Faced with a genocidal enemy, whose sole goal is the annihilation of your country, there is no possible compromise

PHOTO: AYAL MARGOLIN/FLASH90

The decision to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah marked a sea change for Israel. Lee Smith described that change in “Killing Nasrallah” (Tablet Magazine, September 28, 2024): “Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century.”

As Smith colorfully put it, Netanyahu came to realize that “heeding Washington’s advice on the conduct of war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the US is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let US allies win wars either.”

LET US CONSIDER what Israel has achieved since September 17, when approximately 3,000 pagers blew up in the hands or pants pockets of the Hezbollah operatives to which they had been distributed, disabling all of them in one second. A second attack on Hezbollah’s fallback communication system — walkie-talkies — eliminated many more the next day.

Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British Expeditionary Forces in Afghanistan, termed the rapid attrition of Hezbollah forces in the two weeks leading up to Nasrallah’s assassination “unprecedented.” And Professor Charles Lipson, writing in the Spectator, described the Israeli campaign against Iranian proxies as the “most dazzling combination of real-time intelligence, high technology, and precise military action in the modern era.”

Israeli intelligence has apparently penetrated everywhere in the constellation of Iranian proxies, including in Iran itself. On July 31, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was blown up in a Tehran guest house belonging the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), while in Iran to celebrate the inauguration of the new president.

The preceding day, July 30, Fuad Shukr, one of the founders of Hezbollah and designated an international terrorist by the US State Department, was eliminated in Beirut. The Wall Street Journal reported that Shukr had received a call earlier in the day telling him to move from his second-floor office to his home on the seventh floor, where he was killed by an Israeli drone. Israel appeared to have infiltrated Hezbollah’s internal communications network.

Fear of Israeli eavesdropping led Nasrallah and six of his closest top aides to meet in person on September 27, when Israeli planes dropped 80 tons of bombs on the building in which they were gathered. According to some reports, $1.5 billion dollars in cash held by Hezbollah from its drug-running operations was also incinerated and 2,000 pounds of gold melted down in the attack, severely straining Hezbollah’s finances. Israel has continued since then to target all those places where Hezbollah is hoarding its cash.

Nasrallah was irreplaceable, but Israel has made any succession as difficult as possible by eliminating several potential successors in the weeks following his killing. In addition, Israel eliminated a number of senior military commanders in the week leading up to Nasrallah’s assassination, including Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s senior military commander after the killing of Fuad Shukr, and Ibrahim Aqil, head of operations. The latter two were both eliminated in Israeli strikes in Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Concomitant with the elimination of almost the entirety of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, Israel moved on September 23 to degrade Hezbollah’s fighting forces and its large arsenal of missiles, with the Air Force hitting over 2,000 sites in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley and killing hundreds of Hezbollah fighters and destroying thousands of mid- to long-range missiles and missile launchers, cruise missiles, drones, and ammunition dumps in the process. In six hours, wrote John Podhoretz in Commentary, Israel did more damage to Hezbollah’s huge missile stash than it had managed to do during 34 days of fighting in 2006.

The impact of Israel’s combined actions has been immense. Hezbollah’s command-and-control structure has been effectively destroyed, and without such a structure, the chances of Hezbollah mounting a ground action against Israel, as it was contemplating prior to the assassination of a group of leading commanders from its elite Radwan force, are dramatically reduced.

IRAN IS THE BIGGEST loser from Israel’s game-changing actions. Its proxy in Gaza, Hamas, even prior to the killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar on October 16, no longer constitutes a fighting force, according to Israeli commanders.

Hezbollah has always been the crown jewel of Iran’s “ring of fire” around Israel, its vast missile arsenal serving as Iran’s insurance policy against an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities. Hezbollah’s centrality is, in large part, a function of the close relationship between Nasrallah and Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei, who personally chose Nasrallah to take over when Israel assassinated his predecessor in 1992. Nasrallah’s prestige soared in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, for which Hezbollah claimed credit — not without basis.

As Lina Khatib recently wrote in the Times of London, “For Iran, Nasrallah’s personification of hope, strength, and military credibility became immensely useful for rallying its proxies over the Middle East. Iran summoned Hezbollah to mentor and help train members of other groups... Beirut became a hub where leaders of Iran’s proxies gathered.”

