Extraordinary opportunities call for extraordinary acts. Everything else is squander

By ANJULI PANDAVAR • 9 Nov 2024

The man what done Soleimani is back!

Benjamin Kerstein, in his reflection on the Democratic Party’s defeat in the 2024 US Presidential election, observed that, “the Democrats thought they could appease the antisemites. What they could not or would not understand is that antisemitism cannot be appeased. It will accept nothing but genocide.” Kerstein is certainly correct. The implications of his insight go well beyond the autopsy currently underway over the corpse of Democratic electoral fantasies. If anti-Semitism, “will accept nothing but genocide,” then negotiation and compromise are irrelevant. Those who seek genocide will not stop until either they accomplish it, or they are, like the severed metallic hand of Terminator, or the putrid skeletal hand of a captive wight, destroyed utterly. The desire to kill all Jews on the conviction that they must all be killed is, of course, much older than the word anti-Semitism. For example, the idea is canonised in Islam’s notorious genocide hadith:

The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. (Sahih Muslim 6985)

Israel’s immediate enemies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, at least five Shi’a terrorist outfits in Syria and Iraq, and the Iranian regime are all driven by this hadith. Jihad will accept nothing but genocide. In jihad, there is only all, or nothing.

Zionist Israelis recognise how intricately their fate, averting their own genocide or succumbing to it, is tied to the US elections just completed. The relief is demonstrable and widespread. Equally widespread is the recognition of the rarity of this moment, and its promise. “An extraordinary opportunity that we were granted by the grace of God,” said veteran Israeli journalist Caroline Glick. “A once in a lifetime opportunity,” said Lieutenant Colonel Gidi Harari. Yet, if we look at what these two public figures aspire to accomplish with this extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime, God-given opportunity, we see only aims that are ordinary, quotidian and not at all the stuff of divine sanction.

Caroline Glick says:

Until now Israel has pursued a path of moving forward strategically but not actually achieving our strategic goals, because at every turn the Biden administration has blocked us from doing so – whether it’s eliminating the Hamas regime in Gaza, or eliminating the Hezbollah-controlled areas that border Israel in the south of Lebanon, or taking out Iran’s nuclear installations. All of these things were considered out of bounds by the Biden administration and they worked assiduously to block Israel from achieving these goals. (Arutz 7)

The end of the Obama era is indeed a new dawn, and Israel now being able to move forward strategically is hugely significant, given the knife-edge the country finds herself on on so many levels. But if we look at what, more concretely, Glick has in mind for taking advantage of this opportunity, we read:

We have to understand its nature, we have to understand what we need, and we have to have the people in place in positions in Washington and in Jerusalem, and the Israeli people in Washington who are going to be able to actually implement a policy that will secure Israel’s alliance with the United States for the benefit of both countries for years to come while also strengthening and rendering enduring Israel’s position as a regional power hopefully at peace with more of our Arab neighbours, with the kind of borders that we’re going to be able to defend going forward.

All of these will happen anyway for the simple reason that Trump is Trump. Victor Davis Hanson sums it up tersely:

He [Donald Trump] has a singular level of public support and he’s going to do things that are going to be very radical, even. When you have the Houthis announce a few hours after the election that they want peace in the Red Sea, and you had Hamas yesterday say that, as far as they’re concerned, the war is over; they want an agreement. And you haven’t heard a word out of Iran. Why is that? Because he has won the popular vote, won the electoral college, has enormous support and he’s entirely, in their view, unpredictable, and can’t be controlled by their usual levers of influence. They can’t call up somebody in the Pentagon. They can’t rely on a New York Times op-ed. They can’t get Robert Malley to say something. They have no control over him and that frightens them. (Victor Davis Hanson. My emphasis)

It is an extraordinary opportunity to go a great deal further than Caroline Glick’s timidity allows her to. The IDF stunned the world a string of breathtaking attacks on Hezbollah and Iran before Donald Trump got re-elected, before God gave his extraordinary opportunity. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go beyond the pagers and walkie-talkies, beyond the unstoppable decapitations, beyond setting a whole port ablaze, beyond taking out a major country’s entire air defence capabilities. Fear of Trump is exactly the launchpad into that beyond. Still, there are military authorities who simply cannot make that leap. Lieutenant Colonel Gidi Harari says:

What we found on the ground, on the first line of Hezbollah, on the first line of villages along the Israeli-Lebanese border, it was amazing. It was amazing the quantity of munition and arms and the tunnels and bunkers that were almost in every house. Although we knew that they are very well equipped and they are very well prepared, I don’t think that someone thought that the quantity of the munition and arms that were on the ground was so big. It’s amazing, amazing.

What I hoped and what I think should have been done is that the IDF should reach until more or less three or four miles into Lebanon, cleaning all the villages from all the Hezbollah infrastructure that were prepared in the villages. Now there are two things that should have been done: first of all, every house that the munitions or some kind of arms were found must be demolished and every place, every terrain that the bankers was found, even if it’s in in the middle of an orchard of olives, all the olives should be cut and the bunker should be [blown up].

There are two messages that should be delivered to the people in Lebanon: for Hezbollah, the message is very loud and clear, that we are dealing in killing them and in demolishing all the structure that they built in South Lebanon, but to the inhabitants of the villages, they should know that every house that will give help or shelter, or [store] supplies for Hezbollah or ammunition or arms, will be demolished. This message is very important, because this is a message for the people of South Lebanon when they will come home: If they will let Hezbollah again to come over to the South, this is what will happen again.

