Admittedly, the Israel-Gaza War looks messy. Israelis keep debating whether military pressure will save the 20 remaining live hostages – all of whom should be freed immediately. And even if Hamas’s “Health Ministry” pads death tolls by counting terrorists and natural deaths, the possible 25,000 civilian deaths are heartbreaking. Yet looking 216 km. north of Gaza to Metula, on the Lebanese border, clarifies why Israel is fighting and what it’s already accomplished down in the South.
This resort town of 1,740 should be bustling with residents – and tourists. But it’s as if a neutron bomb hit – most structures are intact, yet there are no people, there’s no buzz. Looking up explains why.
Mountainous Shi’ite villages on three sides surround this lovely town in the area known as “Etzba HaGalil,” the Galilee’s “finger.” Just a year ago, with 61,800 Israelis displaced, and, cumulatively, over 8,000 rockets pounding them, Israelis feared the Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian weapons that Hezbollah hid in each village – and in hundreds of kilometers of attack tunnels.
On October 7, 2023, Metula’s residents didn’t wait for government orders – seeing Hamas’s massacre was warning enough. Westerners who believe everyone thinks like them don’t like acknowledging this: As with Hamas-controlled Gaza, and most Palestinian nationalists, this isn’t a fight over borders, two-state solutions, or resources.
Israel-Lebanon history
In 2000, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, leaving Hezbollah with no substantive disputes with Israel. And old-timers recall the peaceful border from 1948 through the 1970s, when Israeli farmers worked lands inside Lebanon, and one-third of Western Galilee hospital’s ophthalmology patients were Lebanese citizens.
Hezbollah, like Iran, and many jihadi extremists, including most Gazans long before Israel’s counterstrike, cannot tolerate a Jewish state, especially a Jewish democracy where Israeli-Arabs thrive.
It’s existential. A Jewish presence in the Middle East, no matter how small compared to the vast Muslim-controlled lands, contradicts the jihadis’ Islamist supremacist worldview.
Hezbollah’s decision not to invade on October 7 may have saved Israel – and certainly saved tens of thousands of Israeli lives.
Intelligence sources suggest ego clashes: Hamas arrogantly initiated unilaterally, expecting Hezbollah and Iran to follow. Upstaged, and seeing thousands of Israeli reservists scramble up north so quickly, Hezbollah dithered, bombing intermittently without invading.
Historians will long debate whether Israel should have resisted former US president Joe Biden’s pressure and counterattacked immediately. Abandoning 43 communities for months was demoralizing. Today, workers are fixing the collapsed roofs and replacing the shattered windows. Less obvious are the fumigation efforts that most houses require: when humans leave, mold, insects, and critters follow.
Beepers and walkie-talkies
Historians, however, assess what Israel did. Last year, in September, Israel finally attacked Hezbollah with exploding beepers and walkie-talkies, targeted assassinations, aerial bombardments, and a long-justified ground invasion.
Hezbollah’s collapse then led Syria’s dictatorial Assad regime to implode. That upheaval gave Israel freer airspace this June to attack the “head of the snake,” Iran’s nuclear-hungry Islamist regime.
Serving as “churnalists” – editorializing incessantly – journalists keep branding Israel’s remarkable military achievements as “aggressive, genocidal, futile, and driven more by politics than self-defense.”
Clearly, Israel’s public diplomacy vacuum and toxic politics have complicated matters. But reportorial distortions miss the uncomfortable fact: unless Islamist fanatics are crushed, they keep threatening liberal-democratic neighbors.
The lack of historical perspective is remarkable. Facing far less direct threats, wielding history’s most powerful army, blessed with multiple allies, the US fought jihadis in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 and in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.
Shared borders
Israel shares a 32-mile border with Gaza and a 51-km. border with Lebanon. Hamas – followed by thousands of rampaging Gazans – invaded on October 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 and taking 251 hostages. The condemnations of Israel minimize the ongoing threat, the “ring of fire” Iran stoked to crush the Jewish state, and how quickly the war would end if Hamas had surrendered and released every hostage.
Westerners, including growing numbers of Americans, are impatient with Israel’s hard slog against genocidal enemies, feeling that it reflects poorly on them. Those underestimating Israel’s enemies and war’s knottiness aren’t “isolationists.” Over half a million mobilized Israelis keep shouldering the burden, no one else.
It’s easier to oversimplify urban warfare if you don’t know war.
In 1975, 81% of US senators were veterans. Today, veterans constitute less than 20% of Congress – and that represents three times the 6.1% civilian percentage of veterans.
Today’s remote-control sanctimoniousness among Israel-bashing Americans is rooted in a pick-and-choose pacifism fusing George Washington’s 18th-century idealism with 20th-century cynicism.
Totalitarians favoring Western foes have long appealed to those naively believing you can outlaw war – stretching in the US from Washington’s Farewell Address to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact banning armed aggression five years before Hitler’s rise.
WWII's Bogus pacifists
World War II’s bogus pacifists were often pro-Nazi, just as the 1950s phony pacifists tolerated Soviet expansionism and domestic terror. Similarly, today’s peace posturers demand “peace” when Israel defends itself – but stay silent – or cheer – when Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian terrorists attack.
The most eloquent rejoinder to these hypocrites could be the seemingly peaceful but heartbreaking images from Israel’s North. They provide the invisible but overlooked moral clarity.
They tell a story of lives disrupted, but saved, because Israel evacuated, then hit hard against a threat that only exists because of an anti-Zionist, antisemitic refusal to accept the Jewish dream of being a free people in the Jewish homeland.
More war critics should speak to these northern refugees and to Israel’s reluctant warriors, the reservists mobilized for hundreds of days, fighting for normalcy to return.
They can confirm what most Westerners used to know: war is hell, but a false peace can be even more dangerous.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were recently published.