PETER HITCHENS: The UN chief must know that there is no historical evil that can be used to justify or excuse Hamas’s atrocities

When someone urges you to see a bad act in context, he usually makes excuses for it.

What would you think if someone said that Myra Hindley and Ian Brady’s crimes ‘didn’t happen in a vacuum’?

I would think I was in the presence of an advocate of evil and expect a disgusting lecture on the unhappy lives of the two murderers, or something like that. Mind you, few things happen completely out of the blue, including ill-advised and insulting comments from international bureaucrats.

So let us also note that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ shocking words – that the October 7 Hamas massacre did not take place in a vacuum – also have context. And that context is the enduring, deep anti-Israel bias of the UN itself.

In Israel, the UN is generally seen as an enemy and there are indications that the UN feels much the same way about the Jewish state.

The UN General Assembly is particularly keen to hit Jerusalem with hostile resolutions.

Most famously, the Assembly once passed a terribly nasty resolution, number 3379, which stated that Zionism – the movement supporting the creation of a Jewish state – is itself racism. Real?

Zionism developed as a reluctant but necessary response to the incessant and often violent racist intolerance against Jews. Israel reasonably viewed Resolution 3379 as a gross insult. But with the support of the old Soviet bloc, itself seething with anti-Jewish hatred, and the Arab Muslim world, it was passed with 72 votes in favor, 35 against and 32 abstentions.

The then US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, protested that by voting for this smear the UN had made anti-Semitism international law. Yet it was not until December 1991 that it became possible to wipe it from the UN’s books – because the anti-Israel Soviet Union and its empire had crumbled into dust. But the endless hostility continues.

Numerous UN General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel, while other countries with perhaps even more imperfect reputations rarely encounter such censure. So Mr. Guterres’ comments will not have surprised anyone in Israel. They will also have done well in many of the seedier corners of the UN.

How did this happen? Mr Guterres is a veteran Portuguese socialist politician, prominent on the European international left, where he will have heard a lot of anti-Israel rhetoric and little to the contrary over the past half century.

The European Left, once sympathetic to Israel as the underdog, began switching sides after Israel’s crushing victory over its Arab neighbors in 1967.

British Immigration Secretary Robert Jenrick said it was “wrong” to suggest there was any justification for the killing of 1,400 people, including women and babies.

This transformed Israel, in the eyes of many, from the lovable David into the unlovable Goliath. Instead of a small pioneer democracy of refugees surrounded by millions of wealthy, well-armed, despotic enemies determined to wipe the country off the map (which it still is), Israel was instead seen as a regional superpower, using its Arab cruelly oppressed minority populations. This has to be one of the most effective propaganda achievements of modern times.

Those of us with long memories know that both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict have done terrible things. In Israel’s early years, the country was subjected to many brutal cross-border attacks by so-called fedayeen. The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were full of horrific terrorist murders and hijackings, mostly targeting civilians, from Munich to Entebbe, and the seizure of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by anti-Israel gangsters.

On the other side of the balance, Israeli terrorists – who were still in full force in 1948 – undoubtedly committed shameful atrocities against the Arabs in that year’s war that confirmed Israel’s existence. The worst of these was the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, in which Israelis killed dozens of Arab villagers, including women and children.

The UN had tried in 1947 to agree on the division of the so-called Palestinian Mandate – in reality a British colony in the region that we could no longer afford to hold. The Arab leaders had rejected this plan and the nearby Arab states, especially Egypt and what was then Transjordan, invaded the area almost immediately after the British forces withdrew.

It was not an easy Israeli victory. The battle was often tough. Egypt conquered what was now Gaza. Transjordan became Jordan after occupying what we now call the West Bank and much of Jerusalem.

As a powerful illustration of how the international left and right have switched sides on this issue, we note that one of the main backers of the new Israel was Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin – and that the Jewish state bought many of their weapons and bullets from newly established Israelis. Communist Czechoslovakia.

Aerial photo shows abandoned and torched vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova Desert Music Festival by Palestinian militants near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev Desert of southern Israel on October 13

Israeli soldiers inspect the site of a music festival near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on Friday, October 13

How things change. But perhaps the most profound and obvious point is that if the Arab armies had won in 1948, the Jews already living in that area could not have expected much mercy.

The new state then faced decades of hostility, cross-border attacks, threats and finally a large-scale, Moscow-armed invasion on two fronts in 1973, by Syria and Egypt together. Israel eventually fought this off, but if things had gone the other way, where would the Jewish state and its people be today?

This is a very old, deep dispute, with very high stakes for the Israelis if they ever lose. For many centuries before these events, the Jews of the Holy Land had been third-class citizens under Ottoman Turkish rule.

When Jewish migrants began settling there in large numbers in the 1930s, they faced violent opposition, led by the obnoxious fanatic Haj Amin al Husseini, the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

Al Husseini (reportedly a hero of the late Fatah leader Yasser Arafat) hated the Jews so much that he went to work for Hitler during World War II and recruited Muslims from the Balkans into the Waffen-SS.

When I say, as Mr Guterres does, that the events of October 7 ‘did not take place in a vacuum’, that is in a sense an obvious statement.

So why would you say that? It is a two-sided battle that has already seen enough blood and did not start 56 years ago, as Mr Guterres seems to think.

When you understand what is really going on in this part of the world, you realize that enough innocent blood has been shed and far too many people have tried to justify it when they shouldn’t have.

Actually, I share Mr Guterres’ view that the Israeli bombardment of Gaza should stop (it should never have started) and that Gaza’s power and water supplies should be restored. But there is no context or historical error that in any way influences the appropriate human response to the Hamas pogrom.

That answer should be total disgust and condemnation, without any qualifications. So he shouldn’t be surprised, because he works for an organization that has long shown prejudice against Israel, if many people think he was making excuses for murder.