Seven months on and I can't believe I still have to explain this to so many of our friends overseas who say to me Israel should just capitulate to Hamas:

Israel is fighting an existential war orchestrated via Iranian proxies Hamas (and Hizballah).

Israel is fighting against enemies with no moral red lines, for whom kidnapping civilians is just another means of warfare, for whom massacre and mass rape of civilians is a legitimate means of warfare.

An enemy who gleefully hides their fighters, weapons and rocket launchers primed and ready among their own civilian population in the hope that this will lead to casualties among their own civilian population.

This is not some "police operation" half way across the world like the Americans or British or French fought in Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere else.

This is right next to us. This is Canada invading New England, raping and pillaging as they go. This is Ireland firing rockets and drones into Wales and England on a daily basis. This is Mexico sending gunmen swarming over the border to burn down American border towns while massacring and kidnapping their civilians residents. This is Germany invading France with the intent of killing as many French people as possible just because they are French and wiping the French Republic of the map.

In any of those scenarios the attacked country would have not just a right but an obligation to its own citizens to defend them with whatever means necessary to save the lives of their people and protect the territorial integrity of their country from invasion.

Except when it comes to Israel the Israeli army is apparently only allowed to protect Israeli people if it can do so without harming any enemy civilians.

With all the good intentions in the world, with all the precautions in the world, it is not possible to fight a war without there tragically being civilian casualties, and this goes double and triple for a war against Hamas which intentionally embeds itself within a civilian population, urban warfare and tunnel warfare of a kind not seen even in the warrens of Iraqi cities.

Israel is doing all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, and yet this too is condemned. Israel is told by America it can't fight against the Hamas terror battalions holed up in Rafiah unless it evacuates all civilians and provides aid for them. When Israel leaflets Rafiah warning civilians to evacuate because Israel is about to act (and thus losing any element of surprise against Hamas) France condemns Israel for evacuating Gazans from their homes.

It is an obscene Catch 22 situation in which Israel's supposed "friends" in the West are creating an impossible situation in which Israel is simply not allowed to wage this defensive war. The message is that Israel is simply not permitted to defend itself, that the lives of Israelis do not matter and the defence of the State of Israel is not considered legitimate. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, Israel is being squeezed to surrender to genocidal terrorists who openly declare their aim of wiping Israel off the map.

Israel's so called "friends" create a twisted situation where Israel is held to impossible standards and condemned for a war of self-defence forced upon Israel by the Hamas invasion. Supposed "allies" like the US threaten to withold vital weapons during wartime (and according to a Wall Street Journal report are actually withholding arms from Israel now). Canada has placed an embargo on Israel. Belgium is threatening similar.

What does having "allies" mean if they are so ready to deny Israel vital weapons during wartime, during a defensive war of survival against an enemy who declares over and over their readiness to perpetrate October 7th again and again?

What does it mean that the supposed free democracies of the West seem quite at ease with the idea of denying vital arms to Israel at a time of war, at a time when Israel is surrounded by existential threats on so many borders, while Hamas and Hizballah will continue to be armed by Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, will continue to build their arsenals and continue to attack Israel?

Israel is expected to negotiate with the Hamas terrorist organisation which perpetrated the October 7th atrocities. Rather than the world rallying in support of the Israelis kidnapped from Israel and demanding their immediate release the supposed "honest brokers" of the world pressure Israel relentlessly to give in to every Hamas demand, to release murderers from Israeli jails who openly clamour to murder more Israelis, to end this war of self-defence leaving Hamas intact to rebuild its war machine to launch another October 7th, to abandon the people of Israel's borders to more years of rockets and bombardment and the ever present threat of another invasion.

I wonder if this fickle behaviour of so many Western governments is simply their own privileged naivete. They simply have been at peace for too long. Yes, they have suffered occasional terror attacks, but they truly don't understand the concept of the enemy at the door, what it means to be invaded, what it means to have a neighbour, as Ukraine does, who doesn't believe you have a right to exist and wants you erased.

Is the dividend of peace in Europe, of peace in north America and the Pacific that these free countries of the world simply can't understand the meaning of fighting for you life, of an existential war of survival? Are these countries just too comfortable and privileged to get it? If it's been generations, or maybe even never, since you've had to run for cover in an air raid or seen your border towns and cities overrun by brutal enemies do you simply have no concept of what this means?