Rise up and kill: Israel delivers a mighty strike for civilization

Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear sites was classic Israeli boldness. The Jewish state's willingness to confront evil also shows Jerusalem remains a pillar of Western civilization.

A feature of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) that I love is exactly what critics hate about it: the blood, guts, and gore.

These gruesome stories, be they history or myth, force us to confront the reality of evil's existence; and come to grips with the terrible things we must sometimes do, and the terrible price we must sometimes pay, to defeat evil.

Israel is doing those deeds and paying those prices.

While the West has dallied, Israel has launched an unprecedented attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran, aimed at destroying its nuclear and missile facilities, assassinating nuclear scientists, and eliminating military leaders.

General Hossein Salami, head of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard Corp, was killed, as was military chief Mohammad Bagheric, and head of military intelligence Gholam Reza. Several leading nuclear scientists, whose expertise is nigh impossible to replace, are also believed to have been killed.

The strike’s timing, just a few days before what was to be the sixth, and presumably final, round of talks between the US and Iran on a nuclear agreement, shows Israel believed the talks would fail.

While US President Donald Trump had vowed not to let Iran acquire nuclear weapons - ideally through diplomacy, but, if necessary, through military force - Israel removed the need for him to make such a decision by sending 200 warplanes to destroy Iranian sites.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that talks with Iran would fail is because he understands Iran’s essential nature in a way that the West, in its current modern form, does not.

He knows that when Iran’s Supreme Leader and mad-mullah-in-chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says that he wants to destroy Israel (and America) and wipe out all Jews, he means it.

Western leaders claim to recognize the danger a nuclear-armed Iran poses, but they have spent decades insisting that negotiating was the best approach and that Iran could be engaged as a reasonable and rational actor.

That is an insane belief. It shows they know nothing about Islamism.

It was as if they did not know that this was the same Iranian regime that used its own children as minesweepers in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Lacking sufficient minesweeping equipment, Iran would write prayers about martyrdom onto children’s bodies and have them walk through the Iraqi minefields and clear them.

Now, that is evil.

Yet, the West still cannot grasp it. In responding to Israel’s attack, world leaders and foreign ministers have been regurgitating cliches and talking points that are gibberish. Their language of “red lines”, “grave concerns”, and “calls for de-escalation” are what you say when you have nothing to say.

The drivel in newspaper columns and editorials has been no better, full of empty concern about “escalation”, fears that it could “spread into a regional war”, or “spiral out of control”.

What are they going on about? These things have already happened.

Israel has been fighting a war on seven fronts for more than 600 days. The “escalation” was on October 7, it was immediately “regional” and, factoring in Israel’s political opponents, has been global since then, too.

While Western leaders might think the phrase “existential threat” is just part of Middle Eastern rhetoric, that is just wrong.

The Jewish people have long understood that “existential” means precisely what the dictionary says it means. That is how the Iranian regime understands it, too. It is certainly how Iran’s proxy Hamas saw it on October 7, 2023, when it livestreamed an orgy of violence for the world to see, and celebrate, and then deny.

Israel understands that this evil is sincere in its desire and intent to destroy Israel, and that the Jewish state must defeat it to survive.

Jews understand it because we have been thinking about it for a long time. The Babylonian Talmud, compiled between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE, states that, ”If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first."

This is an outstanding piece of advice. It sounds like the kind of thing I would write.

When the stakes are existential, the cost of not acting far exceeds the long list of things that could go wrong. Even a “worst-case scenario” would be preferrable to waiting around for Iran to annihilate you as soon as it has the means.

Netanyahu decided - rightly - that Israel could not wait any longer. It is better to confront Iran now than when it had a nuclear arsenal.

Israel’s longest-serving prime minister also understands that Iran’s crazed mullahs are evil. They cannot be reasoned with, or trusted, and will violate any nuclear deal they sign.

The West, by contrast, is lost. The nonsensical post-modernist idea that all beliefs and cultures are equally valid - and that all people are the same, and want the same things - has made Western leaders adopt the incorrect idea that no belief or ideology is evil.

