Just under 25 years ago, while spending the year teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan, I was at a café with some Swedish NGO workers. Both BBC and Al Jazeera were on television showing much the same footage: Israeli tanks had encroached several dozen meters into Gaza. Commentators hyperventilated about Israeli intentions and demanded UN Security Council action, but omitted context about Gaza-based terror.
If the international community were to its maximum ability willing to punish Israel for a limited but necessary incursion, Israeli strategists would have been right to calculate, in for a penny, in for a pound, and ask why they should not go further.
For decades subsequently, Israeli policymakers — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — nevertheless restrained and limited Israeli actions. In April 2002, 23 Israeli soldiers died in Jenin raiding a bomb-making factory and rolling up a terror cell. The Israelis attacked on the ground because of Jenin’s density and the purposeful Palestinian strategy to station terrorists and bomb-making factories in civilian areas. Had the Israel Defense Forces not cared about collateral damage, they could simply have bombed the location and eliminated the same cell without sacrificing any of their own. Nevertheless, the international community screamed bloody murder, with the United Nations suggesting Israel’s “Jenin Massacre” killed 500 innocent Palestinians. In reality, Israel killed 53 Palestinians, 48 of whom were terrorists.
Israeli restraint was also behind its so-called “mowing the lawn” strategy: Whenever Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched missiles or attacks on Israel or neared the capability to do so, Israel would engage in pin-prick attacks to degrade terrorist capabilities, kill bomb makers, or destroy the factories transforming ostensibly humanitarian supplies into lethal weaponry. It was the ultimate kick-the-can-down-the-road strategy that cost the lives of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, but the Israelis sought to walk the tightrope between tactical effectiveness while shielding themselves from international criticism.
As dishonest as the United Nations, European officials, and media were then, they are exponentially worse now. Almost two years since Hamas invaded Israel during a ceasefire and killed more Jews in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust, the United Nations and European Union have yet to investigate how international assistance they provided ended up creating the largest military tunnel network since the Vietnam War. Donors have not asked how the hospitals they built became covers for prisons and torture chambers and how the doctors they salaried had their silence if not complicity purchased.
International media networks celebrate and reward terrorists who moonlight as journalists and who took part in the October 7 atrocities as participants rather than observers. More recently, editors and correspondents outright lied about famine, substituting photos of cancer and cerebral palsy patients for real victims. Called repeatedly on its falsehood, the United Nations responded not with correction, but with changing the definition of famine to fit their preferred narrative. Given a choice between truth and antisemitism, UN Secretary General António Guterres and the leaders of political advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch choose antisemitism. So too do governments such as Australia’s and Canada’s that should know better.
STATE DEPARTMENT PAUSES ALL VISITOR VISAS FOR GAZANS
Perhaps the bash-Israel crowd believe there is no downside to crying wolf, but they are wrong: Israeli officials today recognize they cannot win the image battle; they will face the same opprobrium no matter what they do. In such a situation, they must go big and go long; there is not only no incentive for restraint, but there is actually disincentive. To stand down is to leave Hamas empowered and prepared to expand to the West Bank following 89-year-old Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s death, but then expand into Jordan whose population remains increasingly restive under the corrupt and often tone-deaf rule of King Abdullah II.
International law does not apply to Israel because international jurists recognize that if justice was blind, they would have to find Israel innocent and Hamas guilty. In such circumstances, Israel must accept it will face genocide charges whether or not it eradicates Hamas and regardless of any precautions it takes. In such a situation, Israeli leaders should have only one consideration: eliminating Hamas in its entirety.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.