{"id":6105,"date":"2025-03-27T01:39:35","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T23:39:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/?p=6105"},"modified":"2025-03-27T02:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T00:59:07","slug":"falling-off-the-cultural-cliff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/2025\/03\/27\/falling-off-the-cultural-cliff\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling off the Cultural Cliff"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Builder\u2019s Stone:\u00a0How Jews and Christians Built the West \u2013 and Why Only They Can Save It, i<\/em>s published by Wicked Son.\u00a0You can buy it\u00a0on\u00a0Amazon.com<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Amazon.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A conversation with Melanie Phillips on Israel, the Jews, and the West <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n By: Liz Samuels\n<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe fate of the hostages looks terrible actually \u2013 for all of them \u2013 and this is tearing Israel apart in terms of grief, in terms of trauma, in terms of anger and frustration.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\n Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster, and author who has championed traditional values in the culture war for more than three decades. She writes a weekly column for The<\/em> Times <\/em>of London <\/em>and the Jewish News Syndicate, <\/em>broadcasts on radio and TV, and gives public presentations across the English-speaking world. Her new book, The Builder\u2019s Stone: How Jews and Christians built the West \u2013 And Why Only They Can Save It<\/em>, is published by Wicked Son. Her first novel, The Legacy<\/em>, which deals with conflicted Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and the power of history, was published in 2018 along with her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel<\/em>. Her previous books include her 2006 best-seller Londonistan, <\/em>about the British establishment’s capitulation to Islamist aggression, and The World Turned Upside Down<\/em>: The Global Battle over G-d, Truth, and Power<\/em>, published in 2010. You can follow Melanie\u2019s work at her website, www.melaniephillips.substack.com<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n This interview was conducted by Jewish Life\u2019s<\/em> Liz Samuels in Johannesburg and Melanie Phillips, the UK political commentator and author, in Jerusalem on 5th<\/sup> March 2025 \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LS: In your latest book, The Builder\u2019s Stone<\/em>, which examines the West\u2019s moral failure to stand up against the atrocities of October 7, you say that the West neglected to support civilisation in favour of barbarism. Could you tell me what you mean by \u2018civilisation\u2019 in this context?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOctober 7 effectively threw down a challenge to the West, which was \u2018do you support civilisation over barbarism\u2019?\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: What I mean by civilisation, with specific reference to the reaction of the West to the October 7 massacres, is that it should be perfectly clear that this was a barbaric, savage, deranged attack by people who should have been absolutely vilified, opposed, and that Israel, which was attacked, should have been defended and supported in its attempt to protect itself against what is \u2013 self-evidently \u2013 a genocidal act of aggression. Civilised values mean that we uphold, in such circumstances, right over wrong. The rights of the victims against their attackers. We support justice against injustice. We support truth against lies. And in all these respects and more \u2013 these civilised values were junked by the West. Instead of supporting Israel in its desperate attempt to defend itself \u2013 by defeating forever the forces that were threatening and indeed intending to wipe it out and to murder yet more Jews \u2013 the West turned upon Israel, told one heinous lie after another in order to represent it as an aggressor, rather than fighting the most just of wars. In every respect the West sought to sanitise, excuse, and even in some cases \u2013 effectively or not even effectively \u2013 openly <\/em>support the forces of the Hamas that had perpetrated these atrocities. So what I\u2019ve said in my book is that, to me, October 7 effectively threw down a challenge to the West, which was \u2018do you support civilisation over barbarism\u2019? Unfortunately, for the reasons I\u2019ve just set out, it did not support civilisation.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LS: This blends quite nicely into another question \u2013 that of democracy. Do you believe that democracy is not only at the point of no return, but that it has always harboured the seeds of its own destruction?