Sorry, Israel Won’t Be a Sitting
Duck
by Seth Mandel
Terrorism,
according to some of America’s esteemed defense officials and intellectuals, is
when you jump out from behind a bush and yell “BOO!” at an unsuspecting
passerby. Campfire ghost stories, snake-in-a-can, rollercoasters—terrorism,
terrorism, terrorism.
All these things
make people afraid, maybe even momentarily terrified, and are
therefore terrorism—it’s right there in the word!
“This is going
right into the supply chain,” former CIA chief and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said about
Israel’s targeted pager plot against Hezbollah soldiers in Lebanon. “And when
you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question,
What the hell is next?”
Philosopher
Michael Walzer has a slightly different, but equally ridiculous,
objections: “Yes, the devices most probably were being used by
Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate
target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But
the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of
others, came when the operatives were not operating.”
The first
sentence in that quote establishes that the operatives were, by definition,
operating. So when Walzer then states two sentences later that the operatives
were not operating, one wonders why an editor at the New York Times would
not have saved Walzer from himself at his moment of greatest need.
Since such
objections to the pager plot are no longer merely coming from figures like
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we must ask: Why are folks making imbecilic,
self-refuting arguments in public, where people can see them?
The answer is
that we are witnessing the latest chapter in a long-running attempt to
delegitimize any offensive military act carried out by Israel. And as absurd as
these recent arguments may seem, they are quite dangerous if they catch on.
They are being deployed for the express purpose of disqualifying Israel’s
policy of targeted attacks, very much including targeted assassinations.
Put simply: They
are defending a random Hezbollah operative today to prevent the death of Hassan
Nasrallah tomorrow.
There’s a long
history of forcing Israel to be a sitting duck, pressuring it to not defend
itself unless there are enemy forces on Israeli territory.
Over time,
Israel’s enemies and critics have tried to delegitimize its victory in the
Six-Day War in 1967, despite there being no basis on which to do so. Egypt had
ordered the UN to remove its peacekeeping force standing between Egypt and
Israel, mobilized its troops into formation, and closed the shipping lanes to
Israeli vessels to choke off access. Israel launched what was the dictionary
definition of just preemptive warfare—and won. So the international community
decided Israel shouldn’t be allowed to launch preemptive military action,
because it might win.
In the 1980s,
tensions with the PLO statelet in South Lebanon reached a boiling point. After
enough PLO attacks on Israeli civilians to warrant what was, at this point, not
preemptive war but a textbook response to a war begun by the enemy, Israel went
into South Lebanon and removed the PLO. Because of Israel’s success, some new
“rules” were introduced into the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now, Israel would be
considered the aggressor for removing a threat across its borders.
In 2006,
Hezbollah unambiguously touched off a war with armed attacks by its soldiers on
Israeli territory. Israel sent its army into South Lebanon to pacify the front
without occupying territory or removing Hezbollah from Lebanon. The world’s
reaction surprised nobody: Now Israeli counteroffensives of any kind were
deemed criminal.
All these
capricious rules changes left Israel very few options to prevent its own
destruction. Recently, Israel has relied more and more on intelligence that
enables the targeted assassinations of terrorists. This reduces if not
altogether removes collateral damage, while having the advantage of
de-escalating, even if temporarily, the conflict by hamstringing a terrorist
army planning to attack. At times, Israeli attacks have been so precise as to
be targeted maiming of terrorists, as were many cases in the
pager plot.
Now Walzer,
Panetta, and the empty crayon box known as The Squad (plus foreign governments
and the United Nations) have come out against targeted maiming. Why? Because
it’s the last plausible way for Israel to defend itself before the Jewish state
becomes a sitting duck, patiently awaiting its own destruction.
Luckily, Israel
has shown no signs of swearing off targeted assassinations, each and every one
a boon to the free world and wholly legal. Which is a reminder of just how much
danger the rest of the world would be in if Israel did what its critics wanted it
to do and disappeared.
