Alan Johnson gave this speech in 2014, after the 50-day military conflict between Israel and Hamas. We’re publishing it today, lightly edited for clarity, because we believe the myths are still with us and are still poisonous, radically misshaping the Western understanding of Hamas, Israel, and the history of the conflict, especially on the liberal left. …

We saw “Holocaust inversion” everywhere. You know the kind of thing—Bibi morphs into Hitler, the IDF into the SS, and so on.

And we had Vince Cable calling for a review of arms exports to Israel if. . . Israel responded one more time to those Hamas rocket attacks.

The point is this: we mostly lost the war to interpret the war.

Why?

[What’s so incredible is that initially I started reading below the intro and didn’t realize this was written nine years ago. I included the intro here so that our readers know the context immediately. But read it through and ask yourselves what has changed in nine years, and the answer is … nothing. — Ed]