Israel Has To Stop. No It Isn't Fair.
Things have never been easy for God's chosen people.
The end of the American war in Afghanistan was the most infuriating thing in the history of my time watching American politics, but not for the reason it was for most people. Most people were mad about the American soldiers who died in the evacuation from the Kabul airport. While this was infuriating, I think Joe Biden’s decision to fully withdraw the US from Afghanistan, come what may and damn the consequences was incredibly courageous. There’s no graceful way to lose a war, and while the war in Afghanistan was well and truly lost, it would have been so easy to kick the can down the road for the next president to deal with. What’s another few dozen dead soldiers and a few hundred billion more taxpayer dollars wasted next to a president’s ego? Biden could have been like Obama and Trump before him in this manner. He was not.
What sent me into brooding fits of rage against the wickedness of my government for days on end was the drone strike that was initially reported as having killed a leader of ISIS. A few days later, independent investigators revealed it was actually an Afghan-American aid worker and the vast majority of his family, mostly children. Anyone still in Afghanistan watching the Taliban take control, worried about the future of the country and already missing the Americans, was reminded that even though the Taliban were brutal Islamists hellbent on instituting Sharia law across the country, at least they didn’t sometimes accidentally kill you and your entire family with an airstrike only to shrug and say “oops.” If the Taliban was gonna kill your entire family, they were at least going to mean it. This is just one example of the many ways the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were tremendously destructive of American legitimacy internationally. Once upon a time we were trusted to come into regional conflicts and get the relevant parties to sit down and talk out their troubles. Now we are seen by many as just another empire looking out for it’s own interests.
The problem is, ever since American petrochemical companies figured out how to get as much oil as we needed at home through fracking, America has very few active interests in the middle east. We’ve turned the region over to our proxies like Israel. In many ways, Israel is a perfect proxy for American interests in the region. They’re too small to dominate the region’s politics, enabling us to be hands-off toward the middle-east but their status as a western-aligned liberal democracy located in the heart of the Holy Land throws a wrench into the works of any Islamist group with aspirations of empire.
Before the October 7th attack by Hamas, Israel was on it’s way to normalizing relations with several of it’s neighbors. The reaction to October 7th and the increasing militancy of the Israeli government has left them more isolated than ever. Even once stalwart western allies like Turkey are taking steps to distance themselves from Israel, like cutting off exports.
To a degree this was inevitable. There’s no clean way to prosecute an urban war, much less an urban war against a group like Hamas that sees the Geneva conventions as a checklist to be completed. However, the Netanyahu administration has done nothing to limit this damage to their regional standing and international reputation. A larger war in Lebanon against Hezbollah now looms, and Israel is doing precious little to defuse tensions. If anything a series of assassinations around the region have infuriated regional powers like Iran.
I’ve heard it said that Israel regards the USA as it’s one truly indispensable ally. Israel is certainly a very close US ally, but the Netanyahu administration seems to think the bond between the two is almost unbreakable. Thus far, this has been true. However, there is a people known as the Kurds, who are a textbook example of how the USA is the best of friends, until they aren’t.
The Kurds are what is sometimes referred to as a stateless nation, like the Jews were for two millenia. Where many nations have a state(for example, the French having France), the Kurds are split between several countries. Northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, eastern Syria and northwestern Iran all have substantial Kurdish minorities. Back when ISIS was conquering large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, some of the fiercest resistance they encountered was in ethnically Kurdish regions from Kurdish militias. The US, eager to make new friends at this time, promised the Kurds a state of their own if they’d be our proxies in the battle against ISIS. When ISIS was rendered a husk of their former glory, the US State Department forgot all about this promise to the Kurdish people. Since then, we’ve turned a blind eye as Turkey has cracked down harder than ever on Kurdish nationalism.
