|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
Ordeal
After the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021.
The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office.
Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as American and European pundits, claimed that the laxity of the Netanyahu government was entirely to blame for the grotesque massacre of October 7.
Indeed, last fall, there arose almost a competition of critics to assert all the ways in which Netanyahu was played by Hamas.
Accordingly, Netanyahu’s sweeping Supreme Court reforms had supposedly needlessly split the country, demoralizing the military and eroding Israeli deterrence in the eyes of Palestinian terrorists. Or his purported strategy of playing off the more lethal and toxic Hamas against the Palestinian Authority was supposedly proof of his reckless naivete.
Still, other opponents argued that his 16 years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and his age of 75 made him a Joe Biden-like relic of the past, simply too old and too familiar to be any longer effective. He was told it was well past time to step down and let a new generation break out of the old toxic Middle East mindsets.
And indeed, after October 7, Netanyahu faced a bleak regional and global landscape—analogous to what a 65-year-old Churchill faced in June 1940 when all of Western Europe was in the hands of the Nazis and a lonely Britain was without a single wartime ally—with a sympathetic America still hesitant to commit to ensuring its existence.
Massive immigration from the Middle East into Europe and the United States—spiked by hundreds of thousands of oil-subsidized foreign students in Western universities, coupled with the post-George Floyd woke/DEI hysterias—had made European and American political parties unapologetically not just anti-Israel but now increasingly anti-Semitic as well.
Western governments at times seemed far more terrified of their own Muslim citizens, foreign residents, radicalized students, and left-wing activists of their political parties than they were of any terrorist threats emanating from Iran and its surrogates.
So, a shared sense of resignation, if not despair, had swept the West and, in part, Israel too. Armchair strategists and retired generals opined nonstop how it would be virtually impossible to root out Hamas from its vast subterranean labyrinths—given its armories and headquarters were buried deep below Gazan hospitals, schools, and mosques.
The West all but accepted Hamas propaganda that it was more immoral to root out Hamas murderers hiding beneath hospitals than it was for them to murder and then flee beneath them.
Hamas’s own leaders were in no mood to negotiate a return of the hostages. They felt the more collateral damage their own fellow Gazans suffered, the more CNN-fed propaganda about Israeli “atrocities” and “genocide” would neuter the Netanyahu government. Hamas sensed Palestinians were to be the media’s new Ukrainians—fellow underdogs deserving Western support.
The old friendship days of Donald Trump—the Abraham Accords, the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the institutionalization of an Israeli Golan Heights, the withdrawal from the Iran Deal, the crippling oil sanctions on Tehran, and the terrorist designation of the Houthis—were long gone.
In their place emerged the most anti-Israeli American government in memory. Biden-Harris soon put arms holds on Israel, hectored it to be proportionate in responding to some 500 projectiles launched by Iran against the Jewish homeland, and all but resonated the slurs of the left that Israel had become “genocidal.”
By spring 2024, we were further told that Israel could not finally defeat Hamas or remove its leadership from their tunnels. Moreover, Israel also faced 100,000, 125,000, or perhaps even 150,000 Hezbollah ballistic missiles and rockets—along with the full arsenal of Iranian rockets, missiles, and drones—that were ready at last to swarm and destroy Israeli defenses.
So, Israel was hopelessly trapped, we were told, in a brilliantly devilish Iranian “ring of fire.” Accordingly, Iranian appendages in the West Bank and Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon would wage an on-off again war of attrition against Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran would finalize the production of five or six nuclear bombs. Israel’s civilian and military manpower would be worn down and worn out on multiple fronts and its tourist trade would be destroyed.
The economy would be bled out, as its citizens were ostracized abroad and at home called up to military service. And its only patron, the once reliable U.S., now under the Biden-Harris administration, considered the Jewish state a near embarrassing election-year liability.
