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.

Argentine president Javier Milei finally went there. Addressing the nation last week, he reasserted Argentina’s claim on Las Malvinas – known to the rest of us as the Falkland Islands, the British Overseas Territory 300 miles off the coast of mainland Argentina.

‘The Malvinas are Argentine, historically and legally… there’s no debate about that’, Milei said of this remote South Atlantic archipelago, which was seized by Britain from a then newly independent Argentina in 1833. He was not threatening an invasion, like that undertaken by Argentina’s vicious right-wing military junta in 1982 – a move that led to war with Britain. Rather, he was threatening sanctions against any companies engaged in ‘oil-extraction initiatives’ in the North Falkland Basin.

The embrace of the cause of the Malvinas is something of an about-turn for this proud libertarian. Over the past two decades or so, his left-leaning predecessors all rhetorically exploited the Falklands issue as a righteous, anti-imperial cause of the Global South – and they were backed by their Latin American allies on the left, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. But the right-wing Milei was different. An avowed fan of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (one of ‘the great leaders in the history of humanity’ as he put it in 2023), he used to downplay the significance of the Falklands War. In fact, he even echoed the British line that it was up to the 3,000-plus Falkland Islanders themselves to determine their own future, although he hoped that they might ‘one day decide to vote for us’.

So what’s changed? Why is Milei now eyeing up the Falklands?

Partly, there are domestic factors at play. Milei’s popularity ratings have plunged over the past year. His chainsawing cuts to state spending have brought sky-high inflation down to more manageable levels, but unemployment is still rising amid continuing economic struggles. So, with national elections now just over a year away, it seems Milei has pivoted to a rally-round-the-flag cause that has long proved popular among the Argentine public.

There is also a more material consideration in the shape of the vast, untapped oil fields in the seas around the islands. Indeed, Milei used his state address to announce sanctions on the firms planning to drill in the Sea Lion field – the Israeli company Navitas and its British partner, Rockhopper. Largely, one would surmise, because his administration wants Argentine companies in on the action, too.

Arguably, however, it is the geopolitical context that has done most to embolden Milei’s government, helping to turn this familiar Argentine flex into a major international flashpoint.

After all, his predecessors made similar statements, but these could comfortably be ignored. Milei’s intervention, however, arrives amid an increasingly violent rebalancing of global power, in which longstanding, postwar alliances and institutions are being pulled apart at the seams. This is partly what Milei meant in his national address, when he talked about the ‘winds of change’ blowing around the world favouring an Argentine claim on the Falklands.

The decay of NATO, in particular, is relevant here. Washington has long been irritated by European allies’ relative lack of investment in their own military and defence capabilities. What were once just cracks in this decades-old alliance have threatened to become ruptures since both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, above all, the US-Israel war in Iran. In both cases, the White House has felt that Europe is not pulling its weight. Indeed, it now seems that Britain’s failure to support the Trump White House in its assault on the Islamic Republic has prompted the US to explicitly cast doubt on the UK’s claim on the Falkland Islands.

In April, just over a month into the US’s Iranian venture, an internal Pentagon email, seen by Reuters, suggested the White House was considering withdrawing its formal recognition of Britain’s administration of the Falklands. This clearly sent a message to Milei, a Trump ally. Prior to this, any assertion of Argentine power – legal, military or otherwise – towards the Falklands would have risked damaging relations with the US. But no more. From that point on, the Malvinas have potentially been on the table for Argentina in a way they’ve not been for decades.

And then, just a few days before Milei addressed the nation last week, Trump told GB News that Britain was ‘not there to help me’ in Iran, before he brought up the Falklands, claiming that he doubted Britain would be capable of defending the islands in 2026 in the way it could in 1982. You didn’t have to be a Trumpographer to understand what The Donald was getting at – namely, that the UK will have to defend its claim on the Falklands without US support. Little wonder that when Milei said that the global ‘winds of change’ were behind Argentina’s sails, he explicitly cited ‘President Trump’s [declaration] that the US is re-evaluating its historic position in relation to the Malvinas’.

Milei’s national address also touched on another key factor that has helped reignite the Falklands row: the weakness and disorientation of the British state. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Britain has either the means or the will to defend these distant islands any more.

After all, Britain’s military strength is widely known to be at an all-time low. Its army is depleted, and its navy diminished – a worrying reality revealed to the entire world in March when Britain had to rely on French naval forces to defend a British airbase on Cyprus from a Hezbollah drone strike. And there’s little sign that the UK’s new government is committed to reversing this military decline.

But Britain’s weakness goes deeper than defence capabilities. It is intellectual and ideological, too. Britain is a nation whose political class is imbued with identitarian ideology and has little sense of the national interest, preferring instead to cleave to globalist institutions.

After all, Milei has already seen Britain try to relinquish its sovereignty over another of its overseas territories: the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, hosts a critical joint UK-US airbase. Yet even this hasn’t stopped the UK government from trying to hand over the islands to Mauritius, a close ally of China, while paying billions to the Mauritians for the pleasure, all supposedly in the name of satisfying ‘international law’.

UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband has said of the Falklands that ‘the Islands are British and will remain so’. But his defiance is not very convincing. After all, this is a politician saturated in the globalist, legalistic thinking of New Labour.

Deeper still, there is now a profound indifference among the British public towards the status of a set of islands that are thousands of miles away. A YouGov poll in 2023 asked Brits how upset they’d be if the Falkland Islands stopped being British. Nearly half said ‘It wouldn’t bother me either way’. Among the young, the indifference is endemic, which is hardly surprising given they’ve grown up in a cultural and educational climate dominated by anti-Westernism and the ideology of decolonisation. According to a recent Telegraph poll, just 10 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds want to keep the Falklands British.

None of this is to suggest that Argentina is actually about to make good on its claim on the Falklands. Milei’s focus is, for now, solely on the oil-drilling licences. Besides, the islands are actually far better able to defend themselves today than they were in 1982, with a garrison of 1,500 troops, backed by a state-of-the-art air-defence system, several fighter jets and a small naval force. And Argentina is far, far weaker militarily than it was under the rule of the junta.

But the Falklands row is not going away. Western fragmentation and Britain’s weakness have effectively advanced Argentina’s geographical and historical claim on the territory in a way that Javier Milei could never manage by himself. The future of these distant islands has rarely been as uncertain.