Israel: The way forward

People need to be reminded why Israel exists, and why Jews have every right, and every obligation, to defend their community, their nation, and the integrity of their country’s borders.

By Nils A. Haug, Gatestone Institute

Israel, under the heroic but much criticized statesman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – a leader praised by historian Andrew Roberts as “The Churchill of the Middle East” – appears to have brought threats from Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, under control and can now focus Israel’s attention and military forces on other fronts.

Incomprehensibly, at this crucial period in Israel’s existence, the chaotic domestic political situation has been cooking up unnecessary problems for the nation’s security.

Internal turmoil in Israel just serves to stimulate the hope for victory in its enemies, and less hope for the quick release of Israeli and other hostages Hamas is holding.

“Hamas,” wrote JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, “views the unrest inside the Jewish state as an asset.”

Fortunately for Israel, former US President Donald J. Trump was just re-elected to serve a second term. Within hours, Hamas indicated that now might be a good time to talk about peace.

Qatar, perhaps concerned that its days of double-dealing might be coming to an end, announced it would be “stalling” its role as a mediator between the US and Hamas.

The landslide victory of Trump in the US election this week appears finally to be restoring deterrence.

Israel’s society is politically and ideologically split. On one side are Israelis who understandably want their relatives back, and have been hoping for a ceasefire.

Sadly, they are probably unaware that Iran, Qatar and Hamas, are loath to relinquish the only bargaining chip they have, and will undoubtedly drag out releasing even one hostage as long as they can.

Delaying the release of the hostages would also expand the time Hamas has to rearm, regroup and attack Israel again “until it is annihilated”, as Hamas senior official Ghazi Hamad announced.

The hope seems to be that if they keep making the lives of Israel’s Jews miserable enough, they will all finally pack up and leave. They apparently do not know the Jews.

Nevertheless, after 13 months of futile ceasefire negotiations, many Israelis appear to have trouble realizing that if Hamas and its backers, Iran and Qatar, so wished, the hostages would be home by now.

“[A]s long as the hostages are useful to their cause,” notes Tobin, “Hamas will hold onto many of them, despite the belief among some Israelis that it is Netanyahu’s stubbornness or political ambition that is the obstacle to their freedom.”

The real aim of agitators on the Israeli left appears to be the collapse of Netanyahu’s elected government, and ousting the prime minister, whom they apparently regard as a destructive, self-serving war-monger.

Netanyahu is unfairly deemed responsible for failure to rescue all Gaza hostages by now, despite a total lack of leverage over the situation other than a ceasefire/surrender.

Hamas continues to demand two key concessions: a complete Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza, and an end to the “blockade.”

Agreement by Israel would enable Hamas to import weapons again and to maintain its hold on power. Keeping hostages is presumably an ideal way to ensure that Israel will not re-enter Gaza, and jeopardize their safety.

Meanwhile, radical jihadists from Hamas’s puppet-master, Iran, continue trying to wipe Israel off the map.

Netanyahu and his government seem determined to protect Israel from repeating the horrors of October 7, 2023. Sadly, this agenda is wrongly seen by many as a lack of concern for rescuing the hostages before they are all murdered or die.

Even before October 7, 2023, agitators were protesting Netanyahu’s undisputed electoral victory in what actually appeared an effort to oust him. That seemed the real objective in opposing Israel’s badly needed “judicial reform.”

If the priority of Israeli progressives were to rescue the hostages, they would demand that Hamas release them.

“The slogan for freeing the hostages,” wrote British journalist Douglas Murray, “… should never have been ‘Being them home.’ It should be ‘Give them back.’ Now.”

Murray has also noted that for years, the Biden administration has put all its efforts into trying to oust Netanyahu when it would probably have been better off putting all its efforts into ousting the Iranian regime.

Israel’s progressives would also have called on the international community to pressure Iran and Qatar, rather than hector their own prime minister.

Sadly, these Israelis, some of them in desperation to see their loved ones again, are playing into the hands of Hamas. Its leaders must be delighted to see a divided Israel turn against itself.

Painfully, Israeli activists are doing damage to both their country and the hostages.

Among Israel’s most vocal protestors are prominent Israeli politicians, backed — and some funded — by the Biden administration.

The US appears to desire someone more malleable in Israel’s number-one spot: a person, one assumes, willing to do whatever the US dictates.

This is probably not the best way to treat an ally. The Biden administration’s goal appears to be establishment of a terrorist Palestinian state on Israel’s border.

In addition, Iran will soon be able to produce nuclear weapons with which to bomb Israel to oblivion.

This monumentally destabilizing objective was proposed by the Obama administration in its illegitimate 2015 “Iran nuclear deal,” officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA), the sunset clauses of which guarantee Iran’s regime, in just a few years, as many weapons as they can build.

According to Iran’s former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, all it would take for Iran to obliterate Israel, a country smaller than the state of New Jersey, was one bomb.

Anti-Netanyahu-government agitators, apart from those in the Biden administration, include much of Israel’s media.

So-called “progressive” political leaders in the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe are apparently more worried about trade than a world upended by an expansionist regime with nuclear weapons.

