Why Israel was right to ignore international advice

There are sources in the Jewish tradition that warn against exultation at the downfall of one’s enemies. But I am not Jewish, and so I have exulted greatly these past two weeks.

If you follow most of the British media, 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 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, who was born under Egyptian rule and died in Tehran, never brought the Palestinian people anything but misery.

On October 7 last year Israel was surprised by a brigade-sized invasion of terrorists into its territory. These terrorists raped, murdered and burned their way as far inside Israel as they could get. How this intelligence and military failure was possible is something that Israelis still have to work out. But the first answer is because they face a fanatical, ideological opponent which wants to destroy them. Hezbollah joined in the action on October 8. All these attacks were funded and orchestrated by the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which as I write this is sending hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel from Iran — strikes that have so far proved a failure.

Hamas still holds a hundred Israelis hostage inside Gaza, but the Israeli government has managed to bring half the hostages home already. For many people in the first days of the war, it seemed impossible that even one hostage would be able to come back to their families alive. So this is no mean feat in itself. Aside from saving the hostages, the other most important thing for Israel has been to strike and destroy the proxy armies of Iran who wish to make the whole of Israel unlivable for Jews.

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. As she wisely said: “I’ve studied the maps.” 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.

Next came the complete destruction of Hezbollah, which has the blood of hundreds of Americans and other nationals on its hands, as well as that of Israelis. Not to mention the fact that this foreign army of Iran has immiserated Lebanon for 40 years. The Christians of that country have dwindled to a minority as these Shiite fundamentalists have taken a once thriving country and turned it into yet another ayatollah-dominated hellhole.

Then, in a series of attacks which historians are already studying, everything went kaboom for Hezbollah. First thousands of its operatives were targeted all over Lebanon and Syria. Having decided that phones were not a safe means of communication, the terrorists had recently reverted to pagers, but someone managed to get into the supply chain, put a small amount of explosive in every Hezbollah device and then blew the balls off the people who were hoping to destroy their neighbors. Then Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies also suddenly detonated. Much of Hezbollah’s leadership — including those involved in the killing of 241 American marines in their barracks in Beirut in 1983 — met up in person to discuss all this, during which they too were killed in a strike.

The British and American governments among others had told the Israelis that there should be no escalation. But fortunately they weren’t listened to. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had gone to New York to address the various despots and kleptocrats on First Avenue; so the ultimate leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, thought that this would be a safe moment to get together with the few remaining members of his organization. Before going on stage in New York and observing the traditional walkout of “diplomats,” Netanyahu ordered the final strike. While he was up there, Hassan Nasrallah went to meet his maker.

By this point, there is nobody left in Hezbollah. They’re all gone. All of the leadership, every one of their commanders, while their lower-level operatives are trying to get their testicles reattached in the hospitals of Beirut. It’ll be wall-to-wall wreath-laying for the Hamas and Hezbollah fanboys.

But there it 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. Absent that terror regime, and not just Israel but the whole of the Middle East has a bright future. Sometimes you need war to make peace. Sometimes there is a price to pay for trying to finish the work of Adolf Hitler. Who knew?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.