The Hamas massacre of 1,200 people in Israel a year ago today was not just an atrocity, but also a clarifying event. No matter what concessions are made to them, the terrorists will continue to murder and terrorize up to and, one suspects, beyond their desired destruction of the Jewish state. They must not be coddled. They must be destroyed and permanently neutralized.
Every time the international community, and more specifically our feckless and addled leader President Joe Biden, talks or acts as if Hamas and its terrorist cousins are legitimate, it undermines the principles of freedom, democracy, and human rights. Not long ago, it was generally understood that “you don’t negotiate with terrorists,” so much so that it was almost a mantra among leaders in the 1980s. Just as there obviously is no moral equivalency between Hamas, or its Iranian sponsors, and Israel, so too must the West not treat them as political equals. Israel stands for civilization, tolerance, democracy, and the rule of law; the terrorists stand for barbarism, tyranny, and arbitrary violence.
To understand the stakes and the developments since last Oct. 7, a thumbnail review of Middle East history is in order. Despite trendy left-wing teaching, Jews didn’t “colonize” what now is Israel; they’ve been there for more than 3,000 years. In 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, it wasn’t through conquest but through declaration by the United Nations. Indigenous non-Jews in almost all the territory were welcome to stay there and promised civil rights, while the UN offered a separate territory for Arabs and others (now self-proclaimed “Palestinians”) to create their own state.
Israelis did evict Palestinians, and it was not the Israelis who rejected the original “two-state solution.” The Palestinians chose to leave, and rejected a state of their own — one that never had before existed — unless it included the entirety of the land from the Sinai to Lebanon and from the Jordan River to the sea, with no Jews allowed. In other words, destroying Israel was their first and most important priority, more important than having their own state and self-rule.
For 75 years since then, Israel has said it wants merely to be left in peace, and has acted accordingly. For 75 years, Israel has been attacked by Arab or other Islamic nations and Palestinians, all trying to wipe Israel and its people from the face of the Earth. Again and again over decades, Israel has agreed to trade land for peace — originally in U.N. resolution 242 — and has had war rained upon it from the very lands it traded away. UN resolution 1701 bans all Hezbollah weaponry in southern Lebanon. Yes the terrorists built a massive arsenal there and the U.N. did nothing about it.
In Israel today, all non-Jews — Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and others — enjoy civil rights, and Arabs long have sat on Israel’s Supreme Court and in its parliament. In Hamas-held Gaza, not even native Palestinians enjoy the rights that religious and ethnic minorities enjoy in Israel, and of course, Jews wouldn’t be allowed to remain alive in Gaza.
For years, Israel has provided much of the energy and clean water for Gaza, while sending humanitarian aid there and encouraging other nations and organizations to do the same. Hamas took much of the aid and turned it into a terrorist infrastructure, even boasting that it turned concrete water pipes and into missile casings.
That was the backdrop for the Palestinians’ attack last Oct. 7 in which the terrorists videoed themselves slaughtering innocents, raping women, and torturing infants to death, in some cases bragging to their parents about these subhuman atrocities. As is well known, the attackers in addition to murdering more than 1,200 people, took some 200 more hostage, of whom some 100 remain in brutal captivity.
Since then, Israel has justly tried to eradicate Hamas once and for all. It has gone to extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, lengths to minimize civilian casualties, with multiple warnings to those living in the intended target zones, safe passage to other parts of Gaza, precision weaponry, and infantry our at risk often when heavy weaponry could have eliminated terrorists more easily but at the cost more Palestinian civilian casualties. The statistics bear out the reality of Israel’s great care; in almost no instance of industrialized urban warfare has the ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties been so low.
All the while, Israel has encouraged and significantly assisted the provision of humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians, only for Hamas repeatedly to keep the aid from reaching the intended beneficiaries.
From the standpoints of justice and human rights, Israel is wholly in the right. From the standpoint of basic human decency, Israel is in the right, while bestial depravity reigns within Hamas. For all those reasons, the U.S. and the West should not just side with Israel rhetorically but should support it wholeheartedly rather than trying to restrain it. Restraint is negotiation with terrorists. It doesn’t work and leads to more murder. Whether in Gaza or in Israel’s brilliant campaign against Hezbollah in reply to Hezbollah’s constant, unprovoked barrage of rockets into Israel’s northern provinces, the Jewish state deserves our support.
Instead, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly criticize Israel, press it to refrain from effective counteractions, and refuse to allow it to use various types of U.S. weapons even when they would allow Israel more precision and thus fewer civilian injuries. One searches in vain for Biden or Harris pressuring Hamas to make further concessions. The Biden administration’s approach to Israel’s existential battle has been a disgrace.
Biden repeatedly has refused to enforce sanctions against Iran, allowing it access to $16 billion that otherwise could have remained frozen. Funds are fungible, so some of that $16 billion has paid for terrorism by Iran’s three main proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Likewise, the Obama-Biden nuclear deal with Iran has never been enforceable and merely allowed Iran maneuvering room to build nuclear weapons.
The Biden-Harris stance is also geopolitically stupid. Israel is not “only” the moral actor in the region, but also the one that best secures and advances U.S. interests. It is our indispensable ally, a beacon of Western values and, despite a reputation to the contrary, a force for stability in a region that is one of the world’s major economic and cultural crossroads.
Every time Israel has forged peace with a formerly hostile nation, it has kept that peace. It has done so with Egypt for nearly 50 years. It has done so for decades, partly formally and even more significantly in tacit ways, with Jordan. It did in 2020 with regional neighbors Bahrain, the Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco, and less formally with Oman, with accords that would have been reached even earlier if Obama’s administration hadn’t hampered Israel’s diplomatic leeway.
More formal rapprochement was imminent with Saudi Arabia until Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorism.
Remember that the radical Islamists’ hatred for the West, especially America as the West’s pre-eminent nation, would exist even if Israel did not. Hezbollah is not animated just to eradicate Israel, but to evict all Western presence, commerce, and values from the Middle East and as much of the rest of the world as it can. Iran considers the U.S. toe “Great Satan,” and it would make war on the U.S. however and wherever it could get away with it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Against this primitive, religious savagery, Israel shares with the U.S. much of the finest intelligence-gathering the world has known; advances freedom, commerce, and life-saving medicine and technology; and, as has been shown in recent weeks against Hezbollah, it eliminates entire terrorist infrastructures. Israel’s military and intelligence capabilities are a boon to the entire civilized world.
Israel is turning the Oct. 7 cataclysm into a great victory for the free world. As it continues righteous operations against terrorists in response to their enormities a year ago today, the U.S. should offer virtually unconditional support.