The world must support Israel, as if she goes down, we all go down

One of the most astonishing - and destructive - political phenomena in recent years has been hostility to the state of Israel and all she stands for. If it were just confined to the extreme left - and extreme Islamism - that would be bad enough. But this is a virus that has spread beyond the fringes to much of the soft left, to sections of the media and even the chattering class’s dinner party circuit.

We have become accustomed to see so called “Palestinian Solidarity” marches around Hyde Park, with demonstrators carrying banners reading “we are all Hezbollah now”. We have seen the likes of George Galloway salute Saddam Hussein and the Syrian Assad leadership. We have watched the populist left, such as Ken Livingstone, invite and embrace Islamists like Sheikh Qaradawi (a man who provides the “intellectual justification for suicide bombers”) to the United Kingdom. These people represent a long standing strain of the left. The far left, which for years justified Stalinism, Castroism and appeasement of communism, has now come to support totalitarian Islam. Call it conviction politics if you will - the extreme left’s extremism knows no bounds.

But when virulent anti-Israel politics reaches mainstream society - particularly amongst the media and Labour backbenchers (to be fair, a view not shared by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair), when our broadcast media feeds us a daily diet of partisan coverage on the Middle East, now is the time for free-thinking people on the right to stand up and be counted. It is time to the make the case for Israel.

Israel, in her sixty years’ existence, has been at the front line of freedom. It has faced down dictatorships, secular terrorism and now extremist Islamism. It’s very existence is under threat from Iran’s fundamentalist regime, which is close to having nuclear weapon capability. When Israel faced a daily barrage of suicide bombing from Islamists (courtesy of Hamas and Islamic Jihad), few understood what this signified: a worldwide assault on freedom.

After September 11 - and when extreme British Islamists organised a wave of suicide bombing in London, many on the right woke up to the battle that was being waged. The Islamists who attempt to destroy Israel, are not just waging a battle against the Jewish state, they are trying to destroy Western values as a whole. Eliminate Israel and you wipe out a country that is in the vanguard against totalitarianism - and encourage the whole of the Middle East to be engulfed under fanaticism. The modest steps towards liberalisation made by some Arab countries would be extinguished overnight. Of course, the mainstream left will argue that the Palestinian issue is the reason for Islamist fundamentalism.

But this is akin to arguing that there would have been no Hitler had the Sudeten Germans not felt aggrieved.  September 11 happened before the Iraq war. The second Palestinian Intifadah happened after the Israelis had offered the Palestinians almost everything they wanted at the President Clinton talks in Camp David. When Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza (to rare acclaim at the time), instead of this being used as a staging post to peace, Gaza became a client Islamist State, as Hamas staged a coup d’état and overthrew the PLO. Few will forget the television pictures of Hamas operatives throwing PLO/Fatah members from the rooftops of government buildings. Gaza is now used as a launching post in which missiles have been fired on a daily basis by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on to Israel. It has become a laboratory for a mutated form of Islamism.

Israel’s withdrawal from every part of Lebanon (as recognised by the United Nations), far from weakening extreme Islamism, actively encouraged it. Instead of Lebanon making peace with Israel, Hezbollah, funded by Iran and Syria, took over the southern part of the country and began to fire missiles onto Israeli territory, kidnapping Israeli soldiers. This last action provoked the Lebanon war of 2006, in which Israel was routinely criticised for its actions against Hezbollah - an extremist terrorist movement - that has carried out atrocities across the world. Now Hezbollah holds the Lebanese Government in a vice-like grip, as that country moves a step closer to becoming an Iranian/Syrian Islamist client state.

Unlike most of its neighbours, Israel is a free market society, that believes in individual liberty and the rule of law. It is a country based on deeply rooted parliamentary democracy with all parties andgroups represented. Its laws are subject to monitoring by a Supreme Court, in which any citizen has the right to petition.

The Supreme Court frequently rules against the Government and Palestinians have successfully used the court to deal with grievances, such as the placing of a security fence - something which has decreased suicide bombing by 90%. Yet these things are rarely reported in the mainstream media, which tends to present a particular view of the conflict.

The importance of this tiny nation (smaller than Wales) cannot be overestimated. If we believe in freedom, if we oppose Islamist totalitarianism, if we want to make a stand against terrorism, we must support the state that has done so much to combat these evils over its sixty years existence. For too long the left has allowed anti-Zionism to permeate through politics and beyond.

This is why, I am supporting the initiative recently established by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar and have sponsored his visit to the House of Commons today.  As Mr Aznar states: there never has been a greater need to counter the trends towards deligitimtising Israel and her right to live in peace with secure and defensible borders.   Or, as he notes, somewhat chillingly, given the rise of Islamism: the world must support Israel, as if she goes down, we all go down.