Oppressed lovers of freedom everywhere are secretly rooting for Israel to win

Bernard-Henri Lévy

October 7 was not just a tragedy for Israel, but emblematic of an attack to the Global West, Bernard-Henri Lévy argues in “Israel Alone” (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

The war with Hamas is existential for all of Western civilisation

And then, the third upheaval.

For an instant the world saw what it did not want to see.

And what it saw was a planet that froze briefly before beginning to turn again—but now turning on new bearings.

In 2018, I wrote a book entitled The Empire and the Five Kings. The title was an allusion to the Biblical story of the five kings whom Abraham fought to save his nephew, Lot.

In that book, I described an empire consisting of Europe, its American outgrowth, and others in the rest of the world that have faith in the Western Enlightenment.

I argued that this empire, which I called the “Global West,” is contracting nearly everywhere, both in people’s minds and geographically.

I showed how the space left vacant by the empire’s retreat was creating opportunities for five new kings, five potentates, who ruled over countries that had once been the centers for powerful empires and aspired to become so again.

My thesis was that these five kings—Russia, China, the Iran of the ayatollahs, neo-Ottoman Turkey, and the Arab countries prone to jihadism—were ready to forgo their ancient enmities if that were the price of reviving the glory of Peter the Great, the Qing and Ming dynasties, the Ottoman vizirs, the shahs of Persia, or the Umayyad and Abbasid sultans.

The book was written in the context of the war against the Islamic State, the role of the Kurds in that war, and then, at the moment of the battle of Kirkuk—which in my eyes was the equivalent of the ancient battles that put an end to the hegemony of Sparta, Athens, or Macedonia—how casually their western allies abandoned them once they had served their purpose.

The book’s thesis was confirmed by the subsequent war against Ukraine, where we saw the same five— joined by a North Korea drunk on its own power—in coalition against a Global West that sometimes seemed to be pulling itself together while, at other times, looking like a heavy-footed giant with a head full of clay, a disconcerting mix of authority and restraint, extreme power and inexplicable cowardice.

But now we were seeing the five picking up where they left off, consolidating their alliance, and submitting us all to a new test, this time on the Israeli front.

What was true in the Kurdish and Ukrainian cases is proving true in the case of Hamas—but in reverse, and from the dark side of the world.

And it is around this minuscule terror state, this barbarous Lilliput, about which the big five had previously cared so little, that the dark planets realign and the new world takes shape.

The big difference is that the United States does not seem to be the same stumbling, dazed, declining empire ready to abdicate its throne.

I say “seem” because America still shows a reluctance to fully flex its muscles, to assert its creed and values. It moves ahead and retracts, takes a step toward Israel and pulls back.

And nothing can be taken for granted as the vertiginous unknown looms with the upcoming presidential election.

But regardless of the current or future US position, what is sure is that the revisionist kingdoms were there for October 7 and that we found all five of them as fiery as ever and ready to get back in the game.

That appeared immediately among the Sunni powers who are the natural allies of Hamas.

There was dancing in Kabul; in Islamabad, cries that bin Laden had been avenged; in Qatar, it occurred to no one to disturb Ismail Haniyeh and his retinue who were still, at least until further notice, Hamas’s senior leaders; at most, they were asked—politely and after days of talks—to close their luxurious villas and leave for a well-deserved vacation in Algeria.

It was clear with respect to Turkish president Erdogan, the grand master of the confraternity of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the avant-garde.

He did not lose a minute before resolving the ambiguities that previous signs of rapprochement with Jerusalem, linked with his nation’s gas interests, might have generated.

On October 24, Erdogan declared that “Hamas [was] not a terrorist organization” but rather “a group of mujahideen who are defending their land.”

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attends to listen Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Getty Images)

We saw him, his neck wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, at a huge rally at the old Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, where he informed the “whole world” that Israel is committing unpardonable “war crimes.”

Then, on December 27, this great humanist who has yet, a century after the fact, to acknowledge the Armenian genocide and is still fueling the same hatred today in Nagorno-Karabakh, compared Bibi Netanyahu to Hitler and the Palestinian refugee camps to the Nazi death camps.

