Israel should listen to its friends — and act as if it is alone.
Against the backdrop of a potential hostage and ceasefire deal with Hamas, the Jewish state would be wisest to resist international pressure to choose an illusion of "peace" over existential security.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/israel-should-listen-to-friends-and-act-alone
Editor’s note: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden spoke on the phone Thursday and reviewed a Wednesday response from Hamas to the latest Israeli peace proposal.
Biden reportedly told Netanyahu that “it is time to close” a hostage and ceasefire deal in Gaza.1
The Times of Israel reported that Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, also joined the call to portray a “united front” to Netanyahu and his staff.
There is a famous Roman saying: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
In English: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
It 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 Israeli-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 United States’ feeble policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran and its sprint to atomic weapons ambitions shows the folly of prioritizing peace over security. Appeasing Iran may have helped the U.S. avoid a direct confrontation with the Iranian regime, but the U.S. 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 (e.g. Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank) 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 7th 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 7th-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 other 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 prominently 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 U.S. has been trying to talk both sides down. The Biden Administration has told Hezbollah that the U.S. will not be able to reign in or constrain Israel should it launch a full-scale war in Lebanon. The U.S. 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.
Lost in the media’s usual unlettered coverage of this diplomacy was America’s noting that Israel did not need further U.S. support to defeat Hezbollah. The Pentagon’s analysts have this right.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) remain formidable. It has used recent exchanges of fire to clear the path for a ground invasion by altering the terrain, covertly striking weapons sites in Syria, targeting Hezbollah supply routes and commanders.
With complete air superiority, the IDF can devastate Hezbollah with overwhelming force and has threatened to return Lebanon “back to the Stone Age.” Beyond the devastation, this would also weaken Hezbollah’s already tenuous support in Lebanon.
The IDF has exceeded U.S. expectations of what it could achieve in every way since it responded to October 7th. The U.S. warned that Israel could not invade Gaza, but Israel did so. The U.S. said Israel would get bogged down in gruesome tunnel warfare, yet Israel learned how to clear and destroy tunnels largely from above ground.
The U.S. also said that Israel could not operate in civilian areas with minimum civilian casualties, yet Israel has achieved the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty rate in history, even when measured using Hamas’ inflated and fictitious casualty numbers.
And the U.S. said that Israel could not move a million civilians out of Rafah to attack Hamas there, yet Israel did exactly that.
Israel’s opponents and their global media mouthpieces screamed that it would be disastrous if Israel entered Gaza after October 7th, and then if it went into Rafah, and they are now saying the same thing about Israel going into Lebanon. They are right. It is disastrous — for Israel’s enemies. What they conveniently overlook, or do not care about, is that the current situation is already a disaster for Israel. Enough is enough.
Whether it is pushing back against international efforts to impose a Palestinian state unilaterally, or going to war with Hezbollah over Western objections, Israel must never choose peace over its exquisite security concerns. Peace at that price is illusory. It just sets up a bigger and more dangerous future war. That is something a state with existential concerns should avoid.
With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only direct talks between the two with no preconditions can make progress towards a political solution. The U.S. can draft peace plans, and Saudi Arabia can promise normalized relations, but only the Palestinians themselves can stop their violence against Israel.
A political resolution between Israel and the Palestinians would, in itself, not be enough to ensure Israel’s overall security. Islamist forces among the Palestinians and across the region would disavow any peace agreement and keep pursuing terror against Israel. Iran and its menacing proxies would still want to annihilate Israel and work towards that end.
Jihadists, who want to destroy Israel and impose a Caliphate across the region and then into the West, will remain committed to this goal regardless of how the Middle East map looks or any treaties that are signed. Islamists who want to do away with nation-states have no interest in respecting agreements between them or among them.
If Western leaders and the international community are serious about bringing peace and prosperity to the Middle East, they ought to stop thinking that hurried, superficial peace is the goal, and focus instead on security.
Israel should listen to its friends — but must act like it is alone.
“Biden tells Netanyahu: It's ‘time to close’ Gaza hostage-ceasefire deal.” Axios.
Thank you for this piece Nachum. I have been pleased to share it with some others, in hopes that it may help open their eyes - at least to some degree.
I am an American Evangelical Christian; a Christian Zionist, and I grieve for the ignorance of Israeli reality, and anti-Semitic deception that, tragically, typifies the thinking of so many Americans today; particularly amongst those who profess to be Bible-believing followers of Yeshua. While there is a great diversity of belief and practice amongst Christians, and some are less inimical towards ‘the Jews’ than others, collectively, such people contribute much aid and ‘cover’ towards the evil that is afoot in the world today; evil that ultimately seeks the destruction of Israel, and the Jewish people.
That said, I am also well aware of the diverse views of Jewish Israelis towards people such as myself, including those who would see me as an insidious ‘enemy’ - at the very least, not to be trusted. That grieves me as well, but I understand the historical basis of such views.
I do what I can, as opportunity presents itself, to counter both of those errors. Although I have been doing so for many years now, in my dealings with American Christians, such efforts have become far more common, and far more heated, since the tragedy of October 7.
Often, it feels like I am shoveling sand against the tide, and I fight against discouragement by remembering that what we are dealing with here, is spiritual in nature. It is largely, if not entirely, resistant to ‘reason’ and impervious to the presentation of truth. As such, ultimately, the evil winds sweeping our world can only be effectively countered, individually and/or collectively, through prayerful, practical, and continuous, application of (correctly interpreted) Biblical faith.
It seems I have rambled here, and I will close now. But I will do so with a final statement of appreciation and support for your own efforts, and my hope to contribute some encouragement to all who have the same spirit to resist that which seeks Israel’s destruction.
May the G_d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continue to bless and protect the people of Israel, give her defenders victory against her enemies, and bring all His promises to His Chosen People to fruition.
Outstanding article. The only thing the US has done for its ally, Israel, is to help extend the war to the present. While Hezbollah was building its arsenal of weapons, Israel should have been doing the same. Too much dependence on the US for weapons or any country is not a good strategy. As I've said many times, no matter what Israel does, t will never satisfy the US or any Western country that doesn't understand the serious security issues Israel faces. Israel could have hand carried food to each Palestinian, and the West, the UN and other so-called humanitarian agencies would have criticized and condemned them. So Nachum, you are correct, Israel should listen but act alone.