Evil exists, and is a diligent and patient worker. Defeating it requires tremendous courage and an understanding that awful things must sometimes be done not just to protect good from evil, but to save good from evil.

Jerusalem is one of the West’s foundational pillars. It is why we speak of Judeo-Christian values. Jerusalem has just delivered a mighty blow against evil, not just for Israel, but to save the West, and civilization itself.

Do not say thank you, yet. There is a war to be won and a high price to be paid. Iran has responded to Israel’s precision strikes aimed at key infrastructure and leaders by firing ballistic missiles at Israeli population centers.

Netanyahu - a master politician - also knew that in striking Iran, he was removing the need for Trump to make the tough decision of whether to do so.

All Trump needs to do now is back Israel’s unilateral strikes, which he is doing, and he gets most of the benefits of having struck Iran, but with few of the costs of having done so himself. He can even claim some of the glory should the US join Israel in the fight.

In the Arab Middle East, meanwhile, leaders are condemning Israel publicly, while patting Jerusalem on the back quietly.

Driving Netanyahu may also have been a fear that Trump would fail to halt Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

For decades, Netanyahu has been telling Western leaders that Iran poses a global threat. Again and again, he explained that Iran was a crazed Jihadist regime and presented reams of intelligence and evidence that the Islamic Republic was violating its commitments not to enrich uranium to weapons grade. Iran has also been developing longer and longer-range ballistic missiles to deliver them.

Netanyahu even went so far as to address US Congress behind then-President Barack Obama’s back in 2015, causing a considerable rift between Jerusalem and Washington.

Yet, no one would listen to him.

So, negotiations stopped and started, deals were agreed and violated, and the great game of how long the West could prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons became exactly that - a game.

Tehran ran rings around the West diplomatically, and around the US specifically. US Democratic President Obama and his successor President Joe Biden were especially prone to appeasing Iran, giving the demented mullahs access to billions of dollars in oil revenues for modest nuclear concessions.

These billions found their way to Iran’s proxy armies - Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and a variety of smaller militia in Iraq and Syria.

They eventually found their way into Israel on October 7, 2023, in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in what was a genocidal and existential attack.

In Trump, America finally seemed to have a president willing to confront Iran. He vowed that Iran would not get nuclear weapons. He said he hoped to achieve that diplomatically, but would do so militarily, if necessary. The choice was Tehran’s.

Netanyahu was beaming like a school boy who had won a blue ribbon when he visited Washington shortly after Trump became president again. Finally, thought Netanyahu, someone who understood the problem and had the courage to act was in the White House and on Israel’s side.

Steadily, though, Netanyahu’s conviction about Trump’s willingness to walk his talk may have waned. He watched as Trump all but gave up trying to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine once he realized Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was a barefaced liar and not prepared to concede anything for peace. The word in Moscow is that Putin finds Trump’s belief in his own dealmaking skills bemusing.

Then Trump’s positivity about reaching a deal with Tehran began to wane, too, as he encountered Iran’s intransigence, which, for some reason, he did not seem to be expecting.

Trump kept reiterating that he preferred a diplomatic solution, even as it became clear Iran was unwilling to stop enriching uranium. That made him start to look weak.

Netanyahu also watched Trump visit the Middle East to sign enormous defense deals with Saudi Arabia, and even make private investments in Qatar, a vile regime that vies with Iran for the title of world’s biggest terror exporter.

Trump even cut deals with the Saudis that delinked US defense contracts from the issue of normalizing relations with Israel, which had hitherto been an American policy cornerstone.

The US president wanted a giant trophy deal from is Middle East sojourn, which did not include a stop in Israel, and that was more important to him than a good deal. The Saudis could not believe their luck.

While the world was jawboning about what this meant and treating international politics as though it were a sporting contest, Tehran was developing enough fissile material for between six and nine nuclear warheads.

Given the world has been trying to halt Iran’s nuclear weapon ambitions for decades, it is disgraceful and shocking that Iran has gotten so close. It represents a complete failure of the West’s witless and cowardly appeasement policy.

Israel’s move is courageous, risky, and necessary. The Jewish state’s display of courage in fighting for survival, and its moral clarity in standing up to evil, shows that Israel remains a foundational pillar of the West.

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