Nor did Turkey’s membership in NATO or its economic reliance on the United States dissuade him from announcing on January 14, 2024 that his government possessed solid proof of Israel’s genocidal activities in Gaza and would furnish them forthwith to the International Court of Justice, which was then in the process of examining and ultimately dismissing the formal complaint to this effect that had been filed by South Africa.

Iran began with denial. And perhaps remembering the good old days of the “nuclear agreement” with Teheran worked out by President Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, the American administration went out on a limb to confirm, in the early hours, that there was no “proof” of Iran’s “direct” involvement in the attack.

But we learned quickly enough, through Iran’s official press agency, that a meeting had taken place in Doha on October 14 between Ismail Haniyeh, who had not yet departed for Algeria, and the Iranian minister of foreign affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (Getty Images)

This was followed on October 26 by a meeting in Moscow between Iranian vice president Ali Bagheri and another delegation of the terrorist organization, this one of lower rank.

And then another meeting in Tehran, probably on November 6, between Haniyeh and the Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

We quickly learned that there had been others, in August and September, well before the attack.

We also learned that, according to what the Wall Street Journal described as “highly placed sources within Hezbollah and Hamas,” representatives of the Revolutionary Guard and, on least two occasions, Minister Abdollahian himself had reportedly helped during these meetings to “set up” the operation, “ironed out the details,” and, on October 2 in Beirut, given it the “green light.”

For those still in doubt, the regime’s minister of culture, Ezzatollah Zarghami, a retired general of the IRGC, gave the story the fillip it lacked.

In an interview released by the semi-official Mehr News Agency, Zarghami affirmed that he was “afraid of no one” and willingly admitted that his country had delivered to Hamas a quantity of Fajr-3 ballistic missiles of the type that had been used to strike Israel.

So, “Iran outside Iran” must be added to complete the picture.

Hezbollah’s launches over the northern border of the Jewish state.

The Shiite militias in Iraq ramping up attacks on American positions in Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan and threatening Israel.

Houthis take part in a pro-Palestinian rally in Sanaa amid the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip (Photo by MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images)

And last but not least, the Houthis in Yemen—equipped with an arsenal of drones, medium-range ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles unparalleled in the region, and supported by a Revolutionary Guard spy vessel that makes little secret of guiding the attacks—who were harassing ships in the Red Sea they deemed to have any link with the “Zionist entity.”

Was China testing, as in Ukraine, the adversary’s capacity for resistance in the great confrontation to come?

Was it pondering “Thucydides’ Trap,” that fateful moment when, according to the ancient Greek historian (as recounted by American professor Graham Allison), a waning power (yesterday, Athens, today, the United States) commits the fatal error of responding with force against the rising power (then, Sparta, now, China)?

Or, conversely, was it running the risk of falling into what I dubbed Herodotus’ Trap in The Empire and the Five Kings, in homage to the great historian of the Greco-Persian wars and his account of the ultimate victory of democracy over tyranny?

Was China thinking of moving into Taiwan, and did it want to see whether America’s wound might be widening, hastening the decline of its influence?

Whatever the reason, Chinese premier Xi Jinping abandoned his customary restraint, as he had with Ukraine.

While stifling Tibet and annihilating the Muslim Uyghurs, he refrained from condemning Hamas, refused to label it a terrorist organization, let flourish on Chinese television and Weibo fake news of the type, “Jews represent just 3% of the American population but control 70% of its wealth,” and took the lead in the anti-Israel crusade that was gathering force among the BRIC nations.

But the icing on the cake was Putin. Over the years, he found useful idiots to serve up the edifying story of little Vladimir, poor and lost, raised by a Jewish family to which he remained attached and owed the remnants of his philo-Semitism.

But the admirer of Czar Nicholas I in him remembered that Russia, at the height of its power, massacred tens of millions of Russians, persecuted hundreds of thousands of Jews, and planned, during the waning days of Stalinism, to do their fair share in bringing about the “final solution of the Jewish problem.”

