Only War: Israel has the same choice it always had
Daniel Greenfield
When an enemy wants to exterminate you: your choice is war or death. Peace and deterrence mean death. War means survival.
Israel has the same choice it always had. That choice becomes clearer each year and with each atrocity.
It can carry out another “limited incursion” into Gaza, bomb the homes of some terrorists and then go home, hopefully with the hostages, and wait for something like it or worse to happen again.
Or it can actually go to war and win.
Israel, like America, doesn’t win wars anymore. It has operations. It takes out terrorist leaders and occasionally terrorist cells. And then it goes home. But when home is within a stone’s throw of where monsters live, then there’s no way to go home. Home is where the monsters are.
A war ends with victory. The destruction of the enemy. The Islamic terrorists have been waging a war meant to end in victory since Israel was reborn. Unless Israel fights to win, it will be lost.
What does a war look like? It is not “proportionate” or “limited”. It is not based on “deterrence” and does not end with a “truce”. If at the end of the war, the enemy still exists, you have not won.
Israel has yet to fight a war against the terrorists. Let alone win one.
It’s been 30 years since the Israeli Left sold the myth of peace with the Arab Muslim invaders in Gaza and the West Bank and under 20 years since building walls and defenses was sold as the alternative.
Neither of those were ever a viable option against a genocidal enemy.
The myth of peace and the myth of defense never took into account the reality of who the enemy is.
It is impossible to live in peace with the Religion of Peace except in temporary truces or through strength. And strength does not mean possessing devastating weapons that a nation is too afraid to actually use. It does not mean building walls and hoping that each time the enemy comes, they can be thrown back.
The bloody lesson that is being taught yet again is that playing defense gives the enemy the initiative, the momentum and the choice of battlefield.
Playing defense is what leads to 9/11 or the mass butchery of Israelis that happened during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.
Playing defense is slow suicide.
Going on the offensive what was made Israel possible. Draining swamps and making the desert bloom was all well and good, but it was citizen militias and then an early national military that made the country of an oppressed minority into a viable possibility by striking ruthlessly at the enemy.
Israel has a choice between eliminating Hamas from Gaza or reliving this Simchat Torah again. And worse.
There are no other choices on the menu. Neither peace nor deterrence will work. Only war.
And then the air strikes kill women and children in Gaza. The world condemns Israel. The United States threatens to cut off support. And it all falls apart.