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: Well, I write a lot about current affairs in my work as a journalist, and I have charted what I consider to be the disastrous undermining of core Western value for decades \u2013 and one thing I\u2019ve observed and written about is the undermining of the very concept of democracy \u2013 certainly in Britain. Britain is the country I most know \u2013 it\u2019s my birth country where I grew up and spent most of my life. I now spend most of my life in Israel, but I do go back and forward a great deal to Britain. And I do still write about it \u2013 and I care about it a great deal. What is patently the case, from opinion polling and from anecdotal evidence, is that young people in particular no longer value or rate democracy. Indeed, when asked, they say that they would like a strong man to run everything \u2013 they see no problem in fascism. They see no problem in communism. They don\u2019t appreciate the value of democracy in preserving freedom. This is all of a piece of what\u2019s been happening \u2013 not just in Britain \u2013 but across the West. There is a perception that the institutions of democracy (representative democracy) have failed, because the political establishment across the board \u2013 left, right, centre, whatever \u2013 is no longer to be trusted with delivering the most fundamental wishes and interests of the people. In part, this is because politicians have, I think \u2013 and this is my personal view over time \u2013 told people a bunch of lies in order to attain and maintain power. There is a perception that the very idea of the nation \u2013 the nation state \u2013 has not been upheld by the political elites (again, across all political parties) and that idea grew up, I think, as far back as just after the Second World War \u2013 which delivered a terrible attack on the morale of the West. You know the holocaust and Nazism had happened in the very epicentre of high Western culture, which was Germany at the time and which was supposed to be the acme of modernity and reason and all good things. Nazism delivered a terrible blow to the morale of the West. And the West came to the conclusion (or Western elites, intellectual elites came to the conclusion) that the reason for Nazism was nationalism. And the reason for nationalism was the nation. And so in order to avoid, forever, the possibility of that terrible thing of Nazism and the Holocaust ever happening again, you had to get rid of the nation. This is ridiculous. Nazism had many causes, including genocidal anti-Semitism, but it wasn\u2019t to do with the existence of the nation. If there hadn\u2019t been a very strong attachment to the nation as a source of all good things, Britain would never have famously stood alone against Nazism in 1940 and the West would never have defeated Nazism. The values that we should all hold dear in a civilised society \u2013 like individual freedom, personal responsibility, taking responsibility for your own actions, a care for other people, putting the interests of others first, a respect for justice and the rule of law \u2013 and all things like that \u2013 these things are particular to the West. They were invented by the West. They are founded on principles which come from Judaism, which were mediated into the West by Christianity, but which basically respect every single individual. They respect the life of every individual because Judaism holds that every individual is made in the image of G-d.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese transnational institutions purport to stand for justice, law, and peace, but in fact stand for the opposite because they almost immediately become politicised.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

LS: Do you think the European Union is an example of this \u2018trans-nationalism\u2019?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: The thinking that gave rise to the European Union was very much part of this thinking that said the nation state is responsible for the ills of Nazism. Consequently, good things could only be established through transnational institutions and that the only way European countries could be trusted not to be aggressive or fascistic, was to subsume the national interests of all these constituent countries into a transnational body, which became the European Union. I personally think that was disastrous, because it\u2019s only the nation state which can uphold democracy. There\u2019s no real democracy in the EU. It is basically a kind of chimera. It is something which doesn\u2019t exist anywhere else \u2013 it\u2019s a bureaucratic state. It doesn\u2019t have a real parliament in that it doesn\u2019t have real accountability to the electorate in the way that national parliaments do and, consequently, its laws and its decrees have no legitimacy. We can see this transnationalism at work in other institutions, such as the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Justice, and the United Nations. These transnational institutions purport to stand for justice, law, and peace, but in fact stand for the opposite because they almost immediately become politicised. They are the tools, the handmaidens, of political agendas which are often very bad agendas because they are captured by people in the world who stand for really bad things \u2013 dictatorships. Because you know most of the world is not run by democratic governments rooted in the rule of law.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LS: Now that America has re-elected Donal Trump, how do you think it\u2019s going to affect Israel? What do you think of the recent cease-fire deal?