And above all, the KGB man of a thousand ruses, the crowned seditionist who has thrived only through plots, assassinations, pawns advanced, pawns sacrificed, and power gained with guns and bribes, the postmodern Mad Max who has replaced the motorcycles of the apocalypse with tanks and hypersonic missiles and likes being blessed by Rolex popes who wear their cowls the way Attila wore his caps—that Putin was aware of the benefits he stood to gain from this new Middle Eastern war, which was drawing the world’s attention away from the heinous crimes he was committing in Ukraine.

So, he unleashed his pack, allowed his henchmen to revive the old national anti-Semitism and to warn Israelis of Russian origin that they would not be welcome when they flee their beloved “refuge” just ahead of the bombs.

He did not deny that the Hamas leaders had two sessions with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (in September 2022 and March 2023), whose announced purpose was to “weaken the West,” or that said leaders later returned to Moscow to meet with Iranian officials.

He could not hide the fact that the red carpet was rolled out for them in the days following October 7, or that the Kremlin had still not condemned the massacre.

The circle is nearly complete.

It is almost the same picture, but worse, that we watched take shape at the time of the war against the Kurds and again with the war against Ukraine—which, incidentally, continued unabated in a world where everything was suddenly splitting in two: the media’s focus, the attention of foreign ministries, and even military aid, which some political leaders, expecting Trump to return to power and taking advantage of the general confusion, would like to let fall by the wayside.

Could it be said that this upheaval is not really an upheaval this time around since it is just the same old song?

Is it the fortress Europe (and America) emitting its endless but familiar supply of collaborators and appeasers?

Yes and no.

It is as if tectonic plates had been rubbing together, sliding, overlapping, and separating before suddenly interlocking in a new pattern.

And for today’s observers, the current scene is a panorama where everything seems perfectly in place.

Hamas is no longer Hamas but, instead, the sword and toy of a counter-empire wherein the protagonists of the preceding wars have come together permanently.

And Israel, reciprocally, is a little more than just Israel.

It carries the message, even if unknowingly, of the Uyghurs of China, the intrepid bloggers of the Arab autocracies, the proponents of the Armenian cause in Istanbul who detest Erdogan and his fables of the Grand Turk, the strong souls of Kurdistan, the Iranian insurgents who continue to cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the opponents whom Putin deports, sends into internal exile, and assassinates—and also, perhaps in spite of themselves, the Palestinians in silent revolt against the Hamas dictatorship.

This has nothing to do with a war between West and East.

Nor with the “war of civilizations” that some, already lining up their legions, are hoping for.

Or maybe it does.

But in that case, one of the civilizations is the fine Internationale of the friends of liberty, law, and the spirit of resistance, drawing its members from within the new and ancient empires alike.

And the other is the civilization of tyrants and demagogues whose followers are recruited in the West no less than in the East or South.

The Maharal of Prague wrote in Netzach Yisrael that, in contrast to kingdoms and empires, which are extensive, Israel is a point, a single point, but what a point!

The central and hidden point, secret and essential, upon which rests, in the terrible dramaturgy of history, a piece of human survival.

So there we have it. Israel is not a pawn, but a point.

It is the hearth that radiates a light and a language without which a part of humanity would be lost.

Israel exists in a kind of solitude, no doubt.

A terrible solitude.

But to paraphrase Albert Camus, there are women and men, many women and many men, who would be very alone indeed without this solitary presence and who pray each morning and each evening, more or less secretly and silently, summoning whatever boldness their status as hostages of the five kings allows, for Israel to win its war against the empire of Hamas.

Rape is Resistance and Beepers are Genocide

Daniel Greenfield

• Those same organizations [that condemned Israel’s exploding pagers] and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country.

• There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof-knocking warning projectiles were enough of a precaution. Even hostage-rescue operations were condemned for killing terrorists who, in the usual Hamas medical department parlance, turned into innocent children.
• And there’s also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to murder Jews.
• The Democrat political establishment can’t seem to get around to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.
• Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state, is legitimate.
• The liberal anti-Israel establishment in D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes out terrorists, and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists that would win their approval.
• What makes people cheer for Israel are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible for killing Americans.
• Israel has been held hostage trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.
• No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.

• The only way to win… is to win.