As American journalist Daniel Greenfield points out:

“The appeasement lobby only has one big idea when it comes to Islamic terrorists and any other enemies: 1. Give them land…”

Evidence shows that, unfortunately, this strategy does not work. The failure of the Oslo Accords only emphasizes that fact. The “ceiling” of each offer becomes the “floor” of the next one, as each concession is pocketed in the expectation of more.

On the pro-Netanyahu end of the spectrum is a sizable group of Israelis and other supporters, acting to preserve the nation against future assaults while fending off attempts to replace the prime minister with one who would surrender to Hamas.

The opposition, no doubt, hold to an illusory hope of welcoming the hostages back home. Sadly, only about half the remaining hostages are thought still to be alive.

The hostages seem to have become Hamas’s “insurance policy”: Israel will not presumably be able to attack Hamas in the future for fear of killing them.

It is believed Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, for his personal safety, surrounded himself with hostages.

Sinwar, far from wanting to be a “martyr”, prioritized his personal safety as a pre-condition for a ceasefire. Found on his body when the Israelis finally dispatched him was the passport of an UNRWA teacher.

Israel’s few international supporters have, in the main, offered erratic or limited assistance while imposing unconscionable conditions.

Western leaders, including the US, attempted to micro-manage and constrain Israel’s handling of the war, to the extent that without their interference, the Gaza campaign could possibly have been brought to an end months ago.

“Do what you have to do,” Trump recently told Netanyahu, but, according to one report, he asked Netanyahu to please finish the war by inauguration day, January 20, 2025.

In calls between Netanyahu and Trump, they reportedly “see eye-to-eye on Iran.”

The failure to agree to a ceasefire appears to lie with Hamas’s intransigence, coupled with mixed signals from the Biden administration.

By threatening Israel and withholding weapons, the US administration has, ironically, protracted the war and given Qatar, Iran, and its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis – the idea that all they have to do is wait, and the US, by forcing Israel to heel, will hand them a victory.

The Gaza Ministry of Health — run by Hamas – bewails the large number of alleged civilian casualties in Gaza; a number hugely and falsely inflated.

Hamas fails to reveal exactly how many of the casualties were terrorists. Hamas deliberately causes casualties by concealing weapons depots and command centers in the middle of crowded schools, hospitals, and mosques so that Israel will be blamed.

This practice, known as “Hamas’s CNN strategy,” consists of showing dead babies to television crews so the media and international community will force Israel to stop defending itself, supposedly for “humanitarian” reasons.

Israelis demonstrating for Netanyahu’s ouster claim that they hold him primarily responsible for intelligence and security shortcomings which enabled the October 7th disaster.

Prime ministers, however, are reliant for information on the state’s military and intelligence services, which may have failed to provide him with real-time warnings of Hamas’s impending attack.

The combination of internal forces, aided by Western politicians in their aim to overthrow Israel’s democratically elected government, creates discord that plays straight into the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah, Qatar, Iran, and Israel’s other enemies.

Israel’s internal turbulence most likely suits the Biden administration, which has still not acted strongly against the lynchpin of all this devastation, Iran.

On the contrary, the Biden administration rewarded Iran with “closer to $60 billion” — a windfall that Iran’s regime must at least partially draw on to finance their wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.

In a disrespectful comment implicating Netanyahu and the entire Israeli Knesset (Parliament), the US reportedly described Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant — who they appeared to consider a compliant potential replacement for Netanyahu — as the “only adult in the room.”

That remark came after they had seemingly given up on replacing Netanyahu with former Defense Minister Benny Gantz and, had considered former (briefly) Prime Minister Yair Lipid.

Netanyahu seems determined to protect Israel to the end from future attacks by adversaries, both within and without. Gallant was dismissed from the government earlier this month. “[T]rust between me and the minister of defense has cracked,” Netanyahu said.

Lapid, Gantz, Gallant, Biden, Blinken and others in the circle all appear to be like-minded, acting questionably in the interests of Israel’s elected government, and arguably against the security of the state itself.

Perhaps Israel’s progressives need to be reminded why Israel exists, and why Jews have every right, and every obligation, to defend their community, their nation, and the integrity of their country’s borders.

Even before the US election on November 5, Netanyahu had clearly decided to go it alone. He apparently did not inform the US administration about “Operation Grim Beeper,” which caused pagers carried by Hezbollah’s terrorists to explode; or of the aerial bombardments in Lebanon that that followed it.

Netanyahu’s actions indicate his distrust of the Biden administration (well-earned). Biden has withheld or slow-walked weapons shipments, and has warned Israel not to “escalate” the situation.

Every day since October 8, 2023, however, Hezbollah has bombarded Israel – a country roughly the size of Wales — with rockets, missiles and attack drones.

Netanyahu announced that “No country can accept the wanton rocketing of its cities. We can’t accept it either.”

Meanwhile, in the USA, President-elect Donald J. Trump is already creating seismic global changes within days (here, here and here), long before his inauguration on January 20, 2025.

“After the terrible massacre on October 7”, said a Likud party spokesperson, “we cannot reward terrorism and enable a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Netanyahu has proven over the past 20 years that he is the only barrier to the creation of a terror state between the [Mediterranean] Sea and Jordan.”

US President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s words on America in his 1965 inaugural speech apply equally to Israel:

“They came here – the exile and the stranger… They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.”

Benjamin NetanyahuBiden AdministrationIranTerrorism