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: Trump wants to produce a peace in the Middle East in which there\u2019s a permanent resolution to the century-old war between Israel and the Arabs. He wants to see the war in Gaza stopped. He wants to see Gaza itself developed by America into something which he called a kind of Riviera \u2013 which I think people find strange and comical. This will be part of a much bigger deal in which Israel would finally make the peace with the Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, which would reconfigure the region into a completely different, not just peaceful, but productive area in which \u2013 and this is another key point in this part of the puzzle \u2013 Iran would be somehow put in its box. Now, this all raises many, many questions. In particular, and I\u2019m speaking to you from Jerusalem, and in Israel, as you know, and it\u2019s always been the case that the most anxiety is about Iran, because Iran is the big threat. Iran is on the point of producing nuclear weapons. And it has to be stopped. There are many people in Israel who think it can only be stopped by military means and that the regime has to be brought to an end. Now, how that is to be established, how that is to be accomplished, nobody knows. Nobody knows how this is to be accomplished. Nobody knows whether President Trump is on side with this or not. Nobody knows what Israel intends to do. But the fact is that this is the priority. This is considered the priority.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, you\u2019re dealing with a population which has been not just radicalised, but indoctrinated over many, many generations with the idea not just that Israel should no longer exist, but that Jews should not exist.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\n Meanwhile there has been and is still this dreadful war that has gone on ever since October 7, with the pogrom that was led by Hamas, but nevertheless, the majority of people who took part were, what are called, \u2018ordinary Palestinian civilians\u2019, who poured in behind the Hamas Stormtroopers and themselves participated in the terrible atrocities that happened \u2013 the murders, the rapes, the kidnaps. And, you know, those people in Gaza \u2013 as well as in the rest of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, which is often called the West Bank, when asked (they may not like Hamas, who have oppressed them over many years), they are all, or overwhelmingly of the view that Jews should be killed and that Israel should cease to exist. They support the October 7 pogrom. So, you\u2019re dealing with a population which has been not just radicalised, but indoctrinated over many, many generations with the idea not just that Israel should no longer exist, but that Jews should not exist because what Israel has been facing for 100 years is an Islamic holy war \u2013 which perceives the need to destroy the Jews as a precursor to destroying the Christian West. That\u2019s its agenda. It says so all the time. That unites both the Sunni and Shia Muslim worlds \u2013 whose leader is Iran. So this is the big picture. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n As far as the cease-fire deal is concerned, it was a deal devised by the Biden administration, and then forced upon Israel\u2019s Prime Minister Netanyahu by the incoming Trump administration, more or less on its first day. Trump wanted to have a peaceful situation in Gaza, he wanted to end the bloodletting in Gaza. He wanted to end the war, and he wanted the hostages back, and he wanted Hamas to agree to a ceasefire. Now, in my view, that was a terrible deal, a really terrible deal for which Israel is paying and will pay very dearly \u2013 because part of the deal involved a ceasefire of a certain number of weeks. It involved Israel stopping the fighting and it involved an increase in the amount of aid coming into Gaza. There has always been plenty of aid coming into Gaza. The problem was that Hamas was stealing it in order to make millions of dollars in order to re-equip itself. But part of this ceasefire deal was that aid should be stepped up. And the result is that Hamas during this period has been given time to recover and regroup and reorganise itself into a fighting force. At the time the ceasefire deal was introduced, there were two battalions left in Gaza. However, since that time they have not just regrouped but recruited. So this is a very serious situation because Israel has set itself the goal of not just causing Hamas setbacks, it has set itself the goal of destroying Hamas as a military force forever, so that it can never again threaten Israel and carry out attacks of the kind we saw on October 7. Consequently, the rearming and the regrouping \u2013 the recovery of Hamas to the extent that it\u2019s recovered \u2013 is a terrible setback. And then, the other part of this awful situation is the recovery of the hostages. Now, the deal is supposed to be that hostages are released in response to which Israel releases hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian Arab terrorists \u2013 well, this is a terrible thing. Because, first of all, it releases into Gaza hundreds of individuals who were imprisoned by Israel because they had tried to murder Jews \u2013 and many of them have indeed been guilty of some of the most heinous atrocities against Israelis over the past several years. So that in itself is a terrible thing. And the other terrible thing is that it incentivises hostage-taking. Because every bad actor, not just Hamas, but every bad actor in the world can now see that America will enforce a price to be paid for the recovery of hostages, which is basically the surrender of the people that they have attacked.