Israel is at war. In 2014 I visited Israel, thanks to the NSW Board of Deputies and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), on a trip with a group of fellow journalists from a variety of media outlets.

The trip was wonderful, as well as extremely informative. We saw the most incredible sites and travelled the length and breadth of this amazing land.

We floated aloft in the Dead Sea. We flew in a light aircraft over Tel Aviv and the Sea of Galilee, and even towards the Golan Heights. We went to the militarised zones and the border with Lebanon overlooking the Bekaa Valley. We went into Romolo. We dined in the home of a Druze widow. We went to the deeply moving Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem, and spent an hilarious afternoon with a firebrand member of the Knesset. We saw so much that makes the land of Israel special. We saw the settlements, the wall, spent a morning with the PLA in Ramallah and of course visited Bethlehem, Jerusalem, wandered into the desert, visited the Australian memorial at Beersheba, and traversed much of the Holy Land.

But the one thing that touched me more than anything else, that has stayed with me ever since, was our trip to the small town of Sderot in Southern Israel, only a stone’s throw, forgive the pun, from the heavily fortified border with Gaza.

The young woman we met there, a student whose name I don’t remember, showed us around. In fact, when we returned to Australia I wrote an article about the girl from Sderot.

This young student who, at a moment’s notice had taken the day off her studies to show us around her town because our guide was ill, started off by taking us to the unusual and somewhat disquieting re-enforced children’s playground that doubles as a bomb shelter.

Often these kids and families only have 15 seconds to seek shelter between the sound of sirens and rockets from Hamas crashing down on them. She showed us the massive collection of shells from deadly rockets that have been sent over from Gaza in the intervening years aiming to terrify and terrorise the population.

One of this girl’s best friends died when she threw herself on top of her younger brother to protect him from one of those shells.

As a child, she had grown up in Gaza – an area completely out of bounds to her despite being only a few miles away. She told us how, as a child, her best friends were the local Arab kids. But when Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005 – foolishly, in my opinion – her family was amongst the nearly 10,000 Jewish settlers expelled from 25 settlements in Gaza and the West Bank where they had made their homes and livelihoods – never to return.

As the girl from Sderot took us around the town of Sderot, including to the very spot – and indeed the very sofa – that featured in a disgracefully antisemitic cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald that year… The girl from Sderot talked passionately and endlessly about her great dream to devote her life to studying Arabic and learning the ways of Palestinian culture so that she could help bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians and reunite herself with the friends of her childhood in Gaza.

She herself did not hate those who made life in Sderot terrifying every single day because she passionately believed that peace would prevail if enough people wanted it to.

Last night I thought of the girl from Sderot for the first time in many years. I have no idea what she is doing now – whether she graduated or if she got the job she wanted.

I thought about her on Saturday night when we witnessed the horror of the atrocities being perpetuated by the evil butchers of Hamas on elderly Jews, on children, and above all on women and girls in southern Israel, around and in Sderot.

For decades now the left in Australia, the left in Britain, the left in America and throughout Europe have relentlessly sought to demonise the Jews and delegitimise the state of Israel. They have pretended that there is some kind of moral equivalency between terrorism and self-defence and grotesquely distorted the history of the region in order to do so.

The left has falsely claimed that Israel is some kind of imperialist occupier and the Palestinians are the victims of colonial oppression.

Let me be perfectly blunt – and I apologise if I offend you – but all of you who have indulged in that sort of grotesque, dinner party antisemitism. Who have slyly denigrated Israel and the Jews. Who have prattled on about the ‘noble Palestinian cause’. Who have dismissively sneered at Donald Trump’s amazing Abraham Accords which brought peace for the first time. And those who celebrated the election of the obnoxious Biden regime with its repugnant dealings with Iran. Those of you who applauded Biden’s sick surrender to the Taliban and the total betrayal of the women and girls of Afghanistan. And all of you snivelling Australian Labor and Greens politicians and left-wing activists with your pro-Palestinian flags who have allowed Australian taxpayer money to be poured into the coffers of Palestinian terror organisations. And all you media outlets – both here and abroad – including ‘our’ ABC – who have always twisted the headlines so that Israel appears to be the aggressor. They have emboldened the terrorists by making excuses for their depraved actions.

Jewish blood is on your hands. You have encouraged American and Western weakness and denigrated a great democratic country. You have literally hung Israel out to dry for decades.

Donald Trump warned only a few weeks ago that the $6 billion Biden gave to Iran would be used to fund Palestinian terrorism. Looks like, as usual, Trump was right.

We have witnessed some of the most horrific and barbaric scenes of our lifetimes as Palestinian terrorists butcher innocent civilians. Kidnap and torture innocent Jews. Desecrate young Jewish bodies in macabre evil celebrations in the streets of Gaza. It is horrific, yet this is what the West has been encouraging for decades with the boycott movements, with endless antisemitic actions, dehumanising Jews, demonising Israel, and leaving Hamas and the Iranian-backed terrorists to believe they can get away with murder.

You can have your political differences, of course. But Palestinian terror is evil, pure and simple. Yet they have – for decades – been indulged and I would argue even been encouraged by the leftwing political parties of the West including our current Labor government. To their eternal shame. Penny Wong urged the Israeli government to ‘show restraint’ at this time where maximum retaliation is required, yet she showed no restraint whatsoever when she restored $10 million of Australian taxpayer funds – your money – going to the Palestinian authorities.

Let me be clear. There is no two-state solution. You are fantasists and fools if you think there is. And your stupidity costs lives. There never was the remotest genuine possibility of a two-state solution.

I have sat in the bowels of the Palestinian authority in Ramallah on that very same journalist trip with a group of Australian journalists where an answer to my question about how many Jews would exist in the two-states – we were told by a Palestinian authority that the Palestinian cause requires the removal of all Jews from Palestine and the removal of all but ‘a handful of Jews’ from whatever you want to call Israel. Their words. The Palestinian authorities. Not mine. And I have a dozen journalists who sat there next to me who heard them but didn’t report them. I did, in The Spectator Australia.

Well, eradicating Jews is clearly what the Gaza terrorists have in mind today.

Let’s pray for all the people of Israel. Pray that Jewish children will not grow up permanently scarred by the horror they are now witnessing. Pray that Netanyahu can restore a sense of peace as swiftly as possible with a minimum amount of bloodshed. But I also urge the Israelis to do what they should have done long ago – ignore the hand-wringing of the West’s pathetic liberals and leftists. Take back Gaza and destroy, once and for all, the evil entity that is Hamas. Crush those individuals who wish you nothing but harm. For the safety of your people. For the young women, the children, the elderly – for the survival of the Jewish race – they must beat these terrorists.

I pray for Israel, and I pray for the girl from Sderot.