Israel has a new weapon for its genocide: rainfall. Bored with using bombs and starvation to achieve its Nazi-like goal of eradicating the Palestinian people, now it has brought out the big gun of precipitation. That, at least, is the unhinged cry of the West’s tireless army of Israelophobes. Following the battering of Gaza by winter storms, the keffiyeh classes have been out in force doing what they do best: attributing every sad, bad and even natural event to that all-powerful, all-dastardly Jewish state.

The floods in Gaza are awful. Storms swept the Eastern Mediterranean on Friday night and into Saturday, causing flooding in many areas, including Israel itself. But the deadliest impact was in Gaza, where many thousands still live in tents following the three-year war triggered by Hamas’s pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel. The rushing waters have made already intolerable living conditions even worse. The New York Times reports that four Gazans died on Sunday after the rains caused a sand embankment to collapse on their tent.

It is horrific – a human catastrophe played out in mud, sand and standing water. Yet the speed with which this tragedy has been folded into the zealous crusade to indict the Jewish State for ‘genocide’ has been repulsive. ‘This is no “natural” disaster’, said Jeremy Corbyn. ‘It is a continuation of genocide.’ In the fevered mind of the Israelophobe, so flattened by infantile visions of Jewish State evil, there’s no such thing as misfortune or operational failures or even just the horrors of war. No, everything is proof of Israel’s demonic nature. Everything points to the unpardonable malice of the Jewish nation.

They’re all at it. ‘This is not a natural disaster. This is man-made genocide’, says US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. These ‘apocalyptic conditions’, this ‘abomination’, is all down to Israel, commentators say. It is ‘pure evil’, said actor John Cusack while sharing what appears to be an AI-generated video of neck-high flooding. What’s being argued here is as insane as it is defamatory. They’re not only saying Israel has been neglectful towards post-war Gaza – they’re saying it has intentionally let freezing waters slosh as part of its fiendish crusade to finish off the Palestinians. Apparently even rain becomes a tool of extermination under the rule of this unholiest nation.

This kind of commentary, so commonplace now, doesn’t only slander the Jewish homeland – it also absolves Hamas. By converting every hardship into evidence of Israeli depravity, Western pundits wipe the moral slate clean for the jihadist gang that actually runs Gaza. They wilfully overlook that the suffering of the people in Gaza, including in these floods, is primarily down to the fact that their ruthless Islamist rulers cannibalised their own municipal infrastructure to fuel their cosmic war on the Jews.

There’s a reason Gaza has poor water infrastructure – because Hamas spent years ripping water pipes out of the ground to turn them into rocket fuselages for their holy crusade against the Jewish homeland. This is not an ‘anti-Hamas smear’ – the army of anti-Semites itself has boasted of its subterranean vandalism. It has proudly released footage of its operatives digging up municipal pipelines, sawing through the metal tubing, and fashioning these arteries of water into weapons of death for the Jews. A pro-Hamas documentary on Al-Jazeera showed the militants making rockets from dug-up ‘metal water pipes’ and ‘unexploded Israeli munitions’.

Hamas has even crowed about the fact that it turned EU-funded pipelines into weaponry. As the Telegraph reported three years ago, some of the ‘30 miles of water pipelines’ gifted to Gaza by Brussels were bent into ‘an arsenal of home-made rockets’. As even the BBC said in 2021, the reason Israel banned the importing of ‘dual-used’ goods into Gaza – including pipes, cement and iron – is because there exists footage showing Hamas ‘ma[king] missiles from water pipes’.

A core reason that Gaza is ill-prepared for storms is because its theocratic rulers converted virtually the entire Strip into an engine of fascistic war. For 20 years in Gaza, civic planning has played a poor second to the logistical requirements of anti-Jewish violence. Hamas chose to build not a functioning society but a staging ground for slaughter. Pipes became missiles, hospitals became weapons depots, schools became rocket-launching facilities. And of course, foreign aid was used to build the estimated 350-mile tunnel system in which Hamas hides and plots as its subjects above ground are forced to flee the missiles of the war Hamas started with its mass murder of Jews.

It is a grotesque lie of omission to leave out such brutal truths in the discussion of Gaza’s suffering. We are witnessing the moral absolution of Hamas by a cultural establishment hell-bent on blaming the Jewish State for everything. This has been the modus operandi of the West’s media elites and activist classes since the pogrom of 7 October, and in fact earlier: to monster the Jewish State and infantilise its enemies. To depict Israel as the sole and evil author of every calamity in the Middle East, and Arabs as wide-eyed, child-like victims.

This is the double racism of Israelophobia. The Jewish nation is defamed as a uniquely monstrous entity, while the Arab side is robbed of agency and treated as the helpless infant of history. Even Hamas. Even an avowedly racist army that turned a whole strip of land into a subterranean fortress of death is let off the hook. The Jews are omnipotent, the Arabs pathetic. This is progressive politics now? That’s what the floods discussion reveals: that Israel and Gaza have been flattened into props for a moral psychodrama penned by bigoted Westerners. The flooding of Gaza is terrible. So is the flooding of Western commentary with lies about Israel and apologism for the Islamo-Nazis that want to destroy it.