Imagining Victory

Israel's Bold Strikes Against Hezbollah, Offer Hope to the Whole World

Oct 02, 2024

Summary

Since the collapse of the Oslo arrangements in 2000, the way the world has seen Israel and the way Israel sees itself have diverged. Both Israel and the world have suffered from failures of imagination. Israel’s stunning and unexpected attacks on Hezbollah in the past three weeks offer a new way of seeing the challenge facing Israel and the wider world, and present the hope of a better future, if we have the courage and clarity of mind to seize it.

Lost Hope of a Better World

It is hard now to remember the atmosphere of hope that we experienced in the early 1990’s. Israel announced a breakthrough in secret negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which led to the signing of the Oslo accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. We watched with a mixture of apprehension and amazement as Israel withdrew from the principal population centres in the territories captured in 1967, yielding control to a newly peace-loving Yasser Arafat and his cohorts, who arrived to take over the day to day governance of Palestinians, who had lived under Israeli military rule for the previous twenty six years.

Those were heady days in which the world’s most intractable conflicts seemed to be soluble. Indeed, the Oslo accords were followed by the Good Friday agreements in 1998 which led to peace in Ireland. The emergence of an apparently friendly regime in Russia and the signing of numerous pan-European agreements, fueled a vision of a new Europe, whole, free, and at peace. The west still thought a reformed China would be a cooperative pillar of a global economic order that was bringing prosperity to one country after another.

Image: Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands after signing the Oslo Accords

Since 2000, we have gradually forgotten what it felt like to live in a world which seemed to be on a path to a better future, and Israel was one of the places that the vision first went off the rails. When the promise of peace in the 90’s slowly drowned in the blood of Palestinian rejectionist atrocities, Israelis and supporters of Israel felt betrayed. When the world reacted to Palestinian violence by demonizing Israel, we found ourselves in no-win situation where any measures Israel took to protect its people were recast as violations of Palestinian rights.

In an attempt to reduce the cost of the conflict and accommodate international pressure, Israel left Gaza in 2005, and southern Lebanon in 2006. Gaza quickly fell under the domination of Hamas, which was openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. International guarantees that were supposed to prevent violence from Lebanon quickly proved worthless, as Hezbollah cemented control of the area vacated by Israel.

Between 1993, with its high hopes for peace and 2008, with global indifference to the increasing peril on both its southern and northern borders, Israel moved from a world of hope to a world of menace. During this period the way the world perceived Israel got steadily worse. The concessions Israel had made at Oslo, and in Lebanon, and then in Gaza were pocketed and forgotten.

Fifteen Years of Managing the Conflict

During the next fifteen years from 2008 to 2023, Israel seemed unable to do more than contain the menace on its borders. Periodic battles with Hamas didn’t change the situation in Gaza and the world took an increasingly hostile view of the measures Israel took to protect itself, whether the physical barrier that Israel built in Judaea and Samaria or the blockade imposed to try to impede the military buildup in Gaza.

Israel’s military leaders grew used to managing the threat on its borders rather than defeating it. In 2014, when Israel made a limited incursion into Gaza in response to the murder of three Israeli teens, the IDF encountered ambushes from a Hamas force that was able to operate below ground. The cost in lives for the IDF seemed too high a price to pay. As a result, Israel’s army didn’t enter Gaza again from 2014 until 2023. Instead the IDF resorted to attacks from the air, and an economic blockade, investing billions in electronic monitoring and appeasement. Israel’s leaders convinced themselves that Hamas was deterred and bought off.

Image: Gaza Border Wall ——-Source: Breitbart News

In the end, as we discovered on October 9, the belief in appeasement was a catastrophic misjudgment and the use of high technology to achieve containment was a disastrous failure.

Meanwhile in the north, the threat from Hezbollah mushroomed in Israel’s perception into a sword of Damocles hanging over Israel’s head. People recognized the growing peril of Hezbollah, even as the long truce on the northern border continued.

Changing the Game

In recent weeks we discovered something we didn’t know before. In contrast to the policy toward Hamas in the South, Israel has not been content to merely manage and contain the threat from Hezbollah. Israel has a plan to defeat Hezbollah. They have been working on it for many years and their level of readiness is beyond anything we could have imagined.

When Israel put that plan into action, our perception of the situation on Israel’s northern border began to change. First Israel disabled over 1500 Hezbollah operatives using booby trapped communication devices. In short order thereafter, the entire senior leadership cadre was eliminated by targeted attacks from the air.

