An End to Politics and Diplomacy as Usual

Hamas’s Saturday morning assault on Israel was more than just shocking demonstration of barbarism. The toll of Israeli dead and wounded—not to mention those kidnapped and taken into the Gaza Strip by these murderers—is sickening. And it should alarm and enrage civilized people everywhere.

The full extent of the horror on the southern border, coupled with a barrage of thousands of rockets and missiles fired at Israeli villages, towns and cities, is yet to be determined. Nor can we be sure what will follow after the first day of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rightly characterized as a “war,” and whether it will spread to include Iran and its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries in Lebanon.

But we do know this: It is an event that changes the Middle East. All the rules that have governed the way Jerusalem deals with its terrorist foes and their Gaza stronghold since it fell under Hamas control in 2006—in which the Israeli government and military have always sought to limit the conflict—must now be thrown out.

Above all, it must be an end to politics and diplomacy as usual in Israel, the Diaspora and the West.

Whatever strategies and tactics that the Jewish state adopts as it seeks to reassert control over its border, rescue those held hostage and punish those responsible for these crimes, some basic principles must govern the response to these events.

The first is that the Jewish people and those who care about Israel must unite. After a year of political division and a culture war that threaten to tear Israeli society asunder and undermine its economy and security, those arguments must cease, there and elsewhere. The magnitude of this crisis is comparable to that of Israel’s wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973, and so must be the response of those who claim to be Israel’s friends and supporters.

It may be difficult to imagine the current politically fractured, more heavily assimilated Jewish community of the United States, that is far more alienated from Israel than it once was, coming together as it did during those days. But nevertheless, that is the model that the Jewish world and sympathetic non-Jews must follow. It must be clear to the world that when Israel is under attack and Jews are being murdered, the solidarity of the Jewish people and decent people everywhere with Israel must be unquestioned.

Second, there must be no tolerance or acceptance of the usual narratives and biased media coverage of the conflict, that focus more on Israel’s responses than on Palestinian terrorism itself, and which often seek to demonize the Jewish state’s justified measures of self-defense.

Those who seek to wipe Israel off the map—whether by terrorism or political means—are engaging in a global attack on the Jewish people. The rising tide of anti-Semitism that is sweeping across the world in recent years is driven in large part by anti-Zionist propaganda. Anything that seeks to legitimize the goals of the terrorists to destroy Israel must be rightly labeled not just as hateful but as a form of anti-Semitism that must not be normalized or allowed to be represented as part of mainstream opinion in the West.

If Hamas cared about the safety of the Palestinian Arabs languishing under their tyrannical Islamist rule in Gaza, they would not have started this war. They will, no doubt, continue to use the people under their control as human shields. That is a tragedy, but worries about the suffering of Palestinians caused by Hamas’s actions cannot be allowed to color the responses to efforts to save Israeli hostages and take out the terrorists and their military infrastructure.

(JNS.org)