Israel in Lebanon: The Choice to Lose
The hysteria over the deaths at Qana continues to mount, and in response, Israel has suspended its air campaign for 48 hours. This is a fool’s move on Israel’s part, which speaks well of its humanity, and poorly of its military sense. Let’s recapitulate, because we must, what has happened here: Israel is fighting an enemy, Hezbollah, that explicitly seeks civilian massacre, and hides amongst civilian populations as a matter of course. The direct result of this, as anyone might expect, is civilian deaths. (I am not, as an aside, convinced that there is a meaningful “civilian” designation here, but we will accept it for the sake of argument.) Now, who bears primary responsibility for those deaths? Ordinarily, one might assert that it’s the combatant that actively sought to place those dead civilians in the line of fire.
But standards for the Jewish state are different, you see. The “international community” does not pound its spoon and sippy-cup on the high chair and demand that Hezbollah fight according to the norms of humanity. Rather, the horrors resultant from the jihadists’ inhumanity are somehow the Jews’ fault – and the Jewish polity, rather stupefyingly, lends the obscene opprobrium credence by standing down.
This, in stark relief, is the hideous enmity toward Israel per se in action. It is a curious war indeed in which one side may assiduously seek atrocity and thereby achieve perceived moral superiority over its foe. One searches in vain through history for a parallel. The closest one comes is the Nazi use of captive European civilians in their war factories: thousands of them were killed at the hands of the Allied air forces. But the parallel ends there, because the blame for those deaths was rightly placed upon the Nazis. That is mere moral sanity – and moral sanity is conspicuously absent when the “international community” pronounces upon the Jewish state.
Conspicuously absent from this very discussion is the possibility that the collapsed building in Qana was not, in fact, destroyed by the Israelis at all: rather, there is a chance it was brought down by the detonation of a Hezbollah munitions cache – stored, of course, in a civilian complex. The facts are not in yet, and will not be for some time, but reasonable people ought to allow for it before passing judgment. One might think this would be a lesson of the idiot braying over the fallacious “Jenin massacre.” But the real lesson of that episode was that one may tar Israel with almost any crime, regardless of truth, and the world will rush to embrace the lie. As then, so now in Qana.
This war is within Israel’s capacity to win. It can clear southern Lebanon, and it can root out, village by bloody village, the murderous fanatics of Hezbollah. But to win, it has to accept two facts: First, it must accept that airpower alone is insufficient to accomplish its end. Second, it must realize – again – that it must pay no heed to the strident voices of Europe, the international bureaucratic set, and the Muslim world that claim the interests of a perverse humanity, and thereby wish them dead.
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