By
Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
The
myth that Israel’s tactics not its existence is at issue died with the
murdered Jewish families on Oct 7 and the Hezbollah terrorists taken out
by pagers on September 17 and 18.
No sooner did the encrypted
communications devices handed out to members of the Islamic Jihadist
group begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began
condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a
violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists
had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns
and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in
their own country.
There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any
non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of
warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof knocking warning
bombs were enough of a precaution. Even hostage rescue operations were
condemned for killing terrorists who in the usual Hamas medical
department parlance turned into innocent children.
And there’s
also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to kill Jews. Oct 7
proved that. Nearly a year later, Islamic groups are celebrating the
orgy of butchery, kidnapping and rape. The Democratic Socialists of
America, which boasts 5 allied members of Congress including Rep.
Rashida Tlaib, has taken to arguing in favor of “armed resistance” and
Hamas.
More Democrats have taken to social media to condemn a
Detroit News cartoon which implied that Rep. Tlaib’s support for
terrorism may have led her to worry about her pager than two recent
Muslim terrorist plots to massacre Jews in synagogues in Vegas and New
York City. The Democrat political establishment can’t seem to get around
to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching
through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.
The liberal establishment accepts the Islamic terrorist cause but rejects the Israeli one.
That’s
why when it comes to Islamic terrorism, it emphasizes the cause over
the tactics, but when it comes to Israel, it emphasizes the tactics over
the cause. Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a
Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly
illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state,
is legitimate.
No matter how often the Arab Muslim invaders
occupying parts of Gaza and the West Bank pledge their allegiance to
terror, we are told that their ultimate cause is just and inevitable.
And that the killings, kidnappings and rapes don’t truly represent the
moral righteousness of it.
While every time Israel takes out a
terrorist, the media links it to the Jewish ‘occupation’ of those parts
of Israel that the terrorists demand for themselves. Since Israel’s
existence is wrong, any tactic that it uses to fight the terrorists
trying to take it over is a human rights violation.
The Marxist
mobs in the street are at least honest about their ideological
orientation. They define all Jews living in Israel as “settlers” who are
fair game for genocide. Whether Israel takes them out with drone
strikes, exploding beepers or Barney songs played on a loop doesn’t much
matter except as it’s useful for propaganda materials calling for the
destruction of Israel.
The liberal anti-Israel establishment in
D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of
focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes
out terrorists and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists
that would win their approval. A generation of the Israeli military
jumping through every possible hoop has yielded only angrier and more
sanctimonious condemnations every time another terrorist bites the dust.
Israel
has wasted a lot of the lives of its soldiers and civilians on its side
in the hopes of achieving some phantom ‘purity of arms’ that included
an extensive approvals process for strikes that crippled its aerial
response on Oct 7. Afterward things got better and worse. The pager
attack was brilliantly calculated and yet crippled by an obsessive need
to take out specific targets rather than inflicting as much damage on
the Hezbollah terrorists as possible.
The painstaking efforts to
monitor the terrorists to minimize collateral damage and to focus on
specific targets did not change the inevitable condemnations that came
rolling Israel’s way.
The real lesson of the pager attacks was
that an innovative Israeli attack on Islamic terrorists will be cheered
by the right people and condemned by the wrong ones. Israeli Hasbara is a
fundamentally misguided effort to explain the need for a war whose hand
wringing signals weakness and guilt. What makes people cheer for Israel
are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from
Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and
detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible
for killing Americans.
No one except the occasional military
expert who tours the battlefield is impressed by Israeli restraint. And
restraint will win not a single concession from the same establishment
that can’t bring itself to condemn by name the mobs waving Hamas flags
and assaulting Jewish students.
Israel has been held hostage
trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal
establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing
Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it
will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece
and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.
That
the peace has never come, that the negotiations are worthless and that
the only product of two generations of concessions is endless war will
not change a single mind. Just as the implication of the revelation that
Hamas planned to murder Israeli hostages before handing them over in
exchange for live Islamic terrorists was hardly even discussed in the
media.
After nine months of demanding a deal with Hamas at any
cost, the Biden administration has belatedly decided that the terrorist
group is not serious about a deal, but that news hasn’t changed Kamala’s
set talking point about the urgent need to end the war and cut a deal.
Nor will it change her policy should she be in a position to stop
talking and start making the rules.
Israel has been divided by
the need to balance winning wars against winning over public opinion,
but the public opinion of the establishment was never winnable and if it
is winnable, it can only be won by winning wars. The Biden
administration’s policymakers will never admit it, but they were far
more impressed by the pager attacks than by 9 months of negotiations.
The same is more obviously true of Arab Muslim countries who despise
Hezbollah and fear Iran.
No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.
Israel
will never have even the grudging acceptance of those who believe that
rape is resistance and beepers are genocide. Accommodating military
tactics to their accusations has led to a loop of defeatism that
culminated in the deadly infiltration, invasion and massacres of Oct 7.
But it can best be a player on the world stage by showing its strength
rather than its weakness.
One Pagergeddon was worth a hundred
Nova documentaries and exhibitions about the unhappy victims who were
assaulted at the dance festival to morale, national security and the
reputation of a nation built on repudiating the helplessness and
victimhood of its long exile.
Oct 7 incited the dark glee of a
movement that believes it can taste Israel’s destruction. Protestations
of innocence and victimhood only feed its triumphalism. What it fears
isn’t a documentary about the atrocities of Oct 7, but the destruction
of its Jihadist armies.
The issue was never Israel’s tactics, but Israel’s existence. The only way to win… is to win.
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