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n Before President Trump was re-elected, he famously said that unless the hostages are released by the time I am inaugurated, \u201call hell will be let loose\u201d. Well, they weren\u2019t and it wasn\u2019t. Only some have been released, and we can see the state that some of them are in. They have been starved. They have been tortured. They have been murdered. We have now reached a point where the end of the first stage of this ostensibly three-stage ceasefire deal has been reached. And there will be no second stage because quite obviously Hamas, in many respects, has breached various requirements under stage one, and cannot be trusted. At all. It clearly has no interest in returning all the hostages because it took hostages for one reason only. It took the hostages as the ultimate weapon against a Jewish state that Hamas knows very well would leave no stone unturned in trying to get them back. It took them with one aim in mind \u2013 to prevent Israel from ever winning this war. Consequently, it has absolutely zero incentive to release them all, because once it releases them all, it has no power anymore over Israel. As I understand it, even when Israel knew where the hostages were being held, they knew that if they approached them, Hamas would immediately kill them. This has been held like the Sword of Damocles over Netanyahu\u2019s head from day one. Now, how is this going to be resolved? I do not know at this very moment. As I\u2019m speaking to you now, every day, every hour, there are more developments. It looks like Israel is preparing to go back to war in Gaza. It says that, unless Hamas really do release all the hostages, it will inflict upon Gaza a level of warfare and a type of warfare which has not been seen so far. Now what does that mean? I have no idea.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is a worldwide loss of conscience, loss of reason, loss of civilised values that we are seeing across the world \u2013 against which Israel is standing pretty much alone.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\n You know, the fate of the hostages looks terrible actually \u2013 for all of them \u2013 and this is tearing Israel apart in terms of grief, in terms of trauma, in terms of anger and frustration \u2013 which is coming out in all kinds of ways. I think that the trauma that Israel has been going through and is going through will last. I\u2019m not comparing what\u2019s happened to the Shoah in terms of scale, but we\u2019re dealing with the same kind of people, with the same kind of exterminatory attitude and intention towards the entire Jewish people \u2013 the same kind of psychopathic level of sadism and savagery and barbarism directed at the Jews, simply because they are Jews. So that\u2019s what Israel is up against, and that is what the Jewish people was up against under Nazism \u2013 and what the Jewish people has been up against throughout the centuries, in different forms. And the final part of this dramatic experience that Israel is going through is the indifference \u2013 and worse than indifference \u2013 of the rest of the world. The support for lies over truth, injustice over justice. Support for the aggressor over the victim. Support which came from the Biden administration \u2013 despite its professions of support for Israel. Support which came from Britain and Europe \u2013 from all the intellectual elites, the international and transnational institutions such as the UN and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) \u2013 these institutions that purport to be for peace and justice. It\u2019s an evil agenda, which I\u2019m afraid is being supported by your South African government \u2013 at the highest levels in the ICJ, in particular. Its support for Hamas is a terrible thing, but it\u2019s not alone in this. This is a worldwide loss of conscience, loss of reason, loss of civilised values that we are seeing across the world \u2013 against which Israel is standing pretty much alone. Now, President Trump, for all his many flaws, and despite whatever he\u2019s doing at the moment in other areas, and despite the fact that he enforced this terrible ceasefire deal, his heart is absolutely with Israel. I believe this to be true. And, you know, he genuinely wants Israel to defeat Hamas, and to be able to live in peace and justice, going forward in a way that it hasn\u2019t in the last 100 years. He wants this to happen. I\u2019m sure this is genuine. What I\u2019m not sure about is whether he\u2019s fully aware of the magnitude of the task of bringing that about. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LS: So given all that, what would you say to those people who keep pushing the agenda of a two-state solution?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: Well, a two-state solution sounds very nice, but it\u2019s the very nice answer to the wrong problem. If the problem is that you have two sets of people with justifiable claims to the same piece of land and who are fighting over it \u2013 then it makes sense that you put them in a room, bash their heads together until they see sense \u2013 and then you divide the land. But it\u2019s not that. That\u2019s not what\u2019s happening here. What\u2019s happening here is an attempt by one set of people \u2013 the Arab world \u2013 to destroy the homeland of another set of people \u2013 the Jewish people. Israel is a homeland to which the Jews alone are entitled. Why? Because it is only the Jewish people, as a people, for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom in history, centuries before Islam was even created. Yet, despite this fact, the world has told itself the opposite: that the Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people of the land, and therefore entitled to it. People forget this \u2013 if they ever knew it. The two-state solution cannot be a solution because it has been proposed many, many times