As the Israeli-Hamas conflict rages, a familiar pattern
asserts itself: Israel bends over backward to demonstrate her moral innocence to
the world, and the world heaps condemnation on her anyway. Israel always feels
compelled to restrain her military superiority because victory in that arena means
losing the battle in the arena of public opinion despite extraordinary efforts.
It’s worth questioning whether the moral victory Israel is striving for accomplishes
anything except to perpetuate the hostilities and ensure more Israeli deaths at
the hands of Arab terrorists.
Forced to defend herself, but under the microscope of
worldwide scrutiny, Israel has gone to extreme lengths to avoid civilian
deaths. Business Insider calculated
that Israel has taken such unprecedented measures that she is “raising the
standards of what can be expected in warfare.” The IDF issues warnings to
civilians prior to neighborhood incursions. Israeli doctors treat wounded
Gazans. Israel agrees to a ceasefire only to have Hamas break it. In one
instance, Israel even spared
the lives of fourteen Hamas operatives in order not to incur civilian
casualties. And yet she is still
decried for a “disproportionate response” against the craven Hamas, who hide
behind women and children, store weapons in hospitals, and happily press their
own citizens into martyrdom to wage a very effective propaganda war.
“Disproportionate response” is a completely idiotic
complaint that has never before been raised in wartime except to punish Israel,
itself surrounded by a massively disproportionate Arab population. No one ever
won a war by countering an aggressor with carefully measured, tit-for-tat
responses. Conflicts are won by striking back so disproportionately that the enemy’s military forces are
devastated and, more importantly, its will to fight is crushed so thoroughly
that the threat is extinguished.
Defense Minister and former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon recently
accused
Netanyahu of not combating terrorism with a strong enough hand: “Why are we, a
sovereign nation with a strong army, begging a terror organization to give us
calm? We need to recover the deterrence in a way that they are the ones begging
for calm. What are we teaching our enemies all over the world? That they can do
anything to us and we'll turn the other cheek.”
It is worth reminding ourselves what sort of enemy Israel is
dealing with, and what kicked off this most recent warfare: the murder of three
Jewish teenagers – one an American citizen – kidnapped by Hamas and left in a
shallow grave last month, which left the world – or at least the civilized
world – heartsick and angry. The boys had been shot
shortly after they went missing, “killed in cold blood by human animals,” as
Prime Minister Netanyahu said.
So Israel and decent people everywhere mourned, because we love life; meanwhile
our nihilistic enemy, who boasts that they love death more, celebrated.
Around the world, those who sided with those human animals
had expressed their sick joy over the three kidnapped teens with a
three-fingered salute which they taught to their brainwashed children,
preparing the next generational wave of Jew hatred. Then, their viciousness not
sated with having executed three innocents, they even attacked
the IDF ambulance transporting the bodies home.
Feckless President Obama, who has never been a friend to
Israel (and Israel’s enemies there and abroad are keenly aware of that), decried
the kidnapping/murders as “a senseless act of terror.” But terrorism is never
senseless; by definition, terrorism is not random and pointless but waged with
a terrible, specific intent. Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gilad Shaar and Naftali
Frenkel, both 16, were kidnapped and murdered because they were Jews, the
people whom Hamas has sworn to wipe from the face of the earth.
Abroad, meanwhile, Jews – particularly in France – have
become the targets of raging anti-Israel “protesters” using the Gaza conflict
as an excuse to firebomb synagogues, burn down Jewish-owned stores, and chant
for the murder of Jews in ovens. “Anti-Semitic incidents are an almost daily
occurrence,” the president of France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against
Anti-Semitism told
The Blaze even before the Gaza
operation began. British Jews have experienced
a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents, from verbal abuse to attacks on
buildings and people. From Boston
to Berlin, Palestinian sympathizers have called for the hunting of Jews. In
the understatement of the year, the president of the Council for Jewish
Institutions in France said,
“This is not a good time for Jews.”
As Jordan Chandler Hirsch wrote
in Tablet, “Israel’s operation in
Gaza is not causing deep-seated prejudices, it is revealing them.” In the eyes
of the Jew-haters, Israel can do no right. And still Israel suffers from what
Bret Stephens called,
in the Wall Street Journal, “the
Jewish state's most obvious weakness”:
a certain kind of vanity that
confuses stainlessness with virtue, favors moral self-regard over normal
self-interest, and believes in politics as an exercise not in power but in
self-examination. People, and nations, with such attitudes cannot be beaten
militarily. But they can easily—too easily—be shamed.
In a joint call on both Israelis and the self-proclaimed Palestinians to end the violence,
Israel’s President Shimon Peres and President-elect Reuven Rivlin expressed their desire to live in peace with
their Arab neighbors and their faith in the ability to live together. “The
bloodshed will only stop when we all realize that we have not been sentenced to
live together, but destined to live together.”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/25/14)
