The Jewish people need to relearn a painful and essential lesson—that they are responsible for their own protection.

By Melanie Phillips, JNS

Ukraine’s stunning attack on Russia last Sunday, in which 117 drones burst out of vehicles parked near Russian airbases to wipe out one-third of the country’s strategic cruise missile carriers, has caused widespread amazement and admiration.

The audacious operation calls instantly to mind some of the most spectacular coups of Israel’s Mossad, such as last year’s exploding Hezbollah pagers and the daring 2018 heist of 100,000 documents from Iran’s nuclear archive in Tehran.

Ukraine’s drone attack exhibited the same kind of brilliance, brio and sheer chutzpah. There was a further important characteristic that it shared with Israel.

Kyiv was driven to this act of desperate daring because it understands that it is alone. Europe may have provided it with weapons, but it’s not going to provide what Ukraine needs to win the war.

As for America, President Donald Trump is not only refusing to provide the means to defeat Russia but has been bullying Ukraine effectively to surrender and is persistently cozying up to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Even now, having declared his exasperation at Putin’s continued belligerence and having been told by the Russian leader that he will retaliate strongly for the drone attack, Trump is treating Putin as a valuable ally who will help negotiate a deal with Iran.

The idea that a cynical tyrant intent on spreading his power round the world should be negotiating a deal with genocidal fanatics at war with the West and intent upon exterminating Israel should chill the heart.

The big question is how Trump will react when he realizes that he is facing two utterly intractable foes in both Moscow and Tehran. Israel is holding its breath that Trump will help it totally destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

Without the United States, it’s said that Israel can inflict significant damage on that program but can’t destroy it entirely. Nevertheless, if Trump walks away, Israel says it will act against Iran alone.

For the longer term, Israel is now preparing to wean itself off U.S. military aid. It’s realized its mistake in having become dangerously complacent about American support. It’s relearning the ancient lesson the Jewish people must teach itself—that it’s a lethal illusion to imagine that it can afford to rely on anyone else.

For their part, Diaspora Jews are now starting to understand that their acceptance into Western countries, which for decades they had taken for granted, is also a mirage.

They find themselves caught up in a maelstrom in which they are under sustained attack as Jews because an entire political class, civil society, and even some of their own friends and family members are turning viciously against Israel. And that’s because they are falling for the serial lies being told about it as unchallengeable truths.

This week, there have been three successive days of claims that the Israel Defense Forces have been “massacring” Gazans queuing for food provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the new aid distribution center operated by America and backed by Israel.

Those claims, which have been debunked by the available evidence, are effectively blood libels against Israel. It’s Hamas that has been killing Gazan civilians and trying to stop them from receiving this food aid, and Hamas operatives who have been killed by Israel as a result.

Hamas is desperate to stop Gazans from obtaining this newly organized aid because it has the capacity to destroy its power over the population. Accordingly, it’s been provoking gun battles with the IDF and then claiming these are massacres by Israel of those queuing for food.

This has been uncritically regurgitated by Western media outlets, which have been channeling such Hamas propaganda ever since the atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

As a result, countless people now believe that Israel is wantonly killing Gazan civilians, starving Gazan babies and even committing genocide. All these allegations are the opposite of the truth and defy reason itself.

The outcome is an atmosphere of hysteria and incitement in which the cause of “Free Palestine” and “End Zionists”—the slogans shouted by an Islamist who last Sunday tried to burn Jews alive when he firebombed a weekly march in Boulder, Colo., supporting the Israeli hostages—has led directly to murderous attacks against Jews in America.

We’ve never seen anything like this onslaught before. And this lunacy is now gripping various Western governments formerly considered to be Israel’s allies.

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, shocked Germany’s Jewish community this week when he reversed the country’s previously near-sacred support for Israel by denouncing its actions in Gaza.

“What the Israeli army is now doing in the Gaza Strip,” he said, “I must honestly say, I no longer understand what the goal is.” The suffering inflicted on civilians, he said, was so severe that it “can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism.”

Why is it so difficult for Merz to understand that the goal remains to destroy Hamas and free the hostages? The Gazans themselves are blaming Hamas for causing their suffering by stealing their food and inflicting destruction on their homes by continuing the war. Why does Merz blame Israel instead? And why does he revoltingly imply that the Israelis’ real agenda is to cause civilian suffering?

This week, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas.

Dorothy Shea, the acting U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told the council that America wouldn’t support any measure that failed to condemn Hamas and didn’t call for it to disarm and leave Gaza. The resolution, she said, would undermine diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire and would embolden Hamas.

All too true. Yet along with all the other council members, the United Kingdom voted in favor of the resolution. British Ambassador Barbara Woodward denounced Israel’s conduct of the war as “unjustifiable, disproportionate and counterproductive.”

“Palestinians, desperate to feed their families, have been killed as they try to reach the very few aid sites that have been permitted by Israel. This is inhumane,” she said.

But her claims were untrue. Worse came in a debate in Britain’s House of Commons, where the mendacious venom against Israel was off the charts.

The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, called Israel’s conduct “appalling” and “intolerable.” The junior Foreign Office minister, Hamish Falconer, said the government was “appalled by repeated reports of mass casualty incidents in which Palestinians have been killed when trying to access aid sites in Gaza.”

One Labour Member of Parliament talked hysterically about annexation, genocide, starvation and ethnic cleansing. Another accused the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation of being “a group of trigger-happy private security employees.” A Conservative MP, Kit Malthouse, called this aid center “a shooting gallery—an abattoir, where starving people are lured out through combat zones to be shot at.”

What on earth are they all talking about? Through the new American aid mechanism, Israel is now enabling many Gazans to obtain food for the first time, rather than Hamas stealing it. The “mass casualty incidents” of civilians allegedly killed by the IDF exist only in the Hamas script parroted by malevolent or lazy journalists.

Britain relies heavily on Israeli weaponry and intelligence for its own defense. Israel is fighting Islamic jihadis—the same enemy force that’s increasingly tightening its grip upon the United Kingdom by infiltrating its civil society. Yet Britain is choosing to appease its own Islamists, while treating as an enemy the country that is not only fighting the same existential foe but is vital to help the United Kingdom defend itself against it.

By demonizing Israel in this despicable way, the British and other Western governments are also putting their own Jewish communities at greatly increased risk.

This is all a nightmare for Diaspora Jews. Israel, which before Oct. 7 unwisely allowed itself to bask in its growing power, has now painfully learned the lesson that Diaspora Jews must now confront. The only people who will protect and defend the Jewish people are the Jews themselves.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son.