This article is crossposted with CAMERA UK.
The Financial Times editorial board weighed in on the Israel-Iran war (“The war that should have been avoided,” June 13), warning that Jerusalem’s “devastating assault on Iran” risks “igniting the full-blown war the world has feared since Hamas’s horrific October 7 2023 attack triggered regional hostilities.”
However, it’s hard to comprehend how any serious observer can view events since Oct. 7 as anything other than a “full-blown” regional war. Israel has been at war on seven fronts over the course of 20 months with groups and states controlled, funded and armed to varying degrees by the Islamic Republic, the culmination of what Shany Mor observed has been Tehran’s four decade campaign of building up a ring of proxy armies, terror orgs and vassal states along two of Israel’s borders and throughout the region.
Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear weapons arsenal is just another element within their ideological and theological commitment to the destruction of Israel.
The FT editorial board ignores Tehran’s decades long belligerency, which, let’s remember, has included the targeting of not just Israelis, but Diaspora Jews and the West. It casts Israel, instead of Iran, as the instigator and the impediment to peace, blames the country’s prime minister for seeking “military action over diplomacy,” and then expresses concern that “Tehran, ever more vulnerable and backed into a corner, is more likely to retaliate than negotiate in a bid to raise the stakes.”
“Israel’s European allies and Gulf leaders,” the FT avers, “must use whatever influence they have to try to rein Netanyahu in and bring Iran back to the table.” “Being a friend to Israel,” they conclude, “should not mean giving Netanyahu a carte blanche to wage endless wars that keep the Middle East, including Israel itself, in turmoil.”
Yet, save one throw-away sentence towards the end of the editorial about Iran’s “malign” regional influence, Israel, and not Tehran, is the party portrayed by the FT as the aggressor who must show restraint, cease “endless wars” and not fall into the abyss of continued and expanded conflict.
In fact, since Oct. 2023, the FT editorial board has been consistent, and consistently wrong, in its imperious advice to Jerusalem that it should stand-down.
The outlet’s editorial board began scolding Israel as early as Oct. 13, 2023, a week after the barbaric Hamas massacre, when Israeli rescue teams in southern Israel were still finding the grisly, charred remains of murdered men, women and children, and before the IDF ground invasion began, that “friends of the country should help it by urging restraint.”
Even at that early date, the FT was toeing the Guardian line on the war. This included framing Israeli evacuation orders to protect Gaza’s civilians from impending IDF military action as akin to “ethnic cleansing.” writing, in a sentence that could have been culled from a Palestine Solidarity Campaign protest speech, that “ordering half of Gaza’s population from their homes smacks of the forced displacement Palestinians have suffered since 1948.”
The FT also warned that if Jerusalem didn’t restrain itself, it risked “opening a new northern front between Hizbollah and Israel,” seemingly unaware that the terror group had already opened up another front when it began attacking northern Israel on Oct. 8, a week prior to the editorial!
Jump ahead to a Sept. 18, 2024 editorial by the Financial Times editorial board, and we see their alarmist and strategically incomprehensible condemnation of the Mossad’s wildly successful pager attacks on Hezbollah terrorists, a response, let’s remember, to the terror group’s near daily attacks on Israel’s northern cities, which, at the time, had killed 24 and caused the internal displacement of over 60,000.
The piece (“Israel’s reckless pager attack on Hizbollah,” Sept. 18) included the warning that “Benjamin Netanyahu is raising the risks of an all-out Middle East war,” again showing that editors were somehow unaware that there was already a “regional war” as the result of aggression by Iran and its proxies. In fact, the Iranian military itself had, just a few months before the pager attacks, fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel. If that doesn’t represent a “regional war,” then nothing does.
The FT also said that the IDF’s potential ground invasion of Lebanon would be a “grave mistake.”
To observe that the FT was wrong is a profound understatement. The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon two months later, after the pager and walkie talkie attacks, and the Israeli ground invasion which began on Oct. 1, was a triumph for Jerusalem and a defeat for Hizbollah. The terror group was forced to stop firing rockets and move its forces, and military equipment, north of the Litani River.
What motivates the FT’s dogmatic insistence, despite all the evidence to the contrary, on the putative “futility” of Jerusalem’s efforts to reign in and defeat the terrorist and totalitarian movements and regimes that seek the destruction of Israel and the West isn’t fully clear.
However, in addition to what certainly seems to be a hostility by many editors towards the Jewish state, their tendency to catastrophize over Israeli military action could at least partly be explained their increasing alignment with a common European view that is not only averse to war, but includes instinctual support for negotiations and diplomacy as an end in itself, not merely as one possible means towards achieving a desired foreign policy result.
This soft-pacifism can be understood as a luxury belief, an idea that confers status on Western elites, but which Israel simply can not afford to consider if it wants to survive in the Middle East.