No sooner did the encrypted pagers used by members of Hezbollah begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country. Pictured: A photo taken on September 18, 2024 in Beirut shows the remains of a Hezbollah pager that exploded the day before. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

The myth that Israel’s tactics, not its existence, is at issue died with the murdered Jewish families on October 7, 2023 and the Hezbollah terrorists taken out by pagers on September 17, 2024.

No sooner did the encrypted communications devices handed out to members of the Islamic Jihadist group begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country.

There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof-knocking warning projectiles were enough of a precaution. Even hostage-rescue operations were condemned for killing terrorists who, in the usual Hamas medical department parlance, turned into innocent children.

And there’s also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to murder Jews. Oct 7 proved that. Nearly a year later, Islamic groups are still celebrating the orgy of butchery, kidnapping and rape. The Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts 5 allied Members of Congress including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, has taken to arguing in favor of “armed resistance” and Hamas.

More Democrats have taken to social media to condemn a Detroit News cartoon which implied that Tlaib’s support for terrorism may have led her to worry about her pager, than two recent Muslim terrorist plots to massacre Jews in synagogues in Las Vegas and New York City. The Democrat political establishment can’t seem to get around to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.

The liberal establishment accepts the Islamic terrorist cause but rejects the Israeli cause.

That’s why when it comes to Islamic terrorism, it emphasizes the cause over the tactics, but when it comes to Israel, it emphasizes the tactics over the cause. Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state, is legitimate.

No matter how often the Arab Muslim invaders occupying parts of Gaza and the West Bank pledge their allegiance to terror, we are told that their ultimate cause is just and inevitable. And that the killings, kidnappings and rapes don’t truly represent the moral righteousness of it.

While every time Israel takes out a terrorist, the media links it to the Jewish “occupation” of those parts of Israel that the terrorists demand for themselves. Since Israel’s existence is wrong, any tactic that it uses to fight the terrorists trying to take it over is a human rights violation.

The Marxist mobs in the street are at least honest about their ideological orientation. They define all Jews living in Israel as “settlers” who are fair game for genocide. Whether Israel takes them out with drone strikes, exploding beepers or Barney songs played on a loop doesn’t much matter except as it’s useful for propaganda materials calling for the destruction of Israel.

The liberal anti-Israel establishment in D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes out terrorists and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists that would win their approval. A generation of the Israeli military jumping through every possible hoop has yielded only angrier and more sanctimonious condemnations every time another terrorist bites the dust.

Israel has wasted a lot of the lives of its soldiers and civilians on its side in the hopes of achieving some phantom “purity of arms” that included an extensive approvals process for strikes that crippled its aerial response on Oct 7. Afterward things got better and worse. The pager attack was brilliantly calculated and yet crippled by an obsessive need to take out specific targets rather than inflicting as much damage on the Hezbollah terrorists as possible.

The painstaking efforts to monitor the terrorists to minimize collateral damage and to focus on specific targets did not change the inevitable condemnations that came rolling Israel’s way.

The real lesson of the pager attacks was that an innovative Israeli attack on Islamic terrorists will be cheered by the right people and condemned by the wrong ones. Israeli hasbara (public relations) is a fundamentally misguided effort to explain the need for a war whose hand-wringing signals weakness and guilt. What makes people cheer for Israel are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible for killing Americans.

No one except the occasional military expert who tours the battlefield is impressed by Israeli restraint. And restraint will win not a single concession from the same establishment that can’t bring itself to condemn by name the mobs waving Hamas flags and assaulting Jewish students.

Israel has been held hostage trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.

That the peace has never come, that the negotiations are worthless and that the only product of two generations of concessions is endless war will not change a single mind. Just as the implication of the revelation that Hamas planned to murder Israeli hostages before handing them over in exchange for live Muslim terrorists was hardly even discussed in the media.

After nine months of demanding a deal with Hamas at any cost, the Biden administration has belatedly decided that the terrorist group is not serious about a deal, but that news hasn’t changed Kamala Harris’s set talking point about the urgent need to end the war and cut a deal. Nor will it change her policy should she be in a position to stop talking and start making the rules.

