With the likelihood growing that Israel will extend its civil law to some areas of the West Bank, writes Ed Husain, a conventional wisdom is emerging in the UK that “somehow the British government must act to stop this ‘violation of international law.’” A number of Jews, many otherwise sympathetic to Israel, has joined this chorus. To Husain, London should focus on something else entirely:

Netanyahu’s strong and fearless stance against Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood is now respected in the Arab world. He has made Israel a strategic ally of Sunni Arabs who wish to see a peaceful world. . . . If you’re in Bahrain, go to the oldest synagogue in the Arabian Gulf. Put on the TV in your hotel room, and you’ll see the vastly popular Saudi channel MBC booming into every home in the region the popular TV series Umm Haroun, lamenting the loss of Jewish neighbors and friends from the region. In the show, an Arab businessman has investments in Israel, another objects, and the former shrugs his shoulders and says, literally “so what?” He continues, “The Palestinians curse us daily while we fund them and their government. What has Israel ever done against us in the Gulf?”

Young Arabs in Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, want to visit Israel.

I could go on, but what of Palestinians? And the West Bank? The Palestinian leadership, sadly, belongs to a bygone world, out of touch with their youth and full of contempt for new leaders in the Middle East. Gaza is an Iranian outpost controlled by the fascism of Hamas, killing dissenters, punishing homosexuals, and preparing terrorists against Israel.

The pressure from Britain, and British Jews, should be on [the Palestinian Authority president] Mahmoud Abbas. . . . Boris Johnson and [his secretary of state] Dominic Raab should support the vision of a new Middle East, and British Jews must not let disagreements with Netanyahu blind them to the bigger picture of a more secure, stable and serene Israel.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.