and every time it has been proposed, the Jews have accepted it and agreed to it \u2013 despite the disadvantages of it to them \u2013 but the Arabs have not only refused, but have used it as a pretext to wage war and terrorist campaigns of extermination against the Jewish homeland. The very first two-state solution was effectively proposed by the British, in the 1930s. This was the first time that the West basically turned international law on its head and took the part of injustice over justice, lies over truth, and basically set the pattern which has prevailed ever since. What do I mean by that? In the 1920s, the international community, the precursor to the UN, decided when it carved up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, that what was called Palestine, a name given by the Romans as an insult to the Jews after they\u2019d thrown them out of their kingdom. After the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, along came the rest of the world. In the First World War, the great powers carved up the old Ottoman Empire and restored the name of Palestine as a kind of administrative name for the land which originally included what is now Israel, the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, Gaza, and what in 1920 is now called Jordan. The world powers decided this land was the ancient kingdom of the people of Israel and that Jews should be resettled in that land in order, eventually, to establish a homeland for them.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n Within a couple of years, Winston Churchill in Great Britain gave away a large part of that territory to the Hashemites to create Jordan. This was realpolitik and the result was that in 1922, the international community decided that Palestine, as it was called for purely administrative reasons, was to be administered by the British under a mandate. But it needed to settle the Jews throughout Palestine under international law. The British were to settle the Jews alone throughout what is now the state of Israel, the so-called \u2018occupied territories\u2019 of Judea and Samaria. All those territories were to be settled by the Jews alone, because it was only the Jew for whom that had ever been their national kingdom. They were to be there as right. It was said explicitly, as of right. Other people who were living there who were Arabs did not call themselves Palestinians \u2013 there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. The Palestinians as an adjective was used to describe the Jews of the time. The Arabs who were there didn\u2019t call themselves Palestinian. There was no such thing as a Palestinian people or a Palestinian identity. They considered themselves, and called themselves, Arabs as part of the Arab nation, or as Syrians or Egyptians. And when the Jews started to return to this land, thousands of Arabs and others poured in from neighbouring Arab countries because they understood, quite correctly, that returning Jews would bring prosperity and jobs and progress and they wanted to be part of that. That was fine. And so they poured in and many of them were actually illegal immigrants. Now, into this situation arose what we call Islamism \u2013 the idea that Islam dictates that its adherents should convert everybody else to Islam and should conquer other places that are not Islamic where Muslims had ever lived in. If Muslims have ever lived in such a place, it\u2019s Islamic forever. That is a tenet held by much of the Islamic world. Then the Arabs at the time started to revolt against this idea that the Jews were to be returned to this land which was to become their homeland. And from the 1920s they started conducting appalling pogroms against the Jews. Very similar in character to the barbarism and sadism and psychopathy that we saw on October 7 in Israel. The British decided that to solve this problem of Arab violence they would offer the Arabs part of the inheritance of the Jews. They offered them part of the land. They offered them a two-state solution. It was founded in injustice. It was founded in an absolute negation of international law. The response from the Arabs was to say, we\u2019re not having that. We don\u2019t want our own country alongside the Jews. We want to obliterate the Jewish homeland. And thus it has been ever since. The Palestinian Arabs have been offered a state of their own on at least five occasions \u2013 every single time they not only refused, but have either gone to war, or launched wars of extermination through terror. And the situation has been created there by the West which has tried to reward the perpetrators and instigators of exterminatory jihadi Islamic anti-Jewish terror. The West has tried to reward them every time, by always offering them part of the Jewish homeland \u2013 a homeland to which the Jews alone are entitled through history, through law, through justice, and through truth. This is why this \u2018dispute\u2019 is not a dispute. This is why this terrible war of extermination continues to this day, unlike just about every other conflict.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LS: Around the time of the founding of the state of Israel, the prevailing view of the Left was sympathy and admiration for the valiant Jews, but at some point before the Six Day War, everything changed. Israel was now the despised \u2018Zionist entity\u2019. Do you know why this change happened?