The Islamists are winning

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century

Truth is generally the first casualty in war. On the battlefields of the Middle East, especially when Israel is involved, Reason also has a hard time of it. For neither Israel nor the Jews are seen — whether by themselves, by their friends, or by their foes — as a nation and a people like others.

One form of irrationality, shared by (some) evangelical Christians and (some) Jews, has it that Israel is the ‘Zion’ of prophecy, part of God’s plan, with its borders fixed for eternity by the Almighty. A contrary irrationality denies Israel’s right to exist, or regards Israel as not a nation at all. In the words of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in April 2000, it is merely a ‘cancerous body in the region’. Or, according to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’, speaking last Sunday — and breaking new medical ground — Israel is an ‘infectious tumour for the entire Islamic world’.

Even the lesser irrationalities on the subject of Israel disturb. It is smaller in area than Sardinia or Wales, with only half the population of Mexico City, but its potency, like that of the allegedly world-conquering Jews themselves, is inflated to an inordinate degree. Conversely, the notion that Israel is presently engaged in ‘a fight for its very existence’ is an equally irrational assertion. With its formidable military arsenal, and armed forces which can easily outgun its local foes, it is not, or not yet, in such danger. But similarly irrational is Israel’s vow to ‘destroy Hezbollah’. The right arm of the advancing power of Iran, the so-called ‘Party of God’, cannot now be ‘destroyed’.