Gaza is just another front in Iran's war on the West

Melanie Phillips says that appeasement by Britain and America has fuelled the Palestinian violence and assisted Tehran's ambition to establish a regional empire Britain gazes upon the butchery in Gaza and is shocked. Shocked! How could the Palestinians be behaving in this way, it wails? The Palestinian butchery of blowing Israelis to bits by human bomb or rocket attacks leaves Britain unmoved. The videos of lisping Palestinian toddlers being taught to sing about murdering the Jews elicits barely a shrug. After all, these are brutal Israeli occupiers who deserve all they get, right? Whereas the Palestinians are the good guys, the helpless victims, the people who only want a state of their own.

Well, now the lie is sickeningly exposed for all to see. Palestinians throwing each other off the tops of tall buildings. Churches ransacked and Bibles burned. Hospital patients being treated for their injuries gunned down in those same hospitals. Astoundingly, there are those who blame Israel, America and Europe for causing this carnage by refusing to recognise Hamas and imposing 'punishing sanctions' against it.

Decent, rational people, however, can see that this is a struggle for mastery between people who have brutalised themselves. Those who turn their own children into human bombs will behave in the same depraved way towards each other.

As for the 'punishing sanctions', the aid going into Gaza since these were imposed has actually doubled. If the Gazans are now going hungry, it's because the money has been siphoned off to line their leaders' pockets or to buy weapons.

Undoubtedly, a humanitarian disaster now looms. But the claim that Israel controls access to Gaza is untrue. Hamas now controls its border with Egypt. Aid should therefore be funnelled through Egypt, which should be held responsible with Hamas for its safe passage. Why should Israel be expected to supply aid to those who will merely redouble their rocket and human bomb attacks on it (but whom it continues to treat, nevertheless, in its own hospitals)? Of what other country has such a truly suicidal response to those waging war upon it ever been expected?

Unreality, however, begets ever deeper unreality. It's not just that the Palestinians have divided themselves into two 'states'. It is quickly becoming accepted that there are two different sets of people: Hamas, who are beyond the pale, and Fatah, with whom we can do business. Thus America and Israel are now busily shoring up the Fatah end of the Palestinian pantomime horse, President Mahmoud Abbas. But how deluded is this?

After all, Abbas hardly moved a muscle against Hamas in Gaza; indeed, he has always said plainly that he would never fight them. With his 40,000 armed men, he could have crushed them. He chose not to do so.

And the idea that Fatah is 'moderate' is ludicrous. Its militias have been heavily involved in recent attacks against Israel, to whose destruction — whatever weasel words Abbas may use for credulous Western consumption — it remains committed.

But when in a hole, the Americans continue to dig. Their renewed aid to Fatah will undoubtedly fuel yet more of the corruption that helped bring Hamas to power. Worse still, although the weapons they showered upon Abbas to help him defeat Hamas have now fallen into its hands, they will continue to arm him — even though if Hamas captures the West Bank, it will capture those weapons too.

The reason for this deluded approach is the fundamentally flawed Western belief that the 'two state solution' will end the Middle East impasse. The fact is that the 'two state solution' has been on offer since 1922. That was when Britain gave away to the Arabs three quarters of Mandatory Palestine — within all of which it was bound by international agreement to re-establish the Jews in their ancestral national home — creating the Hashemite kingdom of Trans-Jordan. Jordan therefore is the Arab state of Palestine.

Ever since, different configurations of the 'two state solution' have been repeatedly offered, only to be met by Arab attempts to drive the Jews out. The belief that creating a Palestine state will end this 95-year trauma is therefore as much of a fantasy as finding a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

This continued delusion is further preventing the West from grasping that the war against Israel is merely one front in a far bigger war against the free world, in which Iran is the major player. Iran now controls Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is wreaking havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The true significance of Hamastan, therefore, is that it strengthens Iran still further in its 28-year jihad against the West. And since Hamas is now an Iranian proxy, its agenda is transparently no longer a Palestinian state but the Islamist onslaught upon the whole free world.

Yet in Britain, elements within the Foreign Office and intelligence establishment are pushing 'engagement' with Hamas, even though its agenda is totally non-negotiable. Its charter doesn't merely commit it to eradicating Israel, but is a declaration of war against the entire Jewish people, with demented Nazi-style ravings about the world Jewish conspiracy. It would be as suicidal and immoral to 'engage' with such a body as it was to advocate the appeasement of Hitler.

Israel is now in an appalling position. It must do everything possible to avoid reoccupying Gaza, although it may have no alternative if the rocket fire from there escalates. It is trapped by an Iranian pincer movement in Gaza and Lebanon, from where two rockets were fired on Monday at northern Israel. So much for UNIFIL. Iran's satrapy Syria, meanwhile, is making ominous preparations for war. So Israel could soon face war on three fronts from the Iran/Syria axis.

That axis, though, does not just threaten Israel and the West but much of the Arab world too. Egypt now has the nightmare of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran on its doorstep in Gaza, and Jordan is eyeing the same prospect on the West Bank.

Abbas is patently incapable of stopping Hamas. So a new dynamic is being created. Long-term, the solution lies in Jordan and Egypt exercising their own self-interest. A Jordan-West Bank confederation is now being floated; the same logic would mean Egypt reoccupying Gaza.

Despite the fact that this idea would take us back 40 years, it has certain attractions. Order would be restored by Jordan and Egypt which, unlike Israel, would tackle Hamas with a vigour from which our own principled multiculturalists would not dream of demurring.

The Palestinians would be in the state they were given in 1922. The Arab world would finally take responsibility for a tragedy they themselves created. The Iranian pincer would be broken.

One thing threatens to scupper this. It is the US/UK axis of appeasement, the fateful union of British cynicism with America's catastrophic loss of nerve. No wonder Iran is on a roll. With such serial strategic stupidity and cravenness by the West, how can it lose?

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist.