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This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Batchwood, Gregory Copley, editor and publisher of Defense and Foreign Affairs. In the Middle East, there is fog of war.

The Israeli forces in some fashion have entered North Gaza. The combat is impossible to summarize. So I go to something that we can speak to, which is the support and protest across Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, where the reporting now from the telegraph and the London Times suggests there is great disunity.

There are 100,000 or more people who turn out each weekend to protest Israel's right to defend itself and to support Hamas with slogans that are unacceptable. I won't repeat them.

The question of ceasefire, humanitarian ceasefire keeps being brought up again and again, not understanding of what a ceasefire would mean in terms of combat, but that's not the point of the ceasefire. It's a way of saying, we'll go back to business as usual, the status quo entity of Hamas dominating Gaza and the Israelis on the outside, back to what it was the day before the attack on October 7th.

Gregory, I have a quote that Andrew Roberts provided in the telegraph and I wanted to provide it to the audience to understand what happened in 1941 when Winston Churchill's government was challenged about its sending bombers over Berlin.

The Prime Minister at that time said, we ask no favors of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction on the contrary. If tonight the people of London were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, no.

We will meet out to the Germans the measure and more than the measure that they have meted out to us, Churchill ended by saying, we will have no truth or parly with you or the grizzly gang who work with your wicked will, you do your worst and we will do our best.

That very much resembles the remarks from Israel we're hearing and the remarks from the leaders of Europe who are saying, Israel has a right to defend itself. My puzzle to you is, is this war, Gregory, can we expect this level of descent in a genuine war because Israel now understandably is presenting itself as passionately defending its right to exist? Is that the nature of all wars, Gregory?

Well, I think it is. When you face what you believe could be an existential threat, in other words, to the threat to the very existence of your state and society, you either have to surrender, flee or resist.

And the Israelis are in no mood to do anything other than resist and strike back. And I think much of the world appreciates that it's interesting that the protests in the United Kingdom are being disrupted by the government as much as possible, the protests in favor of the Palestinians.

Most of those protests are either being organized by Arab immigrants, or Muslim immigrants, particularly Arab immigrants to the United Kingdom, supported by young and passionate and often ill-informed students.

So this is not representative of British society as a whole. I think the same argument could be made about these pro-Palestinian protests in Europe and the United States.

They're heavily dependent on massive, jingoistic propaganda. And you know, this does tend to go along with the renewed sense of anti-Semitism we're seeing in a lot of Western countries because it's easy to stir up old myths.

But the reality is that Israel has no option but to do what it's doing. Now, the question really is whether the methodology it's using in its warfare, in other words, a total land invasion of Gaza, wiping out much of the infrastructure in order to get at the Hamas leadership and Islamic jihad leadership, whether that's the most effective way to do it.

We know that Shinbet, the internal security organization, had proposed using its team to selectively target Hamas leadership in the way that the Mossad and others targeted the Palestinians to carry out the Munich massacre, the Munich Olympics.

And that was very successful on the other hand. What we're seeing in Gaza now is something which may just continue to build support for Hamas among Muslim and Palestinian communities, even outside of Hamas.

What's the alternative? It's very hard to say. It's improbable that the selective assassination of Hamas leaders could be effective or timely or result in the disappearance of Hamas itself. Hamas in any event is based in Turkey and Qatar, which is why the reporting by Al Jazeera, which is in Qatar, is not necessarily reliable on this issue.

But you've got sufficient amounts of the Hamas leadership abroad, along with their parent organization, which is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is again based in Turkey and the Turkish government is the Muslim Brotherhood government.

So the question is, could you ever stamp out Hamas under those conditions, but there could be some argument for saying, well, what's happening in Gaza will never be tolerated again, and the entire population will be restructured as a result of the war.

I think there are a lot of Palestinians who feel that Hamas is merely stolen all of the aid money that should have been going to improve the lives of civilians there, and the aid that the food aid and so on has been sidetracked and sold off and so on.

So this is going to be a long war, and unfortunately, by having a long war, we are seeing the prospects for some kind of spread of that conflict occurring.

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