Israel began systematically destroying hundreds of Hezbollah weapons caches, whose locations they knew precisely. Reports began to emerge of Hezbollah members switching to civilian clothes and trying to escape from Lebanon.

Now the IDF has moved into southern Lebanon on the ground, with the stated aim of removing the threat along the border and allowing the residents of the north who have been displaced for eleven months by the enemy’s continuous deadly bombardment, to return to their homes in peace and security. As we feared, this ground offensive against the entrenched Hezbollah forces has already cost the lives of eight soldiers, but it is now possible to imagine that Israel will succeed in removing the threat from its border and returning the northern residents to their communities.

Breaking the Iranian Stranglehold

For the past year, we have seen that Iran created a circle of proxy forces which are dedicated to attacking Israel, from Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, along with the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq. Until recently, Iran has succeeded in bringing deadly force to bear on Israel without putting its own forces on the front lines and without using its own territory as the launching pad of violence.

Now that Israel has started to implement its plan to destroy Hezbollah, Iran is faced with the defeat of its strategy to strangle Israel. In response, Iran has attacked Israel directly for the second time. Both Iranian attacks have been ineffective, and both have revealed that Israel is not alone when it is attacked by Iran directly. Iranian missiles were destroyed with the help of the Americans, Europeans and also Israel’s Arab neighbours.

But although the world is willing to help defend Israel from direct attacks by Iran, they have not shown the same attitude when Israel was attacked by Iranian proxies. Hamas attacked Israel and Israel retaliated and, almost immediately, the world’s preoccupation was not with the defeat of Hamas, but an end to the hostilities. When Israel failed to comply, the chorus of vilification grew ever louder as the year went on.

Similarly in the case of Hezbollah, the response from the US Administration and the French to Israel’s dramatic blows of the past three weeks was a knee-jerk proposal for an immediate ceasefire. In both Gaza and Lebanon, the idea that peace could be achieved through Israeli victory, rather than by doing deals with terrorists, never seemed to enter the minds of Israel’s allies.

Imagining a Better World

Yesterday’s action by Iran, presents the world with possibilities that we couldn’t even imagine a week ago. With the supposedly deadly threat from Hezbollah being rapidly destroyed, and Hezbollah’s daily barrages on Israel being intercepted by Israeli missile defense, Iran’s trump card preventing a direct Israeli attack is disappearing. The risks of an Iranian response to an attack on their nuclear weapons program, which Israel sees as an existential threat and which the United States has said it will not allow, now seem to be manageable.

But today, President Biden said explicitly that Israel shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear program, and that the Israeli response should be “proportionate”. While the Americans have said the right things about “severe consequences” for yesterday’s missile attack on Israel, they are apparently against taking away Iran’s principal remaining tool for blackmailing the world into allowing them to continue their regional mischief.

Image: Map showing location of principal Iranian Nuclear Facilities ———————-Source: BBC News

The American and European imagination is stuck in a world where the best we can do in the face of evil is to contain it and try to buy it off. Israel’s highly effective blows against Hezbollah reveal that there is an alternative. The power of terrorists who rule swathes of the Middle East can instead by broken. The people of Lebanon, Syria and Gaza can be presented with the prospect of a better future. Crucially, so can the people of Iran.

When Nasrallah was killed, there were stories of celebrations in Syria, where Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Lebanon too, has suffered greatly as a result of domination by Iranian backed terrorists and many there would be glad to see them gone. While Israel has a direct stake in the defeat of Hezbollah and Hamas, the neighbouring countries and the western powers also have much to gain.

In the best case, the collapse of the Iranian project of regional domination may also discredit the Iranian regime itself. We know that there is much discontent among ordinary Iranians with the rule of the Ayatollahs. A strike against the Iranian nuclear program will weaken the regime and take away the main lever with which it extorts favours and money from the other world powers. Rather than trying to hold Israel back, the Biden Administration should join them in a decisive blow which will put an end to Iran’s imperialist activities and its nuclear ambitions.

The result would be a much better world for generations to come.

As we complete this piece, the end of the year 5784 is hours away. It has been a harrowing year and we can only pray for a much better year in 5785. To all who are observing, we at Canadian Zionist Forum wish you a joyful celebration of Rosh Hashanah, and a good and sweet year. May you be inscribed for life, joy and prosperity and may all Israel know better days.

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