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: Yes, it\u2019s true. And this is what I talk about in the book, among other things. The Left\u2019s agenda that I describe in the book, which set out to undermine all the West\u2019s core values, was already well underway. It had set out to attack the very idea of truth. No such thing as objective truth anymore; everything was now a matter of opinion. No such thing, therefore, as lies. And so the way was open for people to believe lies and propaganda, because they didn\u2019t believe there was any such thing as objective truth, and the idea that you could defeat an argument though facts and evidence, I\u2019m afraid, went out of the window. So that was one important thing that happened. And that was part of this whole turning against the West, as being the fount of all evil. And you know the West was run by white people who, to them, are all basically privileged bigots \u2013 and as we have heard endlessly over the last few years, we all have to atone for white privilege. You certainly couldn\u2019t say the West was better than any other culture. On the contrary it was worse than other cultures. We certainly couldn\u2019t uphold Western values against other values. The West was basically oppressive and colonialist. Therefore, all peoples from what used to be called the developing world were the West\u2019s victims and therefore, as victims, they could never do anything that was bad. If they did do bad things, such as killing lots of people in the West, that was because they were entitled to do so because they were resisting colonialist oppression. And so you had the excuse for, and sanitising of mass murder. And this is part of the ideology of the Left, which was, as I say, at root, to do with undermining the Western nation state and really took root and really spread and became the kind of default narrative \u2013 the unchallengeable orthodox \u2013 among the ruling elites of the West \u2013 the intelligentsia \u2013 particularly centred in the universities. Arising out of this came a political movement from what\u2019s now called the global south, which was called the developing world. White supremacy, colonialism, had to be fought and defeated everywhere and the Jews and the state of Israel were seen to be part of this. They were considered to be part of the West because they believed that the state of Israel was founded by Ashkenazim \u2013 white Jews, white-skinned Jews \u2013 and founded on the basis of Western values. What people don\u2019t appreciate is that Christianity was a development of Judaism. Of course Jews consider Christianity to be a totally heretical extension, and they believe it to be a threat to themselves, but the fact is that what the West considers to be Christian values are actually Jewish values \u2013 and so, the fight against Western values was ultimately an attack on Jewish values. And therefore Israel\u2019s claim to existence, which is based on truth, law, history, and on the idea of itself as a nation, was inimicable to what the Left came to stand for. Israel was clearly powerful, to the Western liberal leftist mind, because Israel was armed to the teeth. And it was armed to the teeth by America and therefore was seen as an outpost of America. At a very deep level in these left-wing circles is something even darker and more pernicious. It is this terrible idea of Israel being powerful and therefore can do no right and therefore cannot defend itself \u2013 because all its defence is actually aggression. And any aggression by the Arab world that is trying to exterminate it, is seen as resistance. Bad as that is, terrible as that is, there is something much worse happening, in my view, on the Left. Again, I talk about it in my book. We can see it through the prism of victim culture, the idea that there are oppressed groups \u2013 women, gays, dark-skinned people, etc. who form a kind of community of the oppressed. Jews are not part of that group. Jews are part of the oppressor class. Why is that? Well, first of all, they think Jews are white-skinned. Leave aside the fact that the majority of Israelis are darker skinned, let\u2019s put that to one side, they view Jews as white-skinned, but even beyond that, they view Jews as oppressors. Why? Because they view the Jews as all-powerful. Why? Because they think that Jews run the world. They think that Jews run the media. They run the law. They run the professions. They dictate to governments what governments should do, for their own self-interest. Now, this is pure, traditional, unvarnished anti-Semitism. Jew-hatred. Paranoid, deranged, Jew-hatred. It bears no relation to the reality, which is that Jews are the most persecuted people in the history of the planet. If they were all-powerful, how could those two things be true? But nevertheless, that\u2019s what the Left believes \u2013 it\u2019s at the very heart of their victim culture. Even though Israel is engaged all the time in a defence against the attempt of the Muslim world to destroy it \u2013 but nevertheless the Left believes that the Jews and the state of Israel are part of the oppressive white colonialist world which has to be destroyed. That\u2019s what we\u2019re up against.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey take these terrible views because in their minds this defines them as moral, decent, progressive people. It\u2019s very important for them to think that.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