Israel has been divided by the need to balance winning wars against winning over public opinion, but the public opinion of the establishment was never winnable, and if it is winnable, it can only be won by winning wars. The Biden administration’s policymakers will never admit it, but they were far more impressed by the pager attacks than by 9 months of negotiations. The same is more obviously true of Arab-Muslim countries that despise Hezbollah and fear Iran.

No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.

Israel will never have even the grudging acceptance of those who believe that rape is resistance and beepers are genocide. Accommodating military tactics to their accusations has led to a loop of defeatism that culminated in the deadly infiltration, invasion and massacres of Oct 7. But it can best be a player on the world stage by showing its strength rather than its weakness.

One Pagergeddon was worth a hundred Nova documentaries and exhibitions about the unhappy victims who were assaulted at the music festival to morale, national security and the reputation of a nation built on repudiating the helplessness and victimhood of its long exile.

Oct 7 incited the dark glee of a movement that believes it can taste Israel’s destruction. Protestations of innocence and victimhood only feed its triumphalism. What it fears isn’t a documentary about the atrocities of Oct 7, but the destruction of its Jihadist armies.

The issue was never Israel’s tactics, but Israel’s existence. The only way to win… is to win.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

What Is Hezbollah? Even After Three Tries, the New York Times Is Stumped

Ira Stoll

The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

How many tries, by how many reporters, will it take the New York Times to explain accurately what Hezbollah is?

The newspaper has been fumbling and bumbling its way toward an answer in a way that illuminates some of the challenges the Times has faced in covering the wars of Iranian aggression.

Our story begins in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. “What Is Hezbollah, the Group That Poses a Threat to Israel From the North?” a Times article published on Oct. 19 tried to explain. That article, by a Beirut-based British freelancer for the Times, Euan Ward, and a staff writer for the New York Times magazine, Nicholas Casey, did not use the word “terrorist” or describe the US government’s designation of Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization. Instead the newspaper described the group as having “an expansive security apparatus and social services network.”

Then the Times Cairo bureau chief, Vivian Yee, took a fresh attempt at answering the question, for a piece published on Sept. 17, 2024. That article appeared under the headline, “A Look at Hezbollah and What a Wider War Would Mean for Lebanon.” What a wider war would mean “for Lebanon” seems a somewhat narrow framework for analysis in a war with wide international consequences on everything from oil prices to the US-Iran conflict and the American presidential election. For our purposes, though, the Yee piece was a modest improvement over the October 2023 Times effort. This time around, at least, the Times acknowledged that Hezbollah is “considered a terrorist group by the United States and other countries.” It also noted that “many Lebanese see the group as an obstacle to progress that keeps threatening to drag the country into an unwanted war” and that the group uses “authoritarian tactics” to “quell any dissent.”

Perhaps concern about those “authoritarian tactics” helps to explain why the Beirut-based Ward was reticent about using the term “terrorist.”

On Sept. 18, 2024, the Times tried yet again, with a piece by an Israeli-born reporter fluent in Hebrew, Ephrat Livni. That one appeared under the “Jeopardy”-game-show-style headline “What Is Hezbollah, the Militant Group Based in Lebanon?”

Livni’s article calls the group an “Iran-backed militia — which the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization decades ago.” The “decades ago” makes it sound like Hezbollah’s terrorism is a thing of the past rather than an ongoing problem. Later, the Times offers some more detail: “Hezbollah was involved in the suicide bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, drawing the enmity of the United States. The United States designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 1997, and has long sanctioned people and companies with ties to the group to try to cut off its funding.”

Livni’s piece also credits Neil MacFarquhar and Ben Hubbard as having “contributed reporting,” bringing to a whopping six the grand total of Times journalists — Ward, Casey, Yee, Livni, MacFarquhar, Hubbard — mustered into action to attempt to answer the “What is Hezbollah?” puzzler.

Even on the third try, even after having rustled up a half dozen bodies to tackle the issue, the Times can’t quite seem to get a grip on the facts of the situation.

Neither Yee’s article nor Livni’s, for example, makes any mention of Hezbollah having killed a dozen Druze, mostly children, in July 2024 in an attack on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in northern Israel.