Such were the burdens that would supposedly crush Netanyahu as he was forced from office. These challenges would soon lead to a more “realistic” and compliant Israeli government that would stop the ground wars, not retaliate disproportionally against Hezbollah or Iran (“You got a win. Take the win” in the words of Joe Biden), and use the Biden administration as a neutral interlocutor to legitimize Hamas and thereby perhaps ransom the hostages for billions of dollars.
The more Israel knocked down incoming missiles, the more Biden urged them not to respond proportionally, as if to punish Israel for its competence and reward Iran for its ineptitude.
Indeed, not since the infamous days of the 1950s, when the CIA overthrew Latin American regimes, had America so brazenly interfered in the internal politics of a foreign nation as it now overtly sought to replace or undermine the Netanyahu government—by strategic leaks of shared classified information, slow-walking and suspending arms, threats of holding back financial aid, opening back-channel relations with its political opponents, and by nonstop loud jawboning.
Triumph
Yet here we are in autumn 2024, a year after October 7, with Hamas’s leadership virtually liquidated. Its terrorist brigades are decimated and increasingly scattered, and its own battered constituencies now angry that they are suffering the consequences of a self-interested—and, worst of all, losing—Hamas elite.
Hezbollah has launched some 9,000 rockets since October 7. It has made the Lebanese-Israeli border a no-man’s land. Some 80,000 Israelis were forced from their homes. Hezbollah violated all the UN peace accords and used UN deployments as virtual shields. Middle East experts assumed that Hamas were amateur killers compared to Nasrallah’s dreaded Hezbollah—the SS of Middle Eastern terrorist brigades.
Supposedly, its hardened killers, some 100,000 strong, could at any time trump the wickedness and medieval savagery of Hamas by sending at will far deadlier hit teams into northern Israel to repeat the massacres of October 7.
And what of Iran itself, the hub to the spokes of such terrorism?
We were told that it would soon become nuclear and might strike against the proverbial “one-bomb” state. In the mullahs’ eyes, poor Israel was a divine gift to the theocracy of assembling half the world’s Jewry into one easy target.
Did not Iran export deadly drones and missiles to new staunch allies like Russia and China and develop missiles nearly comparable to any in the West?
And yet somehow an embattled Netanyahu, shunned by the Biden administration, demonized by the European Union, and smeared and slandered by the UN, saw opportunity where all others saw only doom.
He understood that the sheer depravity of October 7 gave Israel, at least for a brief window, the moral authority to wage all-out war on its enemies, terrorists whose reputations he sensed were exaggerated, and their leaders’ bloodcurdling threats thus mostly empty.
So, Israel systematically neutered Hamas, eliminating its leadership, destroying its tunnels, and warning civilians this time around to vacate buildings that served as armories, storehouses, and safe houses and thus would be leveled. And so they were.
As if out of some science fiction novel, years ago Israel booby trapped thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. And when they now finally exploded, they wounded or killed in a few seconds many of its ruling echelon while identifying the terrorists among the Lebanese population and revealing their strategic locations at the moments of their demise.
Netanyahu was told that reentering the Lebanese border was to revisit the graveyard of past failed Israeli incursions. And yet he did just that, though in measure, and thus half of the Hezbollah missile force is now reportedly gone. And with that, he pivoted to Iran.
Iran had sent 500 rockets, drones, and missiles into Israel, Israel heretofore launching a mere handful of missiles in response—until last week when the Israelis had apparently taken out much of the Iranian missile inventory and launch sites, as well as its anti-aircraft batteries.
So Israel without loss has finally retaliated against Iran in force, but in a geostrategically brilliant fashion that for now has taken few lives, avoided a regional war, and again put Iran in a nearly impossible strategic position—and all without further alienating an often hostile Biden administration.
If Iran does not match its murderous eliminationist rhetoric with a third strike, it will continue to lose face abroad and perhaps eventually even its governance at home. And yet Tehran realizes such humiliating quietude is the better of two bad choices, since Israel also gave it a way out, by killing few Iranians and sparing its oil and nuclear facilities.