LS: So how would you argue with Jewish groups, like Jews for Palestine, who take the side of those wishing to destroy Israel and the Jews?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: These people subscribe to left-wing thinking, and want to fit in with the surrounding society which is very hostile to Israel. But there\u2019s something deeper going on, something about their desire to expunge from themselves a particular part of themselves which is associated with a Judaism that they despise, for all kinds of reasons. What can you do with these people? You cannot argue with them. They are beyond reason. What the Jewish world should do and has never done is to attack them on their own ground \u2013 to show them up. To make them understand that far from opposing racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, oppression, and tyranny, they are actually standing for these things. We should be hanging these facts around their necks. Unfortunately, the Jewish world never does that. Instead the Jewish world says \u2018why are you being so horrible to us? We are victims.\u2019 Well, that\u2019s hopeless because it\u2019s basically playing defence. Once you play defence against such enemies, you\u2019ve lost the argument \u2013 you\u2019re saying you\u2019re merely seeking to engage with them on the grounds that they\u2019ve defined. We shouldn\u2019t be waiting for them to say these terrible things. We should be, as a Jewish community, as decent people all over the world who support Israel, support the Jewish people, support truth and justice, we should all be going into the verbal attack, because these people have an Achilles heel. They take these terrible views because in their minds this defines them as moral, decent, progressive people. It\u2019s very important for them to think that. And this is why one of the reasons they\u2019re so desperate to shut down any alternative argument is because any alternative argument will destroy their identity as moral and decent people. That\u2019s one of the reasons why they deny the atrocities of October 7. They cannot possibly accept that the people whom they\u2019ve supported all these years are actually psychopathic barbarians who did these despicable things. They have to deny these terrible things happened, or that if they did happen \u2013 it was somehow Israel\u2019s fault. But if they were to accept, for a moment, that the people they\u2019ve been supporting are evil, then what does it say about them? They can\u2019t have that. They\u2019re terrified of that \u2013 and that\u2019s their Achilles heel.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LS: Finally, how do you see the future of the state of Israel? Is there a glimmer of hope \u2013 because after our discussions, things don\u2019t seem particularly hopeful.<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n MP: On the contrary, I think this is very much a diaspora view. In Israel, we have a completely different view. We\u2019re going to win this. We\u2019re going to survive. Israel is going to survive and thrive. Israel is going to become the greatest power in the region. Israel has a fantastic future. The Jewish people in Israel have a fantastic future ahead of them. I\u2019m not being unrealistic \u2013 because difficulties lie ahead, to put it mildly, many more horrors may await. But ultimately Israel will survive \u2013 for one reason \u2013 it has no alternative but to survive. But more than that, it believes in itself. It believes in itself as the expression of the Jewish people and as the fulfilment of Jewish history. We are living Jewish history here in Israel. It\u2019s unfolding before our eyes. We are at the very centre of it. We cannot possibly do anything other than win this, because that\u2019s what the Jewish people does. It survives. And in Israel, there\u2019s absolute certainty that this will happen. I don\u2019t think this is the case in the diaspora which is in a very difficult situation \u2013 not just in South Africa, but in Britain, in America, and certainly Europe. I think the safety of the diaspora very much depends on whether the western civilised world actually wants to stop itself from falling off the cultural cliff.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n Israel will survive despite everything else going on in the world, because it has to \u2013 and because it wants to. If the West comes to that same conclusion then it will rescue itself and rescue its Jews.\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster, and author who has championed traditional values in the culture war for more than three decades. She writes a weekly column for The Times of London and the Jewish News Syndicate, broadcasts on radio and TV, and gives public presentations across the English-speaking world. Her new book, The Builder\u2019s Stone: How Jews and Christians built the West \u2013 And Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son. Her first novel, The Legacy, which deals with conflicted Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and the power of history, was published in 2018 along with her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel. Her previous books include her 2006 best-seller Londonistan,\u00a0about the British establishment’s capitulation to Islamist aggression, and The World Turned Upside Down:\u00a0The Global Battle over G-d, Truth, and Power, published in 2010. You can follow Melanie\u2019s work at her website, www.melaniephillips.substack.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6106,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-136","category-pesach-2025"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6105"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6113,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6105\/revisions\/6113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}