The myth that Israel's tactics, not its existence, is at issue died with the murdered Jewish families on October 7, 2023 and the Hezbollah terrorists taken out by pagers on September 17, 2024.
No sooner did the encrypted communications devices handed out to members of the Islamic Jihadist group begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country.
There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof-knocking warning projectiles were enough of a precaution. Even hostage-rescue operations were condemned for killing terrorists who, in the usual Hamas medical department parlance, turned into innocent children.
And there's also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to murder Jews. Oct 7 proved that. Nearly a year later, Islamic groups are still celebrating the orgy of butchery, kidnapping and rape. The Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts 5 allied Members of Congress including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, has taken to arguing in favor of "armed resistance" and Hamas.
More Democrats have taken to social media to condemn a Detroit News cartoon which implied that Tlaib's support for terrorism may have led her to worry about her pager, than two recent Muslim terrorist plots to massacre Jews in synagogues in Las Vegas and New York City. The Democrat political establishment can't seem to get around to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.
The liberal establishment accepts the Islamic terrorist cause but rejects the Israeli cause.
That's why when it comes to Islamic terrorism, it emphasizes the cause over the tactics, but when it comes to Israel, it emphasizes the tactics over the cause. Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state, is legitimate.
No matter how often the Arab Muslim invaders occupying parts of Gaza and the West Bank pledge their allegiance to terror, we are told that their ultimate cause is just and inevitable. And that the killings, kidnappings and rapes don't truly represent the moral righteousness of it.
While every time Israel takes out a terrorist, the media links it to the Jewish "occupation" of those parts of Israel that the terrorists demand for themselves. Since Israel's existence is wrong, any tactic that it uses to fight the terrorists trying to take it over is a human rights violation.
The Marxist mobs in the street are at least honest about their ideological orientation. They define all Jews living in Israel as "settlers" who are fair game for genocide. Whether Israel takes them out with drone strikes, exploding beepers or Barney songs played on a loop doesn't much matter except as it's useful for propaganda materials calling for the destruction of Israel.
The liberal anti-Israel establishment in D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes out terrorists and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists that would win their approval. A generation of the Israeli military jumping through every possible hoop has yielded only angrier and more sanctimonious condemnations every time another terrorist bites the dust.
Israel has wasted a lot of the lives of its soldiers and civilians on its side in the hopes of achieving some phantom "purity of arms" that included an extensive approvals process for strikes that crippled its aerial response on Oct 7. Afterward things got better and worse. The pager attack was brilliantly calculated and yet crippled by an obsessive need to take out specific targets rather than inflicting as much damage on the Hezbollah terrorists as possible.
The painstaking efforts to monitor the terrorists to minimize collateral damage and to focus on specific targets did not change the inevitable condemnations that came rolling Israel's way.
The real lesson of the pager attacks was that an innovative Israeli attack on Islamic terrorists will be cheered by the right people and condemned by the wrong ones. Israeli hasbara (public relations) is a fundamentally misguided effort to explain the need for a war whose hand-wringing signals weakness and guilt. What makes people cheer for Israel are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible for killing Americans.
No one except the occasional military expert who tours the battlefield is impressed by Israeli restraint. And restraint will win not a single concession from the same establishment that can't bring itself to condemn by name the mobs waving Hamas flags and assaulting Jewish students.
Israel has been held hostage trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.
That the peace has never come, that the negotiations are worthless and that the only product of two generations of concessions is endless war will not change a single mind. Just as the implication of the revelation that Hamas planned to murder Israeli hostages before handing them over in exchange for live Muslim terrorists was hardly even discussed in the media.
After nine months of demanding a deal with Hamas at any cost, the Biden administration has belatedly decided that the terrorist group is not serious about a deal, but that news hasn't changed Kamala Harris's set talking point about the urgent need to end the war and cut a deal. Nor will it change her policy should she be in a position to stop talking and start making the rules.
Israel has been divided by the need to balance winning wars against winning over public opinion, but the public opinion of the establishment was never winnable, and if it is winnable, it can only be won by winning wars. The Biden administration's policymakers will never admit it, but they were far more impressed by the pager attacks than by 9 months of negotiations. The same is more obviously true of Arab-Muslim countries that despise Hezbollah and fear Iran.
No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.
Israel will never have even the grudging acceptance of those who believe that rape is resistance and beepers are genocide. Accommodating military tactics to their accusations has led to a loop of defeatism that culminated in the deadly infiltration, invasion and massacres of Oct 7. But it can best be a player on the world stage by showing its strength rather than its weakness.
One Pagergeddon was worth a hundred Nova documentaries and exhibitions about the unhappy victims who were assaulted at the music festival to morale, national security and the reputation of a nation built on repudiating the helplessness and victimhood of its long exile.
Oct 7 incited the dark glee of a movement that believes it can taste Israel's destruction. Protestations of innocence and victimhood only feed its triumphalism. What it fears isn't a documentary about the atrocities of Oct 7, but the destruction of its Jihadist armies.
The issue was never Israel's tactics, but Israel's existence. The only way to win... is to win.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Christine Carr