Moreover, Netanyahu struck before the election. That sent a message that even if Harris were to be elected, neither she nor Biden in the next few months will veto Israeli strategic options. (And the strike also reminded American voters that the current administration turned a calm Middle East into an inferno). All that said, Israel responded again with restraint, which the Biden-Harris will eagerly claim was due to their own humanitarian pressure.
In sum, Netanyahu has changed the very image of his multifarious enemies—and indeed of the Middle East terrorist himself. The myth of a deadly and inviolate Iran is now shattered, replaced by a neurotic theocracy, its terrorist limbs amputated, its homeland defenseless, and its ultimate fate in the hands of a righteously angry Israel—with the specter of a possible President Donald Trump on the horizon who would end the dangerous American strategic nonsense of promoting a theocratic, anti-Western, Persian/Shiite/underdog as a foil to the moderate Arabs and Israel.
Likewise, exploding pagers and walkie-talkies not only decimated Hezbollah, but it also humiliated it—and made it the butt of macabre global jest.
Targeted assassinations changed the image of the fiery terrorist Iranian, Hezbollah, or Hamas leader, shaking his fist and shouting death to Israel and the West to assembled thousands, into a caricature of a craven and quivering bully—screaming from a reinforced bunker about the unfairness of being on the receiving end of what it has so boastfully for decades dished out.
Western media weekly posts wanted poster-like charts of Iranian, Hezbollah, and Hamas leadership, with x’s over the faces of the deceased. Now no sooner does a Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iranian terrorist implode than there are hushed assumptions that no one wishes to publicly identify as his replacement—and thus join him in eternity
The surreal aspect of the Netanyahu retaliatory tour is that he has done more to neutralize European and American enemies—with decades of Western blood on their hands—than NATO, the CIA, the FBI, and Interpol combined, and yet more often received rebuke rather than gratitude.
Excellent summary of a man who is the “Churchill” of Israel. Let us all hope that he finds eventual victory without the kind of appreciation from his own people, that Churchill was given after his victory
Netanyahu is Israel’s Churchill. Barack Hussein Osama is America’s Neville Chamberlain. Biden and Harris are mindless puppets and unfunny court jesters.
Wonderful comparisons!! However, I’d really like to make the obozo comparison a bit more modern and far more incompetent. (However, I was born in 1943 and have learned of Chamberlain indirectly….perhaps he was sufficiently incompetent to provide a good comparison with stinkpot obama.) Regardless, Steve, great job! Thanks.
You are too benevolent. Obama is the devil. A dangerous 2 faced antisemite, anti-American, anti-white, slimy liar with blood on his hands. The rest are following his lead.
God Bless Israel! And God Bless Netanyahu! May they persevere!
The political future of Mr. Netenyahu should be and will be decided by the people of Israel.
No one else.
And especially not Biden, Harris or any other American politician.
Netanyahu is a seasoned, well-educated man. Proportional is what the enemies of Israel salivate to when hearing this from Biden-Harris.
War is NOT EVER PROPORTIONAL…it’s WIN OR LOSE and by now, Netanyahu is very aware that ALL previous strategies of proportional responses led to Israel’s enemies becoming wealthier, and further determined to destroy the Jewish people starting with the genocidal invasion of the Israeli nation.
When one recognizes that the enemies surrounding it have ALWAYS meant what they said through their charters and their Islamic vitriol chanted across Middle Eastern media and brainwashed starting with their toddlers and school-age children, one either faces, with the greatest clarity the existential threat before them and takes one’s enemies by the throat cutting off all oxygen until they are dead…by all means necessary!
America’s now woke military rules of engagement are designed to lose and cause the unnecessary loss of soldiers’ lives. Maybe I missed it, have Bidden or Harris required only proportional responses from Zelensky in the Ukraine? We sure have sent billions and billions to them if they are only acting “proportionally”!!!
Am Yisrael exChai!
I have admired Netanyahu for a long time. I mean, if a person infuriates the political left they must be doing something right. However, his story since 10/7/2023 contains elements of victory against terrible odds, and also elements of redemption. Redemption makes for a powerful story.
