The reported deaths of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, and Fuad Shukr, the military commander of Hezbollah, will represent a welcome weakening of these terrorist organizations if definitively confirmed. They will not mean the end, or even the beginning of the end, of their terrorism, because for far too long, the free world has chosen to stand aside while these organizations grew in strength.
What is worse, the reactions of many countries and organizations meant to uphold the values of freedom show that the free world is in deep decay and that the world crisis has become acute. This, the dishonorable and shameless behavior of free nations and the deepening of the world crisis it brings with it, is the most urgent problem today.
The shamelessness begins with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who chose to emphasize that the United States was “not aware of or involved in” the death of Haniyeh. What Blinken should have said instead is that he does not know anything about the matter, but the death of Haniyeh, the leader of an organization that carried out the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, is a perfect thing.
Far from adopting such a position, Blinken insists on “the importance of getting to the cease-fire” in Gaza and blithely declares it “manifestly in the interests” of the Israeli hostages and residents of Gaza. A cease-fire which, if it became permanent, would leave Hamas in Gaza, free to take more hostages and inflict more abuse on Gazan residents into the indefinite future.
Whatever Benjamin Netanyahu’s flaws as Prime Minister of Israel, and these flaws are many and deep, he is entirely right to publicly reject the views of those who “urge me to end the war, claiming it is unwinnable.” Those critics have either never known, or have conveniently forgotten the words of Israel’s former left-wing Deputy Prime Minister, Yigal Allon, written in Foreign Affairs in 1976. Allon wrote, “Israel cannot afford to lose a single war... To lose a single war is to lose everything.
A permanent cease-fire in Gaza would mean that Hamas has survived and will live to kill again, and thus Israel has lost the war. This cannot and must not be allowed to happen. Secretary Blinken does not understand this, nor does he understand that emphasizing America’s non-involvement in Haniyeh’s death is thoroughly dishonorable. Blinken’s statements should be considered a mark of shame by American society. It is a hopeful sign that the latest Gallup polling shows that ‘poor leadership’ has become the most important single issue for American voters, more important even than immigration. The sooner that those incapable of showing leadership, like Mr. Blinken, leave the scene, the better off will America be.
Unfortunately, Blinken is far from alone in his shameful behavior. Most predictably, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has issued a statement criticizing “a dangerous escalation.” The very term ‘escalation’, as I have previously written, is at the core of the West’s obsession with doing nothing, or as little as possible, in the face of attack. No war, no military engagement, no bar room brawl has ever been won, or will ever be won, by those who are more concerned about escalation than they are about victory. Of course, Guterres is not at all interested in Israeli victory in the current war, or the victory of the free world in any other war. He proposes “regional de-escalation.” This would give Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and every other murderer in the Middle East time to rest, reorganize, and prepare for worse murders. Truly, the United Nations is an organization that never stops plumbing new depths of dishonor.
It is perhaps futile to expect better of Guterres, but it would be appropriate to expect Britain, an ally to both the United States and Israel, to show a little bit of sense. Instead, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey have both traveled to Qatar, the country that serves as a base for those members of the Hamas politburo who are presently still alive. Lammy opines that Britain and Qatar “share a commitment to regional stability, security, defense and driving growth.” This is the same Qatar where Haniyeh will be buried, according to Hamas. The same Qatar which has accused Israel of assassinating a negotiator in the cease-fire talks, by way of reference to Haniyeh’s death, without even concerning itself with providing any evidence of Israel’s involvement.
Even Germany, which should have learned awful lessons from two World Wars, is not immune from the contagion of moral constipation that afflicts the West. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock suggests that “the central issue now is to prevent a regional conflagration.” This very policy, of democracies attempting to prevent war at any cost, by doing nothing and pretending against all evidence to the contrary that this lowers the flames, is what led two different German dictatorships, Kaiser Wilhelm and Chancellor Adolf Hitler, to deliberately initiate catastrophic wars. The way to prevent conflagration, the outcome that Ms Baerbock claims to desire, is to hit Hamas and Hezbollah so hard that they are rendered incapable of starting any fires. Even that, absent the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program, will not be enough.
One would think that the free world has suffered enough tragedies in the fairly recent past to be a little less obtuse and a little less passive than it is at present. Yet, as if driven forward by malign fate rather than by the actions of the human mind, the world’s democracies are acting in a manner that can only bring about the repetition of the bloody past.
- Dan Zamansky is a British-Israeli independent historian and author of The New World Crisis, a Substack analyzing the problems of today