Standing against the tide of history

Age cartoonist Cathy Wilcox thinks she’s clever, showing Israel in blue and the rest of the world in Hamas red. But what she really revealed is something far deeper — a truth older than her pen, older than every nation in the world today.

From the very beginning, it was Abraham — one man who smashed the idols of his father’s house and stood against the entire pagan world. Alone, but carrying a truth so powerful it overturned history itself: that there is One God, that life has meaning, that human dignity matters.

And later, it was the Maccabees — a small band of Jews facing an empire determined to erase their faith and identity. The few against the many. Outnumbered, outshouted, outgunned — and yet they endured, and through them, the Jewish people survived.

And in ancient Persia, when one Jewish man refused to bow down to the Vizier who then sought to eradicate all Jews from the Empire, but it was that one man, Mordechai, and his adopted daughter Esther, who prevailed.

Now, here we are again. A tiny Israel in blue, against the sea of red that apologises, excuses, or endorses Hamas — a designated terrorist organisation whose pre-civilisational barbarity and values stand against every human freedom we hold dear: freedom of worship, women’s equality, gay rights, pluralism, freedom of thought, of life itself.