The political establishment in Washington has been a gunning for him ever since Slick Willy blatantly interfered in the election in Israel in 1996 and because Netanyahu had the temerity to reject a “peace process” that meant exploding buses and restaurants, with suicide bombers amply rewarded by the “moderate” Palestinian Authority. His original sin was being right about the farce called Oslo
A riveting article. It jumps off the page and grabs the reader.
And all so true.
It is extraordinary to watch great men, like Donald Trump and
Benjamin Netanyahu, in action. Against crushing criticism and
actual near-deadly actions against them – they persevere and
prevail. What makes their miraculous accomplishments and
turn-arounds so attainable is that they truly love their country
and their people. They seem to eschew behind the scenes
shenanigans bent on enhancing their own wealth and power
rather than helping their countries, especially Trump.
This is a great article about a great man, Netanyahu and an
excellent encapsulation of what he has come up against and
what he has done to save Israel.
My worry is the punishment Biden and Harris will mete out to Israel for dealing with the menace of a nuclear Iran after November 5th. Of course, they’re mere puppets of Barack Hussein Osama who has fantasies of a nuclear Iran vaporizing Israel in his unofficial fourth term. If G-d forbid either eventuality happens (a nuclear Iran or a 4th term) I’m sure there’d be dancing in the streets in Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor and Cambridge and that smug smirk would instantly appear on Barack Hussein Osama’s face.
Israel has nuclear weapons and if the election results in America leaving them alone in a world saturated with moral cowardice, Israel will do what is necessary for the nation and the Jewish people.
But, those choosing to curse the Jewish people and Israeli nation, will most assuredly find themselves at the destructive end of the very stick they’ve carried.
I don’t worry about the consequences for Israel of a Harris administration turning on it. If you believe, as I do, that God is upholding Israel then America’s making itself Israel’s enemy must have serious consequences for America. That’s my fear.
Brokeback Hasbeen Obama couldn’t puppeteer Alzheimer Joe or anybody else if he had strings up his ass. He’s a nobody.
Bibi Netanyahu is Israel’s George Washington. Like Washington, Netanyahu is facing powerful enemies from without and within. In Israel, a cabal of Socialists and Moslems oppose Netanyahu. Israeli laws and police keep them at bay, but for how long?
Israel is an island of civilization in a sea of barbarity. In his fight to save Israel, Netanyahu is also fighting for all that we call “Western Civilization,” which means promoting the equality of women; the separation of church and state; secular law and equality before the law; toleration of various faiths and philosophies; promotion of arts and sciences; freedom of speech, trade, and movement, a general love of life and freedom.
Had George Washington lost the Revolutionary War, America would undoubtedly have gained independence in years to come, simply because of the character of our ancestors and geographical realities. If Netanyahu loses his wars, it will be the end of Israel permanently. In his fight to save his country, Netanyahu is fighting for civilization itself and the values we all hold dear. Jim D.
What if Lebanon, instead of giving aid, comfort, and medical assistance to those injured (and identified as terrorists) by their exploding pagers, had instead given each one a double tap? What a statement of defiance to the mullahs that would have been! And what could Iran do about it? Retaliate, and thereby identify their agents in Lebanon as their agents in Lebanon?
This would have reestablished the sovereignty of Lebanon and their military in one fell swoop.
Of course, for the outraged, they could take the longer and more expensive path of trying them all for treason and upon conviction THEN giving them the double tap.
Israel learned in 1948, just as they declared their independence and were recognized by Harry Truman, that they couldn’t depend on ANYONE to defend them. Any number of Americans went over to fight for them at then same time as the UN (America, Britain, France etc) slapped an embargo against them to, cut down on the violence yea know, They of course did the same thing to Spain 1936-1939. (Look it up – Spanish Civil War).. Israel only got American aid when it suited our foreign policy.
The Muslims should go back to picking on the US and Europe. It’s safer they can expect only a proportionate response.
To SteveL You are too benevolent. Obama is the devil. A dangerous 2 faced antisemite, anti-American, anti-white, slimy liar with blood on his hands. The rest are just following his lead.
