Published in the Jerusalem Post, 21 October 2024
Bombarded by missiles from its foes and advice
from its friends, Israel has learned to stand firm against both. Of the
two, well-meaning advice, easy to promulgate from the safety of the US, the UK
and the capitals of Europe, is the more insidious.
After all, Israel’s anti-ballistic missile
systems, though not one hundred per cent effective, do offer the nation a fair
degree of protection. But apparently humane and virtuous calls to “react
proportionately”, “negotiate a ceasefire” and “stop firing in
civilian areas” put Israel in the dock in the eyes of the world, charged
with over-stepping the mark.
The elimination of Yahya
Sinwar on October 17 has, if anything, accelerated the process. Already
US president Joe Biden, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and figures like
UK prime minister Keir Starmer are calling for what amounts to a unilateral
Israeli ceasefire, together with an unenforceable demand that Hamas release the
remaining hostages. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to
Sinwar’s death was “the war is not over”.
The purveyors of
well-intentioned advice to Israel seem to ignore the oft-stated intention of
Iran and its satellites in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq to eliminate
the Jewish state and its people. Israel’s friends often appear to
discount the fact that the nation has been fighting for its very existence from
the moment it was established, and that the fight is far from won. And
they either fail to appreciate, or simply do not believe, that Iran has the
West and its democratic way of life in its sights just as much as Israel, and
that in battling the Iranian octopus Israel is fighting for the West as much as
for its own continued existence.
This lack of perspective has marked much of
Biden’s reaction to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Middle
East. Biden had grown increasingly frustrated as
Netanyahu appeared to brush off his advice and reject his attempts at
reducing the prospect of escalation. Until October 9, when a phone call was arranged between him and
Netanyahu, the two leaders had not spoken for 49 days.
Word is that Biden was angered at Israel’s
failure to provide advance warning of either the exploding pager operation (for
which Israel has never claimed responsibility), or the assassination of
Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. On October 1,
2024, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli targets,
and Biden was determined not to be left in the dark about how Netanyahu planned
to respond – hence their 30-minute telephone conversation.
Washington has remained
tight-lipped about what they said to each other. Vice President Kamala Harris
joined the call, but in a TV interview afterwards refused to provide any
details, describing it as “classified”. The most she would say was “It
was an important call.”
One visitor to the
White House at the time of the conversation was Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris,
in Washington to mark 100 years of US-Ireland diplomatic ties.
He told
reporters that Biden “left me in no doubt” that his call with Netanyahu was “a
conversation of substance and of depth, in terms of actions that Israel needs
to take, in terms of aid, humanitarian aid, in terms of bringing about a
ceasefire,” presumably in Gaza.
Reported by CNN, “actions that Israel needs to take” is a direct quote by
Harris, and it betrays the mindset of those who regard Israel as an ally but
fail to appreciate that Israel’s best interests as perceived from Washington or
London are different, sometimes radically so, from the view from
Jerusalem. A valid question is, who is better able to assess Israel’s
best interests – well-meaning friends or Israel itself?
On October 8 the journal
Commentary turned the issue of Biden’s frustration with Israel on its
head. His problem, the magazine pointed
out, was not Israel’s defiance. It was Iran’s .
Israel resisted going
into Gaza, it said, until Hamas got tired of waiting and invaded Israel
instead. Nor did Israel go into Lebanon until, by way of Hezbollah’s missile
campaign, Iran made clear that it would be the only way to return displaced
Israelis to their homes in the north. Iran-backed
attacks, the journal said, have continued also from Iraq and Yemen, as well as
from Iran itself.
“Nobody has been asking
Biden or Harris why the Iranians don’t listen to them,” the journal commented,
going on to observe that Qatar doesn’t follow US advice, nor does Egypt, Turkey
or the Palestinian Authority. We only seem to ask about US
influence, says Commentary, in connection with “the one country under
assault and surrounded by genocidal enemies: Israel.”
On October 15 news broke
of a letter from Washington, dated two days previously, stating that if Israel did not significantly
increase humanitarian aid to Gaza within the following thirty days, some
unpleasant, though unspecified, action would follow. The thirty days encompass the date of the
forthcoming US presidential election, and whether the letter is in any way
related to that momentous event is anybody’s guess.
The
prestigious British journal The Spectator carried an article on October
4 headlined: “”Why Israel was right to ignore international advice”. It begins by setting down the picture of
recent evens in the Middle East as purveyed to the UK public.
“If you follow most of the British media,” says the author,
Douglas Murray, “you may well think that the past year involves the following
events: Israel attacked Hamas, Israel invaded Lebanon, Israel bombed
Yemen. Oh and someone left a bomb in a room in Tehran that killed the peaceful
Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh.
“Of course,” he
continues, “all this is an absolute inversion of the truth. Hamas invaded
Israel, so Israel attacked Hamas. Hezbollah has spent the past year sending
thousands of rockets into Israel, so Israel has responded by destroying
Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen — now so beloved of demonstrators in the UK —
sent missiles and drones hundreds of miles to attack Israel, so Israel bombed
the Houthis’ arms stores in Yemen. And Hamas leader Haniyeh…never brought the
Palestinian people anything but misery.”
As Murray observes: “ All
this time the governments in Britain and America have given the Israelis advice
which mercifully they did not listen to. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris
warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Hamas’s Gaza stronghold in Rafah. Fortunately the Israelis did not listen to
Kamala’s beginners’ guide to Rafah. They went into the Hamas stronghold,
continued to search for the hostages, continued to kill Hamas’s leadership and
continued to destroy the rocket and other ammunition stores that Hamas has
built up for 18 years.”
The nub of Murray’s
argument is: “The wisdom of the international community is that ceasefires are
always desirable, that negotiated settlements are always to be desired, and
that violence is never the answer. As so often, these wise international voices
have no idea what they are talking about.
Israel’s enemies have spent the past year trying to destroy it, as they
have so many times before. But it is they who have gone to the dust, with the
regime in Tehran the only thing that is, for the time being, still standing…Sometimes
you need war to make peace. Sometimes there is a price to pay for trying to
finish the work of Adolf Hitler.”
Published in the Jerusalem Post, and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "Why Israel ignores international advice and focuses on its survival", 21 Oct 2024https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-825363
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