Commentary
As of this writing, there is no indication of whether Israel will observe the first anniversary of the Hamas assault upon it to respond,
as it has promised to do, to the explicit act of war committed by Iran on Oct. 1 when it fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Iran claimed that it was a justified use of force because of Israel’s attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah—terrorist organizations that have been entirely sustained by Iran and have been inflicting casualties upon Israel for many years. They have both avowed that they will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, though it was as a Jewish state that Israel was established by the United Nations in 1948.
Israel’s counterattacks upon Hamas and Hezbollah have been an exercise in what former Prime Minister Golda Meir called “cutting off the hands” of the enemy after she had those who murdered Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games
hunted down and killed.
A year ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition war government and declared that Israel was at war after the Hamas invasion of Israel and the gratuitously barbarous murder of more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. International opinion roughly settled into three camps: those who stated that Israel had no right to exist in the first place and that it is on stolen land which should be restored to the forces that had attacked it (never mind that Jews have lived there for
5,000 years); those who asserted the right of Israel to exist and to respond to an act of war by conducting war to a victorious conclusion; and those who wallowed in moral relativism, acknowledging the right of Israel “to defend itself” but not to go beyond repelling the invaders.
Almost all of Israel’s natural allies, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, have in effect pretended that the attack on Oct. 7 was just another skirmish over contested borders. In reality, it was an act of war designed to elicit an outbreak of war, and it explicitly highlighted the refusal of the Iran-backed terrorist organizations in the Middle East, including the Houthis in Yemen, and of Iran itself, ever to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. In the circumstances, Israel had no practical alternative but to set out to eliminate the terrorist organizations that were tormenting and provoking it. If peace is the objective—but the other side will not under any circumstances accept peace other than by annihilating the country it attacks—there is no alternative but to annihilate the aggressors and seek peace with whatever comes after.
The ceasefire that is endlessly being sponsored by the U.S. government, and
last week jointly by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the French President Emmanuel Macron, always includes a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and from the Gaza/Egypt border, known as the
Philadelphi Corridor. Such a withdrawal would merely result in a continuation ad infinitum of these many decades of terrorist assaults and provocations of Israel.
In that scenario, Hamas would be massively resupplied by Iran, with the money that the Americans either released to it which had
previously been frozen or which is made from the unfettered sale of oil. The sinews of war and terrorism would be reintroduced through the tunnels from Egypt into Gaza, development aid would be redirected to rebuilding Gaza’s tunnel network for the convenience of Hamas terrorists, and Hamas would continue to take refuge in and underneath hospitals and schools and mosques with complete indifference to the level of civilian casualties amongst the population that it purports to be protecting and liberating.
The U.S. Democrats have signed on to former President Barack Obama’s erroneous view that all will be well in the Middle East if Iran is just permitted to build up to a level of comparable
power and influence to Israel and the main Arab countries.
This constant and uninformed demand for Israel to accept a ceasefire that guarantees a continuation of terrorist attacks such as occurred a year ago has been rightly ignored by the government and people of Israel. The unutterable impudence of foreigners who know nothing about the history of the Middle East or the conduct of war in criticizing Israel’s conduct of this war, is an embarrassment to the West. Reliable figures show that Israel has inflicted comparatively little collateral damage on the civil population of Gaza, despite the declared enthusiasm of the Hamas leaders to produce civilian casualties in order to embarrass Israel in the world and envenom domestic Gaza opinion.
Now that Iran has directly attacked Israel with maximum force, aiming to do great destruction in civilian populated areas of Israel, the Arab world would rejoice, and the informed and reasonable opinion that is the backbone of the great Western nations would fully understand, if Israel now exercised its military superiority over Iran and destroyed its nuclear military program, destroyed its oil refining and exporting facilities, destroyed as systematically as possible the installations of the secret and public police that enforce the totalitarian theocracy of Iran, and did anything else it reasonably could to incite the uprising that the majority of Iranians would obviously like to make.
All indications are that the great
majority of Iranians despise the primitive and corrupt totalitarian state that has been riveted on the back of the people of Iran since President Jimmy Carter assisted
in the removal of the Shah of Iran in 1978. Nor should we forget
the role of George W. Bush in electing Hamas and Hezbollah in his enthusiasm for promoting democracy even where the democratic choice was an anti-democratic political option.
With all the mistakes of recent American administrations—except for Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the senior Bush, and Trump—it little suits the Americans to tell Israel to turn the other cheek now.
The best possible observation of the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, would be a lethal assault on Iran as the principal terrorism-supporting government of the world. Apart from anything else, it would cement good relations between Israel and the Arab powers. This grim anniversary is an opportunity to turn the page from endless skirmishing to Israel-Arab solidarity and a thoroughly chastened Iran. Israel has the right to take the necessary steps, and all responsible opinion would rejoice if it did so.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