There’s a lot more factors keeping Israeli and American interests in alignment than there ever were with the Kurds, but those factors are not bottomless. While the religious conservatives in the US see it as a moral obligation to support Israel no matter what, more and more Americans are starting to re-evaluate the calculus of always backing Israel as the death toll in Gaza rises and Israel picks more and more fights with other threats on their periphery. Israel wants to be safe, and like most nations they see the path to safety as destroying their enemies. They have authentic threats to their safety and security on all sides, but this is inevitable, and no amount of bombing is going to change it. It is the nature of Israel’s existence in this time and place.
International Islamism is a problem more than a thousand years old. It is at war with all the nations of the world. If you think this sounds extreme, take a look at Afghanistan today. The single biggest hurdle toward the Taliban’s unification and control of the country is ISIS. While both ISIS and the Taliban are Islamists, the Taliban incorporates Afghan nationalism into their governing platform. This isn’t nearly Islamic enough for ISIS who will stand for nothing short of a global caliphate. To stop at bringing Islamism to only Afghanistan makes you just another collaborator with the infidel world order that needs to be fought.
Israel is a particular irritation to these people because of their location in the Holy Land. It is natural for Israel to want to destroy these organizations, but this is like the hydra from the story of Hercules. You cut one head off and two more will rise to take it’s place. As long as the state of Israel exists, or Islam produces ISIS type groups, they will never be completely safe. Instead of trying to completely destroy these organizations, Israel must work to render them pathetic so that only fools will join them. Terrorist organizations thrive on quality, rather than quantity. They need the brilliance to outwit western security and espionage agencies.
Two incidents from opposite ends of the conflict in Gaza drive this home to me. The first is a phone call that was made by one of the young, foolish men who attacked Israel on October the 7th home to his family in Gaza. He had used the land line in the home he had invaded to call home, and was bragging about the dead Jews at his feet and saying how he hopes his parents are proud of him. His father is silent. His mother says how she prays for his safe return, but the tone of her voice tells that she knows her son is a dead man walking, and that she will never see him again.
If that fool alone was dead, his parents would have a story about how their son started a fight he couldn’t finish to share. The people who heard the story would be dissuaded from fighting unless they were truly foolish or suicidal. Anyone with any hope or prospects for a better life would take a different path. It would be only the foolish, desperate and pathetic who would take on the insane task of trying to disestablish the state of Israel. There would not be a mastermind to be found among them.
However, recently a mother in Gaza gave birth to twins. The babies were three days old. The husband left the home to collect the birth certificates from the hospital and when he returned home, the mother and the twins were all dead, killed as collateral damage in a “precision airstrike.”
If that guy didn’t want to kill every last person in Israel before, he probably does now. It would take a true saint to live in forgiveness after something like that. Violence against the state of Israel is more than merely justifiable to that man now. It’s practically inescapable. I hope for Israel’s sake that he is not a mastermind, but given how many have died, a few probably have very smart relatives. This should terrify security personnel in Tel-Aviv.
Israel has to stop. They have to go out of their way to negotiate with these terrorists, even if they suspect the other side isn’t negotiating in good faith. They have to keep trying to negotiate even when repeatedly jerked around. Every time they do, they look more and more like the reasonable ones to the rest of the world. Every time they’re betrayed and come out just as much an independent country as before, they make the prospect of resistance look more and more foolish to those with the potential to be terrorist masterminds. Their belligerence is losing them the moral high ground. Worse, they’re stretching the goodwill of the American public toward their state a little more with every month this goes on. I don’t know where the breaking point is, but I wouldn’t want to get anywhere close to it in their shoes.
Is it fair that they have to live in the crosshairs of the entire international Jihadi movement? No. Is it just that they should have to repeatedly negotiate with people who want nothing more than to fool and abuse them? No. However, things have never been easy for God’s chosen people. If Israel is truly the most moral country in the world(as their diplomats love to say to the United Nations) they must choose peace more than anyone else. It is only with a maximum of diplomatic cover to the secular and predominantly Muslim governments in the region, married to the military strength they already have that safety will be achieved for Israel. Otherwise, their list of enemies will continue to grow. God help them if their friend list ever gets shorter, because the USA won’t.