The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive

In The Builder’s Stone, Melanie Phillips reminds us forcefully that we must never forget how 7 October 2023 changed the world. On that day Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded southern Israel and brutally raped women and butchered or burned alive 1,100 Jewish men, women and children. They also dragged 250 Israelis, including three-year-old twins, grandparents and young women whom they had already attacked, into Gaza as hostages. They filmed it all on their body cameras, and perhaps the most terrifying thing they recorded was the glee with which they carried out these atrocities.

Phillips, a British writer who lives in Jerusalem and London, has spent many decades fighting Goliaths. Like David, she has fired well-aimed stones at left-wing educationalists, enemies of traditional families and others determined to remake the world according to what she deems destructive progressive agendas. In this fearless and invaluable book she describes the horror she felt that after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the West did not immediately rally to Israel. Instead:

A tsunami of brazen, frenzied Israel-hatred and anti-Semitism erupted across the West. Ever since the pogrom, western capitals (and especially campuses) have been besieged week after week by thousands of Muslims, the hard left and Palestinian supporters, who have chanted for the destruction of Israel, jihadi holy war and the murder of Jews everywhere.

Phillips is right. I never imagined that we would see demonstrators in London screaming: ‘Death to the Jews.’ 

It recently emerged that even as the torture of Israelis was taking place on 7 October, pro-Palestinian groups in London were informing the police that they were organising a protest against Israel for the following Saturday. No wonder that friends in Britain’s tiny but essential Jewish community are frightened for their children and for the first time ever considering leaving the country.

All this crystallised Phillips’s fears about the decline of western civilisation – also known as Judeo-Christian civilisation. Her book’s title references a verse in Psalm 118: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’ She argues that for the West to survive it must once again base itself on the Jewish and Christian values that gave it strength and goodness. And remember, Judaism came first:

The moral principles assumed to have been invented by Christianity, such as compassion, fairness, looking after the poor or putting others first, were all introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible… Judaism is the foundation stone of western civilisation.

But, she goes on to argue, the West has been tragically weakened since 1945 because it has stopped believing in itself. ‘To be more precise, political and cultural leaders have stopped believing in the West.’ The demoralisation began with the Holocaust, which took place at the epicentre of western high culture. This horrific failure encouraged many post-war left-wing intellectuals to blame ‘the entire Enlightenment project, and reason itself, for the rise of fascism’. Under such corrosive ‘progressive’ influences in the past half century, the western world has witnessed the deconstruction of the family and education, the erosion of religion and demographic decline. 

The dreadful events of the past 16 months show that the world is now inexorably divided, she says. One side wants to preserve core values, such as national identity and cultural self-belief; the other seeks to replace the traditions and principles of the West with ‘a brand new world of deracinated individuals dedicated to breaking the bonds of attachment between successive generations and their nation’s inherited culture’.

She also argues that this cultural crisis is being exploited by the growing number of Islamist extremists in Europe and the US, who make the most of our increasing weakness. She believes that we must be resilient, above all, and learn from the Jewish people’s extraordinary culture of survival. She quotes Napoleon: ‘Any nation that still cries after 1,500 years is guaranteed to return.’ Faith is as crucial as courage to the survival of the Jews. Phillips describes how Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz secretly used the camp’s kitchens in the middle of the night to bake matzo (unleavened bread) for Passover, risking instant execution. The West, she says, must be equally fearless, and must renew faith in itself if it is to survive.

Churchill declared that ‘war is mainly a catalogue of blunders’, and Israel has made its share of those since 7 October. But, says Phillips, quite correctly: ‘Israel is demonised for defending itself as effectively as possible against an enemy determined to wipe out the Jewish state and kill every Jew.’ Hamas is a viciously racist enemy which has deliberately used Gaza’s civilians as shields in its battle against the IDF. Why? Because, as its late leader Yahya Synwar declared, the more Palestinians who died, the more Israel would be condemned. The odious evil of Hamas has been agonisingly demonstrated in their treatment of the Bibas hostage family. The murder of two little boys and the unexplained failure to return the body of their mother have caused national grief and anger in Israel.

A final note from history. In January, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish Chronicle published moving photos of Jewish women as they were freed from the death camp in January 1945.  The same week, Israeli women hostages in Gaza were photographed surrounded by terrifying crowds of masked Hamas gunmen. For Jews, the threats never change. The big difference, which Phillips displays admirably, is that in 1945 the Nazi Jew-killers were defeated. Today, the Islamist Jew-killers are rampant. The West needs to trust in its roots to defeat these new Nazis.