Israel has learnt the lessons of October 7 but the West is sleepwalking to disaster
What will it take for the democracies to take their own security seriously?
With the war in Gaza grinding towards a close, now is as good a time as any to take stock and ask that time-honoured question: what the hell just happened?
October 7 forced Israel to learn painful lessons about the dangers of complacency and what it will take for survival in the future. In the West, however, we remain in a state of sleep while the danger grows under us.
Let’s start with the Jewish state.
It is easy to forget just how much peril faced Israel under the surface in the years leading up to 2023. I took my kids on holiday there just a few weeks before the pogroms. It’s chilling to look back now.
Neither we nor anybody else really thought about it, but the Jewish state was on the brink of destruction. Hezbollah had up to 150,000 missiles pointed at Israel’s population centres and Iran had an arsenal of similar size, not to mention its burgeoning nuclear project.
In Gaza, Hamas was well-organised, well-financed and well-trained, with thousands of rockets in reserve and the Nukhba force, which spearheaded October 7, preparing to strike. Their subterranean smuggling beneath the Egyptian border was thriving and they controlled a tunnel network that was more that 350 miles long, in a territory of just 25 miles. These catacombs were richly stocked and air conditioned.
Further afield, the Houthis in Yemen had their own stockpile of missiles, while smaller militia in Iraq and Syria were also training their weapons at Israel. And that’s before we even consider the numerous terror cells throughout Judaea and Samaria.
The war with Iran showed how Israel’s air defences can be overwhelmed and the devastation that can result. Imagine – if you can bear it – a parallel universe in which all of these enemies surprised Jerusalem by attacking at once.
Hundreds of thousands of projectiles would have rained down on Israel simultaneously, launched by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, devastating the country and claiming many thousands of lives.
While Hamas bulldozed the border fence and rampaged through the kibbutzim of the south, the Radwan Force, Hezbollah’s commando unit, would have swarmed over the northern frontier and made a similar incursion into civilian areas. (Last year, the IDF unearthed such plans in Lebanon.)
With Israeli troops and security forces pulled in many directions and Iron Dome overwhelmed, Judea and Samaria would have erupted in flames. With the country on its knees, who knows how many other groups of terrorists in Egypt, Jordan and Syria would have risen up and joined the bloodshed?
Truly, it doesn’t bear thinking about. But this was the threat that Israel faced when we blithely holidayed there.
This didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of a Netanyahu security doctrine known as “the concept”, which involved containing and deterring threats while focusing on economic and military development at home and the Abraham Accords overseas.
At the time, this allowed Israel to enjoy the longest period of calm and flourishing it had ever known. In retrospect, however, it looks agonisingly naive.
The apocalyptic fate outlined above was only averted because Hamas was unable to coordinate with Israel’s other enemies, who were then deterred from joining the fray in full force by the American aircraft carriers despatched to the region by Joe Biden.
Israel’s lesson is very clear, and it is one it has taken to heart. When an enemy declares his malign intentions and works on building up his capabilities, you can’t bolster your defences and hope for the best.
You’ve got to take action before the problem gets any bigger.
This new way of thinking is what has powered Israel to its current position of unprecedented regional dominance, with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran all castrated, the Syrian threat greatly reduced and fresh diplomatic accords on the horizon.
Which brings us to the state of the West.
It feels to me as if we are still living in our own version of Israel’s pre-October 7 world. In her column about the anniversary of the 7/7 atrocities this week, the Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson pointed out how the threat had only grown in the two decades that have since elapsed.
The vast majority of suspects on MI5’s terror watchlist – around 43,000 – are jihadis, she points out, which equals about one in a hundred Muslims in Britain. Pearson writes:
As for a “shared common language”, the census of 2011 found there were around 846,000 Muslim women living in England; of those, almost 190,000, or 22 per cent, said that they could speak English “not well” (152,000) or “not at all” (38,000). (Some 90,000 Muslim men, or 10 per cent, said the same.) More up-to-date figures are hard to come by, but as the practice of importing virgin brides from Pakistan and Bangladesh continues unchallenged, it is hard to imagine that situation has improved much.
In fact, as recent figures cited by Prof Matt Goodwin make clear, the establishment of de facto ghettos and alienation from the mainstream proceeds apace. In Luton, 79 per cent of babies have at least one foreign-born parent, Slough (78 per cent), Leicester (71 per cent). Blair’s hope of full Muslim integration into British society is now a distant pipe dream…
Twenty years after one of the most heinous terror attacks in British history, our borders are effectively open. Some 20,000 undocumented young males from backward, misogynistic cultures, often exporters of Islamist violence, have entered the UK by boat since the start of this year, and are being seeded in towns up and down the land to try and hide them from a furious populace that is done with immigration. There is now overt sectarianism in Parliament, with Muslim MPs forming their own political alliance with Jeremy Corbyn, trying to affect British foreign policy in favour of Islamic fundamentalists.
It will come as no surprise that a counter-terror officer told her that since 2005, the threat had “grown inexorably”, but the potential attackers are biding their time. “We are where they want us to be,” the officer said.
“We have their religion enshrined outside of UK law and their community leaders have got the police under control. They are wily; when they see do-gooders they walk all over them. Like the scorpion and the frog it is what they do. The numbers are now so huge that our own government has sleepwalked into a nightmare of extraordinary proportions. They are building while we are continually lying to ourselves.”
The parallels between our predicament and that which formerly faced Israel are as obvious as they are chilling. Of course, the threats from Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas and the rest are existential in a way that terrorism on our shores are not.
But when you combine our woefully weakened armed forces in the face of a belligerent Russia, we are in a very perilous state indeed. Britain and Europe in particular need to wake up. We must get tough with illegal migration, get tough with the parallel societies that hate us, get serious with rebuilding our armed forces and get our national pride back.
Our current leadership class isn’t going to do any of this, of course. But which will come first, the political reckoning or the security one?