Topsy Turvy in the Middle East: The Case for Total Victory

by Gwythian Prins  •  October 15, 2024

In Israel’s war of self-defence, tactical operations show that minimisation of loss of life of everyone except the terrorist enemies has been a prime concern. To a degree that is unmatched, the IDF routinely warns civilians to leave targeted zones before attacks. Pictured: An Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter jet flies over Haifa on September 24, 2024. (Photo by Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

• Such were the mutilations that not a single corpse of a girl or a woman was in a state fit to be shown to her family before burial.

• [W]ithin days of the atrocities, the global moral compass had swung 180 degrees. Starting significantly in London, and long before the IDF had marshalled itself to go into Gaza, street protests in Western cities and reporters in mainstream media were portraying Hamas as the victims and Israel as the violent aggressor…. This accusation has been the biggest lie of the past year.
• If one is among the modern cult “perfecti”…. one’s inherent virtue confers special privileges and exemptions which are not available to less-perfect people. By definition, one can do no wrong. Any respect for the integrity of history is lost. As in the former Soviet Union, but no longer a joke: the future is certain, only the past is ever-changing…. and the mandatory projection of modern values onto the past is popular among the self-righteous.
• [I]n Israel’s war of self-defence… tactical operations show that minimisation of loss of life of everyone except the terrorist enemies has been a prime concern…. To a degree that is unmatched, the IDF routinely warns civilians to leave targeted zones before attacks.
• Iran’s proxy groups hide their attack tunnels, command posts and weapons caches in Gaza and Lebanon under residential buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques, in an express flouting of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war…. The tunnel complexes which, in the instance of Gaza, exceed the length of the London Underground, were not built for the protection of civilians in time of conflict, but only for the protection of Hamas terrorists, as Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, readily admits…. Not by choice, these are the circumstances under which the IDF has been forced to fight.
• It is all the more so because since October 7, 2023 the IDF’s actions on the ground in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon show the best record of any modern armed forces in discriminate targeting, even in combat with terrorists who deliberately use civilians as human shields…. On the basis of such data, former British Army Infantry Commander Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, has called the IDF “The World’s Most Moral Army.”
• When one’s enemy has no war aim other than genocide, and has said so consistently for 90 years, there is most likely zero probability of a diplomatic route to peace. After six refusals of land offered for peace since 1922, there is now no prospect of any diplomacy this side of Israel’s total victory, and the terrorists’ total defeat. “Mugged by reality” is now… the realisation that, whatever else people may think about him, Netanyahu is the indispensable war leader for present times. The historian Andrew Roberts has called him “The Churchill of the Middle East.”
• By and large the Western administrative class — whose worldview is framed by the assumption that with enough meetings in convivial places (“diplomacy”) deals can be reached that split differences — still does not rise to a sufficient level of geopolitical and comparative historical appreciation. This weak intellectual grasp only contributes significantly to the risk of a third world war.
• The need for a strategy of total victory needs to be underscored. For decades, Iran and its proxies have been trying, as Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it, to “wipe Israel off the map.” Israel’s enemies are still trying. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad warned a year ago that Hamas would repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel was annihilated.
• With the high probability that if Iran were to be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, it would use them on Israel, the avoidance of World War III now depends upon Israel eliminating that threat. Once again, President Joe Biden must not be obeyed. Products of the Western mind-set, as mentioned, it was the disastrous naivety of President Barack Obama and Biden in seeking to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear programme (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — and illegitimately, with no mandate, to boot — that allowed Iran’s regime to play the US for fools and in so doing to acquire vital foreign currency inflow – and time — that enabled the Iranian theocracy to resume and hasten its road to nuclear weapons.
• “Iran is reeling… insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.” — Jared Kushner, advisor and son-in-law of President Donald J. Trump, X, September 29, 2024.
• The threat is not just to the Jews but to the world order and the West…. Israel rightly feels unleashed. This tiny nation has both moral mandate and customary international legal right (which long predates the experiment of UN-drafted papers) to be so. Like Ukraine’s, Israel’s victory matters to the entire free world.
• The world currently divides unequally into those who understand this and the majority who do not, or who may just not want to admit it.

One year ago, in the form of armed Hamas terrorists, death arrived on the wings of the morning at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Three hundred and sixty-four revellers were murdered there, out of the 1,200 murdered altogether that terrible October 7.

At the London memorial gathering on October 6, 2024, all those faces, overwhelmingly of young people, were projected onto a big screen. Standing in a cold English drizzle, it took more than an hour to view them all, in the knowledge that the fate of those smiling faces was one of utter depravity. Rape, torture and mutilation — both before murder and post-mortem — these crimes were committed by approximately 3,000 Arabs from Gaza, most of whom – but not all — were Hamas terrorists.

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