Anti-Semitism will accept nothing but genocide. In jihad, there is only all, or nothing. This takes me back to the much-undervalued Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a man whose regard amongst the Jews is not unlike that of Donald Trump amongst his own nation. In the context of securing a Jewish state out of Mandatory Palestine, Jabotinsky remarked:

We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about “agreement” which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. (The Iron Wall)

We see this kind of defeatism in Glick’s, “a regional power hopefully at peace with more of our Arab neighbours”, “a regional power …with the kind of borders that we’re going to be able to defend going forward.” If you can only hope for peace with your neighbours, then you are not a regional power. If you can only hope for defensible borders, then you are not a regional power. Similarly, Lieutenant-Colonel Harari is bitter that:

We came the first mile into Lebanon. We did everything what we did, but we didn’t finish the job, because we need to go further until the fourth or fifth mile from the border and finish. Sadly, I don’t know why, but, sadly — I’m saying that — they stopped everything and we are withdrawing from South Lebanon even before we’ve reached some kind of an agreement with the Lebanese authorities. All what [we] gained in this manoeuvre and all the soldiers that fought there, we are wasting it. We are wasting it. They will come again and we’ll need to fight again in two years, in one year, in five years; it doesn’t matter, but this is the life of our soldiers.

Gidi Harari is justifiably frustrated both with the IDF’s failure to penetrate beyond the narrow Lebanese borderlands, and the wasteful, untimely withdrawal from those borderlands. But there are several critical flaws in the Lieutenant-Colonel’s thinking.

Firstly, a failure to recognise that Hezbollah is a jihad organisation. Hezbollah is ideologically-driven to prosecute a religious war. It sees the world in stark black-and-white terms. There is no message that will have any effect on it. It is either victorious or it is defeated; everything in between is war. It does not matter whether those waging jihad have, “an amazing quantity of munition and arms and tunnels and bunkers almost in every house,” or lack even one 5-shekel knife, because they are driven by ideology, everything is a weapon, including their own bodies.

The only amazing thing about all this is that Lieutenant-Colonel Harari should, on the one hand, be amazed at the weaponry and infrastructure that Hezbollah had amassed right under the noses of the IDF, and yet on the other, believe that pushing “more or less three or four miles into Lebanon” and reaching “some kind of an agreement with the Lebanese authorities,” will secure a better outcome than, “They will come again and we’ll need to fight again in two years, in one year, in five years”. I have offered a substantial three-part critique of this kind of thinking here.

More to the point of this essay, Lieutenant-Colonel Gidi Harari wants to use his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to accomplish even less that the IDF had accomplished in previous Lebanese wars, including continue the serial fiascos of agreements with the Lebanese authorities. This giving of messages when fighting for survival is discussions by another name, exactly what Jabotinsky describes as “spoiling our own case.”

“It’s a time to recognise the nature of the opportunity that an incoming Trump administration presents for Israel,” advises Glick. Israel did that well enough the last time. It comes naturally to both sides. The nature of the opportunity that an incoming Trump administration presents for Israel is that Trump, merely by holding office, paralyses Israel’s enemies.

This time, confronted as Israel is by people on jihad, people who cannot back down from trying to kill all Jews, demands the extraordinary, the once-in-a lifetime, of Israelis. This once, it is within their capacity to kill the ideology that drives jihad, and they only have to do it once. Without doing this, the problem never goes away.

[Syrian General Muhammad] Suleiman [head of the Syrian nuclear programme] had not gotten the message after the [Israeli] destruction of the nuclear power plant. The Israelis received intelligence that the Syrians were resuming their efforts to build another nuclear power plant.” (American journalist and North Korea expert, Nate Thayer).

Technically, when you destroy a nuclear program, within five years the countries that have done it can do it again. If you have enough money, enough determination and know-how, and you start from zero, your nuclear programme, in five years, you can have the Bomb.” (General Amos Yadlin, former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence).

Killing the ideology will require much more than just “peace with more of our Arab neighbours.” Active collaboration with those neighbours to put an end to jihad once and for all will require more than “the kind of borders that we’re going to be able to defend.” The readiness to cross those borders and permanently annex territory beyond it, such as in South Lebanon, such as Gaza, and apply sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, is how you begin to eradicate “the ideology.” It will also require more than “some kind of an agreement with the Lebanese authorities” that are the handmaidens of Hezbollah, or “sending a strong message” to people unreceptive to messages.

Jihad means all or nothing. Utter destruction must be the fates of Hezbollah, the IRGC, the Supreme Leader, and the religious institutions in Qom. That would be adequate to the difference between a spectacular Trump election victory, and “an extraordinary opportunity that we were granted by the grace of God.” The difference lies in its being a fitting revenge for Mahsa Amini and the brave women of Iran, who would hold themselves forever in the debt of Israel and the Jewish people, a return of Cyrus’ favour, if you will.

Anti-Semitism, that “will accept nothing but genocide,” and jihad, for which there is only all or nothing, will face an Israel that they have faced many times before, and for which they are well-prepared, unless this opportunity is not squandered. If withdrawing from South Lebanon, as Gidi Hariri describes, were but a tactical ruse, then the extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from God could stretch all the way from a few thousand pagers blowing up simultaneously to American bunker-buster bombs crashing mountains onto Iran’s nuclear facilities. If this is a God-given opportunity, then treat it like a God-given opportunity, not like a Trump-given opportunity.

Picture credits:

https://x.com/Trump_History45/status/1854057058943086910/photo/1

US Special Operations Forces – https://twitter.com/farhad965/status/1212893082460532736, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136535445