En route to Beirut? Ruthie Blum
https://www.jns.org/en-route-to-beirut/
When 12 kids were slaughtered Saturday in the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams by an Iranian missile supplied to Hezbollah, Israelis were horrified but not surprised. Given the incessant bombardment of northern Israel—leading to the evacuation months ago of hundreds of families from their homes—mass murder was just a matter of time.
That’s what happens with a policy of containment—a key element of the very “conceptzia” that enabled Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. If an enemy assault fails to be as deadly as it could have been, Israel doesn’t treat it with the response it deserves. Instead, it prides itself on preventing more casualties thanks to Iron Dome defenses and public obedience to Home Front Command directives.
These include: informing us of how many seconds we have to enter a bomb shelter or safe room when an air-raid siren goes off; instructing us to exit and clear away from our cars when caught by an alarm while driving on the highway, then lie on the asphalt with our hands on our heads; warning us not to photograph interceptions, which can result in injury from falling shrapnel; admonishing us to lock our doors, turn out our lights and close our shutters at the first sign of a potential terrorist invasion; and assuring us that we’ll be the first to know if we need to stock up on supplies ahead of a greater, less temporary threat.
It’s no wonder, then, that our military is called the Israel Defense Forces. Considering the fact that we are surrounded by foes both bent on our destruction and equipped by Tehran to carry it out, one would have thought it appropriate to replace the word “defense” with “offense.”
But no. The IDF boasts of being the most moral army in the world, with a code of ethics fit for local and international kangaroo courtrooms, not soldiers risking their lives to protect the country.
Though it was crafted by Asa Kasher, a far-left activist working to topple the government and undermine Israeli efforts at victory over Hamas in Gaza, it’s still touted as a holy guide, rather than tossed in the trash where it belongs.
Another part of the “conceptzia” that hasn’t been discarded despite the Oct. 7 atrocities is the principle of “legitimacy.” Rather than responding to every rocket launch as though it had succeeded in its aim of mass murder, the government and IDF top brass treat each failed attempt as a statistic—a number added to the spreadsheet of projectiles emanating from one of the many entities in the region working to wipe Israel off the map.
The most egregious example was on April 14. Since the Iranian launch of hundreds of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles left only a seven-year-old Bedouin-Israeli girl injured and caused minor damage to two Israeli airbases, Israel and the “coalition” of countries that assisted it in intercepting the bulk of the projectiles left it at that.
Any time Jerusalem is challenged about this overly cautious policy, its answer is always the same: that Israel wouldn’t be given the “legitimacy” from Washington, New York or Brussels to preempt, or even retaliate, with what the Biden administration, the United Nations and the European Union consider “disproportionate force.”
There’s no doubt that this is true. Yet, as we have witnessed, neither Oct. 7 nor July 27 (the day that kids playing soccer were obliterated) provided world justification for an Israeli blitz of the kind required for deterrence.
On the contrary, the greater the care the IDF takes to prevent civilian deaths, the worse the attitude toward the Jewish state becomes and the higher the antisemitism in the world rises.
Furthermore, tough Israeli actions don’t incur as much wrath as one might expect. Take the Israeli Air Force strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen last weekend, for instance. Following the drone attack in Tel Aviv the previous day by the Iran-backed terrorist group, which killed an Israeli civilian and wounded some others, the IAF hit the port city of Hodeidah.
This wasn’t the first act of Houthi aggression over the past few months. But the others hadn’t succeeded in spilling blood.
The reaction to the havoc wreaked in Hodeidah was pretty mild. In fact, it’s barely been mentioned, other than by those assessing that it was a signal to Tehran about Israeli capabilities.
Nevertheless, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari felt the need to report on the operation by referring to it as “necessary and proportionate,” and “carried out in order to stop and repel the Houthis’ terror attacks after nine months of continuous aerial attacks aimed at Israeli territory.”
The supplicant position is really wearing thin. But the above was nothing compared to Hagari’s little briefing at the site of the Majdal Shams soccer field in the immediate aftermath of the child killings.
“We didn’t know that Hezbollah was planning to fire here; we didn’t have intelligence about it,” he said. “No one thought that a murderous terrorist organization would fire at a football field where boys and girls were hanging out. No one imagined such a thing.”
Israelis of all stripes were outraged by the remarks. The next morning, Hagari clarified that what he had meant to do was “illustrate the cruelty of the murderous terrorist organization Hezbollah.”
Israel’s Security Cabinet on Sunday night authorized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to “to decide on the manner and timing of the response” to the Majdal Shams massacre. Let’s hope that they’re fast and furious.
Beirut must pay for Hezbollah aggression. Unless Lebanon is held accountable, Israelis won’t be willing or able to return to their homes in the north. Avoiding a full-scale war makes a mockery of “red lines,” relegating them to the language of coloring books.
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