Israel has the right to win
Not a right to defend itself. A right to win.
“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Kamala told CNN. And then insisted that the “war must end.”
What she was really saying was that Israel doesn’t have a right to win.
Democrats and some Republicans have offered the same formulaic responses since Oct. 7.
And long before that.
“Israel has a right to defend itself from
rocket attacks,” Obama said in 2014 before calling for a ceasefire.
Israel has a right to defend itself, Bush and Clinton used to say before
urging a quick end to the fighting in order to make a deal with the
terrorists Israel is defending itself against.
The right to self-defense is the bare
minimum allotted to anyone. Everyone has a right to defend themselves
when they are attacked. Agreeing to it is not a pro-Israel statement. It
is at best a neutral position to which the alternative position is that
the Israelis should have allowed themselves to be overrun, destroyed
and massacred, men, women and children, on Oct. 7.
Anything less than the assertion that
Israel has a right to defend itself is a declaration that it deserves to
be destroyed. And that is the state of the debate within the Democratic
Party.
On one side are the supporters of a
two-state solution, who want to split Israel between the Jews and the
Islamic terrorists. Every time the terrorists invade and kill Jews, the
Israeli army would have the right to briefly defend the country before
the politicians make a new deal with the terrorists. On the other side
are the one-state solution backers, who don’t believe Israel has a right
to exist and therefore no right to defend itself. These people support
the Islamic terrorists who call themselves “Palestinians” in their quest
to destroy it by any means, from BDS to genocide.
The “extremists” want Israel gone now
while the “moderates” want Israel to keep making deals with terrorists
until it ceases to exist. Along the way it’ll have plenty of chances to
defend itself on a diminishing amount of territory using static defenses
that the enemy will plot to subvert.
Israel does not need a right to defend itself. It needs a right to win.
The right to defend yourself is the right
to be penned up in a ghetto while murderers roam outside. It’s the right
to spend billions of dollars on elaborate defenses like the Gaza border
wall or Iron Dome that, like any alarm system or wall, only work until
the terrorists find a way around them. It’s the right to be constantly
hunted, to be always on the defensive and always afraid.
That’s no right at all.
The Nazis were not defeated with the right
of defense, but the right of offense. Wars don’t end when the invaded
are given a right to fight for a few weeks before calling it a draw.
Wars end when one side actually has the power to do more than defend
itself. To fight back and win.
When Netanyahu spoke to Congress about
“total victory,” the political establishment ridiculed and dismissed the
prospect of defeating Hamas, instead arguing in favor of a deal with
the terrorist group. That deal, known as a “ceasefire” after the cycle
of ceasefires with Hamas initiated by Obama, would allow the genocidal
Muslim Brotherhood jihadists to regroup, rearm and attack again.
“In some respects, we are struggling over
what the theory of victory is. Sometimes when we listen closely to
Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of… a sweeping victory
on the battlefield, total victory,” Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State
Kurt Campbell told a NATO summit. “I don’t think we believe that that is
likely or possible.”
The Biden administration and NATO leaders
did not display this sort of skepticism towards Zelensky’s promises of
victory against Russia. When the Ukrainian leader recently promised to
present a “victory plan” to the Biden administration, the move was met
with applause.
The Biden-Harris administration and the
European Union believe that Ukraine has the right to win while Israel
only has the right to defend itself. That is the fundamental difference
between the treatment of Ukraine and Israel, and the treatment of their
two wars.
Ukraine’s demands for bigger and deadlier
weapons systems, including tanks and jets, were swiftly met even while
the Biden-Harris administration cut off or “slow walked” more basic
weapons deliveries to Israel to force it to slow down offensive
operations, including in Rafah. Those pressure campaigns allowed Hamas
to hold on to and murder captured hostages.
That’s what the “right to win” looks like as opposed to the paltry “right to defend itself.”
Every time Ukraine pushed further or
opened a new front in the war, including going into Russia, there was
applause, rather than warnings about “escalation.” But every phase of
Israel’s military campaign, including the push into Rafah where the
hostages and tunnels were, was marked by pressure campaigns and warnings
about the danger of “escalation” in the Middle East.
Ukraine attacking a nuclear world power isn’t “escalation,” Israel taking out a Hamas leader is.
The political establishment believes that
Ukraine has the right to do more than just throw back invading armies,
but believes that Israel’s rights are limited to defending and
maintaining its 1948 borders, that it must surrender of all its Six-Day
War borders, including half of Jerusalem, to Islamic terrorists and then
promise them everything else they ask for to end the fighting.
And when the terrorists attack anyway,
Israel will have the “right to defend itself” for a week or two. Then
it’ll be time for another “ceasefire,” more negotiations and more
surrenders.
Kamala and the political establishment are
wrong. Israel does not have a “right to defend itself,” it has a right
and a duty to go on the offensive and win. It has a right and a duty to
utterly defeat and destroy every single Islamic terrorist organization
at war with it. It has a right and a duty to secure whatever territory
the terrorists were using for their operations, including the
Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, through which massive
amounts of weapons were delivered to Hamas.
That’s the least of what winning means.
In 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israel undertook
to win. In those first three decades, it won and emerged stronger for
it. In the next terrible four decades, it lost land, ambition and safety
in a failed search for a peace that could never come on any terms other
than its own strength.
Defense was traded for offense. Conflicts
were to be managed. A weakening deterrence would reduce the scope of any
individual exchange of fire. The United States and the Europeans would
offer “guarantees” in exchange for a perpetual process of peace
negotiations and war.
That was Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
On Oct. 7, Israel hit bottom. The cost of
peace at any price was no longer just the ethnic cleansing of Jews from
Gaza, rockets falling on major cities or a worldwide campaign of
demonization by its “peace partners,” but a new invasion of Israel. Out
of that horror rises a single fundamental question: Will Israel remain
on the defensive or will it fight to win.
The right to defend itself is Israel’s slow suicide. Survival rests on the right to win.
https://www.jns.org/israel-has-the-right-to-win/?