Victor brilliantly summed up the situation vis a vis Bibi. I think he should write his biography. Victor if you’re listening, please do it. You are one of the very few who could do it justice. I want to order the first book!
For the past # of years I have been defending both Trump and Bibi. Most of my Jewish friends hate Trump for no other reason they can articulate other than ‘he’s not presidential’ (whatever that means) but for the most part they still were ok with Bibi. As Victor rightly points out, since the macabre pogrom that happened on Oct 7, they were dumping on Bibi too. I felt like I was his lone defender. Within weeks of that infamous day, Israeli ‘experts’ from the Left were sent here to do ‘Hasbara’ and either directly or subliminally blamed Bibi. Actually well before that date, when Bibi was fighting for judicial reform, those same ‘experts’ were also pushing the meme that Bibi is a Trump like hitler. He’s a power hungry dictator (like Trump) who refuses to give someone else a chance to lead, he’s a felon (like Trump) for accepting bribes (a box of cigars) and he will make a deal with the devil (holy religious Jews (Haredim) who keep the Torah and Judaism alive) to stay in power (like Trump who apparently partners with white supremicists (all 20 of them).
I wrote an article comparing both men a while back as I saw their political lives were uncannily similar:
https://leonupsidedown.blogspot.com/2019/04/what-should-we-make-of-election-and.html
When thousands of Israelis were protesting in Tel Aviv against evil Bibi and his ‘extreme’ right wing members of knesset like Smotrich and Gvir, again well before Oct 7 2023, some of my Jewish friends in Toronto who swallowed the kool aid by the MSM and their leftist cousins in Israel who swallowed the same liquid, were freaking out. To make matters worse, some of my friends on the Right were angry with Bibi because they felt he didn’t do enough ( annex Judea and Samaria for example). All targets were on Bibi. It indeed looked bleak for a real Jewish hero who took a bullet for his country both figuratively and literally.
What Victor didn’t explain was who is Bibi. Like Trump, he is a loyal, patriot who will do anything for his country and his people. Unlike Trump he is the best spoken state leader in the world.
I consider them both heroes and with G-d’s help may they both succeed to help move our glorious world into better times!
Fabulous article though I am one of those who believes that Israel MUST ANNEX ALL THEIR LANDS; Judea, Samaria and Gaza while DEPORTING ALL of the Muhammadans and Communist Jews within all their historical, ancestral and legal lands – under International Law – if the world, and the Jews, want peace; at least within their borders.
Islam does not allow peace with the kafir, only the Hudna: temporary pause “peace” from Islam’s obligation: Jihad against all that is non-Islamic in order to submit to Allah and the Sharia.
I also wish Israel, Bibi and the entire Western World would start telling the factually correct historical truth about the subject of the so-called “Palestinian” People, their genocidal fake flag and their entire invented mythological history.
Even the Islamic texts do not mention any Kingdom of “Palestine” or “Palestinian” people which tells us that neither Moses, Jesus nor Muhammad knew any either.
This entire subject is all about Massacring Jews, destroying Judeo-Christian Civilization and expanding “Dar al Islam”…..
I truly wish Israel would END the supplying of any aid to Gaza or the so-called “West Bank”. No other place on Earth was ripped out of its historical roots: Judea and Samaria to be renamed after a geographical location: “West Bank”. Is Jordan, the failed attempt to the first “Two State Solution” for “peace” in 1921 to be called “The East Bank”?
God I wish Israel would find its Jewishness and DRIVE OUT all Islam and Communism/Socialism from within its borders. They would become a light among the nations – similarly to both Japan (which can be Japanese or Arabia which can be 100% Arabian and 100% Islamic) and Hungary – for the rest of the West to do the same.
Islam does not afford peace, especially with the Joo, and neither does Socialism/Communism. One is founded upon the Jihad – al-Jihad, while the other hosts The Revolution…..
Both are responsible for hundreds of millions dead. It is time for the West, especially Israel, to wake up and smell the coffee….
“They Must Go!”