If it wasn’t for Israel, if it wasn’t for that monstrous, marauding state, there’d be peace in the Middle East. This is the Great Lie of Israelophobia. It’s the truthless, venomous current powering the global loathing for the Jewish State. You hear it on the street, on campuses, in mosques: that peace demands the muzzling, if not the outright destruction, of the bloodthirsty Jewish nation. Yesterday, staggeringly, we heard a version of this lie from the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom.

For me, this was the most striking thing about Ed Miliband’s statement to parliament: his propagation of the falsehood that the Jewish State is the prime barrier to a two-state solution and something like peace. With its war in Gaza, which Miliband said was unjustified in its barbarity, and its green-lighting of yet more settlements in the West Bank / Judea and Samaria, Israel has nuked the possibility of peace, he said. It has created ‘a set of facts on the ground’ that have made ‘the two-state solution unviable’. MPs giddily murmured their approval.

Contrast this with how he spoke about Hamas. He condemned Hamas, of course. All politicians engage in a spot of anti-Hamas throat-clearing before piling on the real monster of the Middle East: Israel. Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ outfit, he said. It caused Israel and Jews great ‘trauma’ with its attacks of 7 October 2023. The violence of that day was ‘vile’. And it must now ‘decommission its weapons’.

Spot the difference? Hamas is a pain in the arse, but Israel is the true menace to future peace. Hamas causes trauma, but Israel creates ‘facts on the ground’ that make peace and equality all but impossible. Hamas, in this twisted telling, becomes a bit-part player, albeit a ‘vile’ one, in a horror story authored by a murderous, expansionist Jewish State that is well and truly off its leash. And that’s why, said Miliband, we are rolling out a stringent package of sanctions against the Israeli settlements: to tame Israel’s ‘expansionist’ lunacy that creates ‘facts’ which torch all hopes of peace.

What Miliband said wasn’t only untrue – it was the public execution of truth. He didn’t only spread misinformation – he also inverted reality itself, depicting the seekers of peace as the destroyers of peace, and the Islamofascists who truly jeopardise our civilisation as mere causers of trauma. Like the keffiyeh mob, only in more moderate language, he infantilised Hamas and monstered Israel, presenting the former as a pest but the latter as a threat to all that is decent. It is one of the most misleading speeches a modern politician has given.

The very war that Miliband so stingingly condemned – the Israel-Hamas War – was born not from Israel’s hatred of peace but from Hamas’s. It is well established that Hamas’s carnival of Nazi-like violence on 7 October was designed to destroy not only Jewish life but also the Abraham Accords. These are the accords initiated by Donald Trump and signed in Washington, DC, in September 2020, with the aim of bringing about ‘normalisation’ between Arab states and Israel. The UAE and Bahrain recognised Israel for the first time. Sudan and Morocco followed. Then something extraordinary was reported: Saudi Arabia was considering signing up, too.

It would have been a region-changing development. More than that: a global quake. But it infuriated Hamas’s masters in Tehran, the theocratic freaks devoted to the fascistic annihilation of the Jewish homeland. Internal Hamas documents confirm that the October pogrom was in part designed to ‘thwart the Saudi kingdom’s process of normalisation’. Other documents gloat that Hamas’s savagery during the Second Intifada – when a thousand Jews were shot, stabbed and burnt to death – had helped to stall the Arab Peace Initiative, which Iran also hated.

It is misinformation on steroids to depict a war that sprang from the brutish Islamist instinct to frustrate ‘normalisation’ in the Middle East as proof of Israel’s hostility to peace. The Gaza conflict is the bloody handiwork of an Islamic Republic that fears all peace deals with Israel because they undermine its own genocidal dream of destroying Israel. Israel relentlessly pursued the repairing of relationships with the Arab world as Iran and its armies of anti-Semites – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis – plotted the violent thwarting of those relationships. Anyone who looks back on the past three years of war and says it was caused by the obstinacy and lunacy of the Jewish State is either a liar or a fool. Or both.

As to Miliband’s claim that Israel is the author of a ‘set of facts’ that make a two-state solution ‘unviable’ – what is he smoking? As Jon Mendelsohn says at the Spectator, numerous offers of a Palestinian state have been made since the start of the so-called peace-process era in 1993, but all crashed against the ‘rejectionist architecture’ of Iranian theocracy and its proxy manifestations. Hamas has reiterated time and again its ‘rejection of the two-state solution’, and even the dogs in the street know why: because it desires the Nazi-like erasure of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land. Palestinian Authority incompetence in the West Bank alongside Islamist genocidalism in Gaza did far more to thwart two-state peace than Israel did. It is an act of neocolonial infantilisation, of imperious pity for Arabs, to refuse to acknowledge their contribution to the conflicts of the region. Do you think they are children?

What else might have made two states ‘unviable’? What about 7 October itself? Did that historic atrocity, a pogrom of the like we hadn’t seen since the Nazis, not also lay waste to that old political vision? Certainly many people will think it unreasonable, or at the very least impractical, to ask the seven million Jews of Israel to live next to a state that would have people in it who carried out a Hitleresque assault on the Jewish people with the aim of destroying the Jewish nation. ‘We will repeat 7 October again and again’, Hamas has said. Only the most hopeless dunce would wonder why Israelis aren’t super-keen right now on having a two-state solution.

The anti-Israel mania has long been fuelled by a double bigotry. The bigotry of seeing the Jewish State as uniquely wicked and the bigotry of seeing Arabs as fundamentally blameless. The Jews become the demonic authors of war, the Arabs their wide-eyed victims. One side is monstered, the other robbed of agency. Kipling notoriously described the non-West as being ‘half devil, half child’ – such imperial hubris finds expression today in the treatment of the Jews of Israel as devilish barbarians and their foes as child-like innocents. The Big Lie of Israel-hate.

It’s one thing to see bourgeois pricks in keffiyehs hawk such half-truths and calumnies about Israel. But the foreign secretary? Miliband brought shame on Britain with his fallacious fingering of Israel as the block to peace. This is the low-information appeasement of Islamo-voters at home, with little to no regard for truth or, indeed, peace. Our government has burnt global diplomacy at the altar of domestic sectarianism. It is sickening.