Livni’s article, after a subhead asking “Why are Hezbollah and Israel fighting now?” reports, “Hezbollah’s military wing has been targeting northern Israel for nearly a year in solidarity with Hamas and its war with Israel in Gaza.” Yet the Hamas war with Israel hasn’t been only “in Gaza” but included rocket attacks and deadly raids into Israel. The same article describes Hezbollah as having been “formed in the 1980s from the chaos of Lebanon’s long civil war to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000.” The Lebanon civil war began not to fight the Israeli occupation but rather Palestinian domination. The Council on Foreign Relations explains, “Hezbollah emerged during Lebanon’s civil war, which broke out in 1975 when long-simmering discontent over the large, armed Palestinian presence in the country reached a boiling point.” The Times, because of its anti-Israel tilt, can’t bring itself to talk about armed Palestinians in Lebanon. Instead it has to frame everything as a response to Israeli “occupation,” even if that’s inaccurate.

The idea that Hezbollah is mainly a response to “the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon” or to the Hamas “war with Israel in Gaza” is a misunderstanding. Like revolutionary Iran, Hezbollah has a goal of imposing its version of militant Islam worldwide and wiping Israel off the map. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has stated that if Jews “all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world-wide.”

Maybe by the fourth or fifth or sixth try, the Times might work its way up to including that Nasrallah quotation in its explanation to its readers of what Hezbollah is. Maybe the seventh or eighth or ninth Times reporter assigned to the job will figure it out. Until then, readers will be better off looking elsewhere, to more trustworthy sources than the Times, for an explanation of the terrorist organization and its goals.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

Ambasador Czech wyjaśnia dlaczego jego kraj nie może poprzeć rezolucji Zgromadzenia Ogólnego ONZ. (Zrzut z ekranu)

Rezolucja parowóz dziejów, chwała jej maszynistom

Andrzej Koraszewski

Why the reactions to Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah matter

Jonathan S. Tobin

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Israeli soldiers evacuate wounded people who was severely injured when a missile fired from Lebanon hit the Ramim Cliff area, near the Israeli border with Lebanon, on Sept. 19, 2024. Photo by Ayal Margolin/Flash90.

It was the covert operation that inspired thousands of Internet memes. The simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers in the possession of Hezbollah operatives followed a day later by a similar mass explosion of terrorist walkie-talkies was the top story across the world this week.

The strikes on Hezbollah leadership that occurred a few days later might have been just as important in seeking to cripple the terrorists’ ability to continue its ongoing missile strikes on northern Israel and possible threats of a possible land attack on the Jewish state. Nevertheless, the attack on members of the organization (and its associated sponsors and string-pullers, like the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who reportedly also had a Hezbollah beeper and lost an eye when it blew up) carrying around those relics of 1980s technology triggered both the imagination and the indignation of international opinion.

We can’t know for sure just how much damage Israel has done to Hezbollah’s morale, let alone its capabilities to inflict terror and pain on Israelis as well as Lebanese citizens. There may be some truth to what the doomsayers among New York Times analysts and Israeli left-wingers who claimed that any harm would be superficial and transitory.

More important was the angry reaction inspired among many Western liberals who denounced the attacks because they don’t believe in Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorists and because they no longer believe that any Western nation has the right to fight even the most just wars.

Not an ‘escalation’

The claim that this was an Israeli “escalation” is entirely untrue since it is Hezbollah that initiated the current round of strife. No matter how many terrorists were killed, maimed or wounded in the strikes, the Iranian proxy shows no sign of halting its firing on not just northern Israel but now other areas since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas in the south. Hezbollah’s rockets have essentially depopulated Israeli communities along the country’s northern border, turning tens of thousands of its citizens into evacuees holing up in hotels in the center of the country alongside those who were similarly affected by the assault on southern Israel.

No spy caper—no matter how ingenious or expertly targeted to harm as few innocents as possible—means much if it doesn’t contribute to Israel’s strategic goal: pushing Hezbollah forces away from its border and ensuring safety to the north. It may be, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has recently hinted, that this objective may only be achieved by a cross-border offensive involving the use of land forces.

But there is no avoiding the fact that the enormous attention devoted to what analyst Michael Doran satirically called “Operation Grim Beeper” told us not only about the role that Jews and Israel still play in the Western imagination but also about what a great many people in the West now think about armed conflict.

