestinians have been killed in around 500 separate violations of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. Gaza is following the pattern set by the “ceasefire” in Lebanon, where Hezbollah withdrew and disarmed its forces south of the Litani River, only to find Israel staying in outposts and continuing to bomb the country, killing more than 300 people and injuring more than 900 in the past year, according to the Lebanese health ministry. 

Furthermore, Israeli demands have grown. On Sunday, it returned to its campaign of targeting top Hezbollah leaders by assassinating Haytham Ali Tabatabai, Hezbollah’s chief of staff, in a strike in Beirut clearly aimed at provoking a Hezbollah response. 

The ceasefire is deemed to exist only because Hamas and Hezbollah have not returned fire. The moment they do, the western media, with one voice, will proclaim the ceasefire is broken.

Unprovoked invasion

In southern Syria, where Israel has seized land the equivalent of the size of Gaza, without a missile or a shot being fired over the border by any militant group, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just performed a victory parade with some of his cabinet ministers.

His appearance on sovereign Syrian territory spelt the end of talks with the new Syrian government, which were in any case deadlocked. 

According to sources close to the talks, Israel had demanded not only safe passage to the province of Sweida, but also permanently unimpeded military access to the Kurds in the north, along with the right to inspect and veto all weapons acquired by Damascus. 

Neither Iran nor any of the resistance groups that Israel thinks it has defeated in the last two years regards itself as defeated

Netanyahu issued a fresh warning that the string of bases the Israeli army had already set up on Syrian territory, one of them 25 kilometres from Damascus, may not be enough: “This is a mission that can develop at any moment,” he warned.

Netanyahu’s unprovoked invasion of Syria is the surest and quickest way I know of ensuring that Israel’s northern border will be attacked in the future by a rich variety of radical Islamist groups. 

If he succeeds in his goal of toppling the US-backed government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, and making central government impossible in a land riven by sectarian tensions, that vacuum will be filled by groups that will have no hesitation in bringing the war to Israel via ground incursions.

Apart from destabilising Syria and making it as difficult as possible for a post-Assad regime to govern nationally, Israel’s military adventurism in Syria is clearly aimed at preparing the ground for another attack on Iran.

Tehran is expecting that attack to come sooner rather than later - but this time, it will not be caught off guard by the presence of fake peace talks with the US.

Spillover conflict

Iranian officials described the country’s posture as defensive during the 12-day war that broke out after it was unilaterally attacked by Israeli and US warplanes this past June. In the next war, it will go on the offensive, particularly against the countries it now sees as a launchpad for drones and surveillance flights: Azerbaijan on its northern border and the UAE just across the Gulf. 

“When Israel starts the next round of this war, Iran will respond. But the next time we are attacked, it will spill over into the Gulf and the region. The United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, who are betraying the region, will pay a huge price,” a senior source with knowledge of Iranian thinking told me.

This is no idle threat, as the Emiratis themselves are the first to realise. 

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In fact, neither Iran nor any of the resistance groups that Israel thinks it has defeated in the last two years regards itself as defeated.

They acknowledge the blows they received when Israel wiped out their leadership multiple times. But each describes those setbacks as tactical rather than strategic - and this is not just propaganda. Each is quickly rearming. 

As a movement, Hamas, which is a proscribed organisation in the UK, is more popular and has more offers of support in the region than it has ever had in its existence.

According to a poll conducted last month by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, if new legislative elections were held in Palestine tomorrow, 65 percent said they would participate, and of those, 44 percent would vote for Hamas, while 30 percent would support Fatah. Around 70 percent said they staunchly opposed the disarmament of Hamas.

This is chiefly down to the fact that this generation of fighters learned the lessons of the Nakbas of 1948 and 1967, and former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s humiliating exit from Beirut when surrounded by the Israeli army in 1982.

Empty resolution

The second stage of the “ceasefire” in Gaza, after Hamas handed over all of the live hostages and the bodies of dead hostages in its possession, is just as mired as the first was.

No Arab or Muslim countries are willing to contribute troops to the proposed International Stabilisation Force without either a clear mandate or a path to Palestinian statehood. Azerbaijan will not agree to deploy troops unless Turkey does. 

King Abdullah of Jordan will not touch it. He told the BBC: “Peacekeeping is that you’re sitting there supporting the local police force, the Palestinians, which Jordan and Egypt are willing to train in large numbers, but that takes time. If we’re running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that’s not a situation that any country would like to get involved in.”

It’s the same story from the UAE, Egypt and Indonesia. Forced to look ever further east, US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have approached Singapore, which was reportedly surprised by the request.

And it’s the same story with the proposed membership of the "Board of Peace". No one knows who is on it or where the money for it is coming from. No Palestinian government has been formed, and there is no clear plan to do so.

One could go on, but it is clear that the UN Security Council resolution that set all this up has no planning, no commitments, no money and no personnel behind it. Of all the empty resolutions the UN has passed on this conflict, this is surely the emptiest.

If this counts as peace, it is unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, and probably for purely electoral reasons, Netanyahu will make good on his threat to “finish the job” - after two years of war where he patently failed to do just that. 

And Phillips, for one, will be delighted, as yet more blood is shed. Her unvarnished Islamophobic vitriol will not bar her from appearing on BBC Question Time or the Moral Maze, nor will anyone dare to challenge her zealotry. 

Phillips is right. The West, and the BBC along with it, is sinking - but it is sinking because it tolerates and accommodates voices like hers.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.