Western powers, often suppliers of advanced weaponry to Israel, are pushing the Jewish state to stop fighting Hamas and Hezbollah. Why?
You would probably laugh. Orthodox Jews do not use electronic or electrical devices during the Sabbath and holidays. Smartphones, computers, and the like are generally turned off with the entry of a holy day and only turned back on when the day goes out the following night. So what happens when Israel assassinates Hassan Nasrallah or kills Yahya Sinwar on one of these days? Orthodox Jews are still curious people, even if their internet-connected devices are off. There are generally three classes of people who will know what’s going on days like today, the first holiday day of Sukkot (The Feast of the Tabernacles):
1. Foreign nationals who are not Jewish.
2. First responders, including religious Jews, who have non-exploding beepers to get updates.
3. Non-religious Jews who travel, communicate and do much as they would on a regular weekday.
So as news of Yahya Sinwar’s demise spread, more people in our neighborhood started to ask their neighbor’s Philippine care-giver or a guy sitting in an ambulance if the news was true. One of our sons asked a first-responder whom we saw downtown; we had asked the same guy a month earlier when news of Nasrallah’s demise began to circulate.
Israel has notched some impressive milestones during the past few months of fighting—at the cost of soldiers killed and wounded as well as civilians harmed in rocket volleys or local terrorist attacks. Israel has killed the heads of Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel took Rafah without the high death toll that Joe Biden and others predicted. Recently captured Hezbollah fighters said that many of their brethren fled their positions after the exploding beepers and Nasrallah’s death. Israeli soldiers are going through houses and tunnels in south Lebanon, where they are uncovering such large amounts of weaponry that the IDF announced that it will set up a new unit to use the war material in future battles. Northern Gaza—closest to Tel Aviv--is being razed.
With Israel doing so well and as we all wait to see how Israel responds to the latest rocket fire from Iran, why is the West doing its best to make sure that Israel either loses or draws? Recent headlines have including the following:
1. Biden tells Netanyahu not to bomb Iranian nuclear or energy targets.
2. Biden threatens an arms embargo if Israel does not increase aid (mostly stolen by Hamas) into northern Gaza.
3. Macron demands that the world stop sending Israel weapons.
4. Keir Starmer revokes several weapons export licenses for materials to be sent to Israel.
Of all places, it is only the Germans through their foreign minister who speak unequivocally about Israel’s need to destroy its terror enemies. What is going on? Why does the West insist that Israel not win too much or actually wish for Hamas and Hezbollah—who both have lots of Western blood on their hands—to continue to function going forward? Why isn’t the West demanding that Israel destroy Hamas so that Gazans and other Palestinians can have a new day? Why isn’t the West demanding that Israel destroy Hezbollah so that Lebanon might finally return to being a normalish, Christian-run country?
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Henry Kissinger attempted to thread a very fine needle. He believed that it was in the interest of the US that Israel should win, but he felt that Israel should not completely humiliate Egypt, Syria and the other Arabs combatants if there were to be peace talks in the future. In order to put his plan into effect, Kissinger slow-walked weapons deliveries to Israel. If the latter asked for some number of weapons, he would send fewer or send them over more flights. Golda Meir was getting very desperate reports from her commanders that Israel was losing on both fronts. She made an announcement that it would use “all weapons at its disposal” to protect the Jewish state. Nixon understood that she was talking about nuclear bombs and went over Kissinger’s head to speed up resupply at a very high tempo. Israel beat back the Arab armies and eventually signed a peace treaty with Egypt and created a solid status quo on the Syrian border still in effect to this day.
The Israelis understand that if there is to be any future peace with an Arab enemy, then the bad guys have to be crushed. Any unclear outcome or possibly some small Arab win is an invitation for future aggression. Just as the Allies understood and stipulated that Germany and Japan must agree to unconditional surrender, Israel knows that Hamas and Hezbollah must be crushed out of existence. Previous conflicts such as Israel’s wars in Gaza and the 2006 Lebanon war worked on very limited lines as both the West and the population wanted short conflicts with limits on allowable military activity. After the October 7th massacre, Israel was unchained. It could bomb a mosque in the West Bank if that’s where the terrorists were hiding. It could blow up a UNRWA school in Gaza if it was known to be harboring weapons. In Lebanon, Israel has been attacking the Shiite southern neighborhoods of Beirut with spectacular secondary explosions as stockpiles of Iranian weapons cook off. There was a report that the attack on Nasrallah not only killed him and about a dozen other senior people, it also destroyed over a billion dollars in cash used to pay Hezbollah fighters.
Biden, Macron, and others want Israel to stop because they and their supporters have seen a lot of dead Gazans and Lebanese and don’t want to see any more. Israel understands that these terror groups are like a cancer: if you leave a little bit behind, it will grow back even worse. Whether a new and improved Hamas or Hezbollah reforms in 3, 5 or 10 years is irrelevant: it all means that Israel will have to go through this exercise again at some future time. Israel believes that it can change the physical and political realities in Gaza to make it no longer a threat to Israel. The Egyptian crossings are gone and northern Gaza is also being changed—all for Israel’s safety and benefit. If Hezbollah can be truly weakened, then other forces in Lebanon may take the opportunity to return the country from Iranian control. And finally, what does Israel have in store for Iran? We don’t know, but whatever it is, please make it big and please don’t do it on the Sabbath!