‘Magical’ Jews

One side of this reaction is not entirely bad. As much as the still-powerful myth about Jewish power is at the heart of antisemitism, the belief in what might be termed the “magical Jew” who is smarter and more resourceful than other people sometimes works to benefit Jews.

Britain’s 1917 decision to issue the Balfour Declaration in favor of the creation of a Jewish National Home, which gave Zionism a crucial boost at a critical time, is often ascribed to the philo-Semitsm as well as the belief of several British statesmen, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s in the authority of the Bible, which has a thing or two to say about to whom the land of Israel belongs. More important was their misplaced belief in the unchecked power of the Jews (whom they were persuaded would be won over to the Allied cause by the declaration) to ensure that the United States stayed close to British objectives and to keep Russia an active participant in World War I, something that was far beyond the capabilities of either Jewish community.

Yet the heart of the deterrent power of Israel’s defense and intelligence forces is the fact that many of the Jewish state’s enemies see it as a mighty power that can’t be beaten.

This reputation has been honestly earned by Israel’s many military victories and intelligence coups over the decades. The latter, in which technology masterminds working inside Israel’s Mossad has dispatched with ingenious methods a long list of those working to harm Jews—Arab terrorists, German scientists working in Arab countries to produce weapons of mass destruction, those involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and, in recent years, Iranians working on building the Islamist regime’s nuclear program—are already well-documented.

This sense of their own invincibility has sometimes also worked against Israelis. The tragic errors made by its intelligence establishment before Oct. 7 showed the price of such hubris. The same geniuses that helped pull off the exploding beepers this week were members of the organization that failed so badly to prevent the largest mass slaughter of Jews since World War II and the Holocaust.

The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies (employed only because Hezbollah was already convinced that modern means of communication involving cell phones and the Internet were inevitably going to be compromised by the Israelis) will join that list. But as with every Israeli achievement, including the innumerable technological and medical innovations produced by that tiny country’s scientists, tech specialists and engineers that have inspired great praise (and made Jews everywhere proud of what their people have done), it will also inspire more harmful conspiracy theories that contribute to hatred for Jews. This proves again that although times and circumstances changed, the Jews remain the primary boogeymen of Western thought.

Along with those more traditional tropes of antisemitism, the reactions to what we all must presume (though Hezbollah and Iran have many enemies, such as the United States, which currently lacks the will to strike them and many others who don’t have the capability) was an Israeli operation, the moral disdain it aroused among some needs to be understood and put in context.

The attack provoked condemnation from among supposedly high-minded people who labeled the scheme a “terrorist” attack or claimed that it violated international law—as did Human Rights Watch, a group that has time and again been exposed for its bias against Israel and antisemitism. As predictably negative articles published by NPR and The Intercept noted, so-called experts from the United Nations agreed. Other entities irredeemably committed to undermining Israel’s right to exist and defend itself decried that the exploding devices were evidence of a massive “war crime.”

An Israeli tank during military training in the Golan Heights on April 19, 2024. Photo by Michael Giladi/Flash90.

Is it acceptable to laugh at the situation?

Even more insufferable was the moral opprobrium directed at the many Israelis and people everywhere, Jew and non-Jew alike, who found humor in the misfortune of the terrorists, as was made clear in a tsunami of jokes and memes about their stupidity as well as the grievous injuries suffered by many of them.

Let’s specify that many of these jibes were not in the best of taste. Maybe all of them were tasteless. The notion that we should in some ways recognize the common humanity we share with members of Hezbollah or that we are obligated by our own faiths to grieve with our enemies, even as we resist them, is well grounded in Jewish as well as Christian traditions.

After all, one of the highlights of a Passover seder is the ritual of removing drops of wine from our cups at the mention of each of the plagues sent by God to punish the Egyptians for their enslavement of the Jews. Moses’ own sister, Miriam, was punished for celebrating the deaths of the Egyptians who drowned when the Red Sea reconstituted itself after letting the escaped slaves pass.

