Israel must resist pressure to choose peace over security
Demands for a two-state solution and for Israel to show restraint against Hezbollah in Lebanon are asking Israel to choose "peace" over security. That is a fool's trade. Israel must not accept it.
The Roman saying Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace prepare for war) shows they understood that there can be no peace without security. Israel understands this. The West seems to have forgotten it.
Contrary to what many world leaders think, and what the mainstream media would have you believe, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not a territorial dispute or about Palestinian nationalism. These are misdirections worthy of a stage magician.
Israel's goal is security, be it at peace or at war. The Palestinians' goal is to replace Israel with an Arab state. The idea that the Palestinians are fighting to create a peaceful, liberal, democratic state beside Israel exists only in the deluded minds of those who know nothing. It is a deep mystery how anyone can think that a two-state solution that meets neither side's goals is a viable endgame.
The so-called two-state solution is an attempt to create a Palestinian state at the expense of Israel's security. Calls for Israel to show restraint against Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia militia in Lebanon, are the same. Israel must never sacrifice its security for anything, including the illusion of peace.
The US' feeble policy towards Iran and its atomic weapons ambitions shows the folly of prioritizing peace over security. Appeasing Iran may have helped the US avoid a direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic, but the US has made itself and its allies much less secure. A nuclear-armed Iran is more dangerous and far harder to defeat.
Appeasement in the lead-up to World War Two may be history's greatest foreign policy blunder, but at least Europe's leaders did this in the aftermath of the First World War. The hitherto unfathomable death toll of The Great War had so traumatized Europe that anything that avoided another war seemed preferable. Today's leaders have no such excuse. They are just weak and in denial about the Islamist threat’s nature, scale, and scope.
Along with misunderstanding the conflict’s fundamentals, this denialism is a major contributor to Western leaders not being able to see the two-state solution for the dreadful idea that it is.
Israel giving up part of its land (Judea and Samaria) to an enemy that wants to take it all is not going to bring peace. The Palestinians will see it as progress in their goal to destroy Israel. No serious person thinks that if Taiwan gave half its island to China, then Beijing would give up its goal of taking over all of Taiwan. Yet, bizarrely, that is the premise of the two-state solution.
Giving up land is a stupid thing to do. The two-state solution - a proposal really, as it solves nothing - is guaranteed to make Israel less secure. So will the imagined borders for the fantasized two states along pre-1967 borders.
These borders would involve Israel surrendering the highlands of Judea and Samaria, reducing the country’s strategic depth, bringing Palestinian threats closer, and not addressing the conflict’s real causes, which are Islamism and Jew hatred.
For Israel, whose paramount goal is security, that would be a terrible trade. Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza has shown that nothing good follows from giving up security for peace, or relative peace, as it was in Gaza's case.
Israel is facing a similar equation on its northern border with Lebanon, where Israel is trading increasingly heavy blows with Hezbollah. In its obsession with misreporting the war in Gaza, the mainstream media has ignored that Gaza is only one front in the war between Israel and Islamists (funded by Iran and Qatar).
Hezbollah, a poisonous Iranian tentacle, exists to attack Israel in the event of an Iran-Israel war, and as part of Iran’s longer-term strategy to strangle Israel out of existence.
Since the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah has built a formidable arsenal of up to 150,000 rockets, including high-tech precision ones. It has also learned to work with Iran-backed militia in Syria and Iraq, where Hezbollah troops have been battle-hardened in civil wars.
The Islamist group has fired more than 5,000 rockets at Israel in support of Hamas since the October 7 attack. It has turned northern Israel into a collection of ghost towns and displaced at least 60,000 Israeli civilians. Its latest strategy is to launch rockets at forested areas to create wildfires in Israel.
This is an untenable situation for Israel. It is the result of 18 years of choosing “peace” over security, remembering that during this period, Israel has tolerated Hamas and Hezbollah firing missiles at it regularly.
The security risks on Israel’s northern border are acute. If Israel and the Palestinians made peace tomorrow, Hezbollah would still pose an unacceptable threat to Israeli security.
Israel has rightly said that it cannot tolerate this and will resolve it, either through diplomacy or military force. Israel wants to push Hezbollah back about 10.6 kilometers (six miles) from its border so that it cannot threaten Israeli villages or be close enough to conduct an October 7-style of raid on Israel. Israel’s northern residents must be able to return to their homes.
This is where the West chimes in with its calls for Israel to “avoid escalation” with Hezbollah. This is doublespeak for telling Israel it cannot defend itself. No country would accept this. Engaging in a war against an enemy that has fired thousands of rockets at you is not an escalation; it is self-defense.
Even if a political agreement led to Hezbollah retreating, the Shia terror group would still be in Lebanon with its enormous arsenal and chests full of dollars from its benefactors in Tehran.
So, war with Hezbollah might be better for Israel’s long-term security. It could push Hezbollah back and diminish the group’s military capabilities, making Israel more secure in two ways. This makes war between Israel and Hezbollah almost inevitable, although I would be delighted to be wrong about this.
Hezbollah and Iran are talking up the “obliterating” consequences that Israel invading Lebanon would bring. Hezbollah’s powerful arsenal can surely inflict substantial damage and a high casualty toll on Israel, but some of this is chest beating. Far from projecting strength, it displays their weakness.
There is also a risk that Iran could come to Hezbollah’s defense, though it may not be in Iran’s interests to do so. Open conflict between Israel and Iran would give Israel cause to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, something Israel has long wanted to do. Such a strike could undo years of progress that Iran has made - and which the West has shamefully allowed it to make - towards attaining nuclear weapons. Iran will want to avoid that.
The US has been trying to talk both sides down. The Biden Administration has told Hezbollah that the US will not be able to reign in or constrain Israel should it launch a full-scale war in Lebanon. The US has also told Israel that it could not come to its aid the way it did in April when it helped Israel shoot down 99 percent of the missiles and drones that Iran fired at Israel.
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