But dipping our fingers in a wine cup is easy enough when trying to atavistically recall an event that happened more than 3,000 years ago. Israelis have been living with the trauma of Oct. 7 for the past year and decades of terrorism before that. Jews elsewhere are facing a surge in antisemitism the likes of which have not been experienced in the living memory of most people. We are all only human and are entitled to take some satisfaction when those dedicated to murdering Israelis, Americans and other Diaspora Jewish communities encounter some misfortune.

This is not dissimilar to reactions to the deaths of Nazis in the past, even though as many as a million or more German civilians were killed in both Allied bombings and the invasions of Germany needed to overthrow Adolf Hitler’s regime. When human beings engage in mass murder, as members of Hezbollah have repeatedly done, they forfeit the right to sympathy when reaping the whirlwind they have sown. Anyone who disagrees with that has lost their moral compass.

Although the deaths of any innocent civilian is a tragedy, there is no other example that I am aware of such a mass-targeted killing of terrorists that was so clearly crafted to avoid such casualties. In the past year, Israel has often been falsely accused of making no effort to spare civilians, even though they do more than any nation in that respect. But when it does something that is so transparently directed only at terrorists—who else would have a Hezbollah pager?—it is still attacked with the same unfairness charge. As in so many other ways, this proves again that Israel is assaulted verbally, legally and physically not so much for what it does but for what it is.

Israel can do nothing right

At the root of this the same belief in Israel’s illegitimacy as a “settler/colonialist” and “apartheid” state that motivates the mobs who have marched in the streets of American cities and on college campuses in support of Hamas’s efforts to purge Jews “from the river to the sea.”

To such people, there is nothing that Israelis could do to defend itself under any circumstance that would be justified. And, as they have also shown, there is nothing that those who wish to eradicate Israeli—even the genocidal Islamists of Hamas who perpetrated an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7—can do that can’t be characterized as an act of justified “resistance” against “settlers” and “white” oppressors.

Just as important as that is the way the attack on Israel’s efforts to stop Hezbollah tells us about the way many in the West have lost any belief that there is such a thing as a just war.

The immediate reaction to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, reminded the overwhelming majority of Americans that there were times when you had to fight to defend yourself and your country. That was a matter of consensus among the generation that fought in World War II but had gone out of fashion in the Vietnam War era. Amid the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed 9/11, it is once again being attacked by the left.

Some wars are just

That sense that there is nothing worth fighting or dying for has been compounded by the success of the left’s long march through our institutions in recent years as a generation of American students were indoctrinated in the toxic neo-Marxist myths about critical race theory and intersectionality. This is not just a war against America and its history but against Western civilization itself. By this means, many Americans have been intellectually disarmed against threats to their values and their nation. Along with it comes a belief that “white” Westerners are, like Israelis, inherently illegitimate and should not resist those who label themselves (as does Hezbollah) as members of a class of victims who seek to do them harm and topple their civilization.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, one liberal intellectual who had protested America’s involvement in that conflict sought to map out a way to think about war that would be free of mindless pacifism, in addition to chauvinism and war fever. His 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars, is a classic that has withstood the test of time and bears revisiting. It teaches that while unnecessary and aggressive wars are unjust, those waged to defend against murderous regimes and those who seek to victimize the powerless are just. Most of all, a war waged to defend a nation’s existence is fully defensible and should be supported by anyone with a set of moral values.

But many contemporary Western liberals have either forgotten that or have embraced anti-Western and Marxist ideology that would render even the most obviously moral wars, such as those waged against Hitler’s regime and the perpetrators of Oct. 7, as somehow immoral. In this way, they are prepared to condemn Israel’s exploding beepers that are clearly aimed at killing only terrorists as much as they do anything to prevent Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and their Iranian paymasters from continuing to inflict suffering on Israel and the West. In their worldview, the terrorists should be protected from attack, and their Israeli and Western victims deserve none.

The issue this week isn’t so much whether it’s OK to laugh at the predicament of terrorists who have had the tables turned on them. It’s whether it’s ever right for Israelis or any citizen of a Western country to defend themselves against murderers with blood on their hands, and who wish to create more mayhem and death. Ethical people understand that there is only one answer to that question. The anger directed at Israel is because they have once again shown that they are prepared to try to make the killers pay for their crimes.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.