But with Nasrallah’s killing, Khatib continues, “the invincibility of Hezbollah has been shown to be a facade. This sparks a tectonic shift in Iran’s relationships in the Middle East.” If Israel can bring Iran’s most powerful asset to its knees, newer, smaller, and weaker groups in Iran’s orbit must worry about their future. She concludes on a hopeful note, “The killing of Nasrallah is part of a wider Israeli campaign to neutralize Hezbollah, potentially marking the beginning of the end for Iran’s regional influence.”

In addition, Iran’s April 14 missile strike on Israel failed miserably, and a second one after the Nasrallah assassination was no more successful. As a result, Iran now finds itself “the subject of ridicule across the Middle East,” which their leadership will find intolerable. That perceived weakness poses an internal threat for the regime, which is widely despised. While Iran has been weakened, Israel’s deterrent profile has been dramatically raised, making it an increasingly important ally for Sunni Arab regimes that live in fear of Iran. The Israeli Air Force has demonstrated the ability to act with impunity in the skies of Iran.

YET AS SOON AS ISRAEL decided to cripple Hezbollah, Western countries joined together in singing the old John Lennon anthem, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” French president Emmanuel Macron proposed an immediate 21-day cease-fire and announced a cut-off of all arms shipments to Israel. Remarkably, during the preceding 11 months, during which Hezbollah showered northern Israel with rockets, missiles, drones, and RPGs, forcing 70,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes and farms, and killed 12 Druze schoolchildren with a drone, Macron never once called for a cease-fire. Indeed, the UN cease-fire statement prepared by France, the United States, and six other nations did not even mention Hezbollah.

In any event, the possibility of a diplomatic solution that would answer Israel’s basic need to return its citizens to their homes was nil. Such a “solution” has, in fact, been in place since 2006, when Hezbollah agreed to remove all its forces north of the Litani River under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. The only problem was that Hezbollah never paid the slightest heed to its commitment, and UNIFIL peacekeepers made no effort to enforce their mandate.

Indeed, UNIFIL has never served as anything more than a shield for Hezbollah from Israeli attacks. That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu urged the UN to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon before Yom Kippur. And it is also why the UN refused.

Macron’s cease-fire proposal was transparently nothing more than an attempt to allow Hezbollah to regroup after the heavy damage it had incurred to fight another day. But the last thing that an army with the momentum in its favor and the enemy in disarray wants to do is to remove the pressure. As Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner put it on X, “Iran is reeling... insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.”

Yet cease and desist is exactly what Israel is being asked to do, just as the United States has repeatedly ordered it to do in the Gaza Strip. Since the assassination of Nasrallah, the Biden-Harris administration has devoted its efforts to ensuring that Israel not deliver any major blows against Iran in retaliation for the launch of 200 or so ballistic missiles launched at Israel on October 1 — e.g., either striking its nuclear facilities or its oil refining facilities. It has alternately threatened Israel and attempted to cajole it with offers of diplomatic support and weapons systems. But the thrust of American activity has always been the same: Keep it minimal. And at every juncture, the administration has informed the world media and Iran of its efforts, when not directly leaking Israeli plans for retaliating against Iran.

All this is in furtherance of a ludicrous theory, first developed by President Obama and kept alive by holdovers from his administration, that Iran can be turned into a status quo power if treated with sufficient deference and its equities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere are respected. The result was the 2015 JCPOA, which guarantees Iran’s right to achieve nuclear weapons. In addition, Iran has been furnished with billions of dollars of cash by both the Obama and Biden administrations, and relief from oil sanctions valued at around $100 billion by the latter.

That Iran policy would surely continue to guide a Harris administration. Her chief foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, is one of its premier advocates and a vigorous opponent of Iran sanctions.

Yet all that solicitude has resulted in no diminution of Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist entities bent on the destruction of Israel, or even of its refraining from calls of “Death to America” in the halls of the Iranian parliament. Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have effectively closed the Suez Canal to shipping, while being declassified as a terrorist organization by the Biden administration.

Above all, Iran continues to call for the eradication of Israel from the face of the earth, as it has from the outset of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. And as Hitler should have taught us: When enemies declare their intention to exterminate all Jews, believe them.

Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre put the case against appeasing Iran well in response to a reporter’s question about how he could disagree with Joe Biden’s stance that Israel should not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities: “I think the idea of allowing a genocidal, theocratic, unstable dictatorship that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing the world could ever allow.” If Israel could take out Iran’s nuclear program, he added, “It would be a gift by the Jewish People to humanity.”

Peter Deutsch, a six-term Democratic congressman from Florida, recently endorsed Donald Trump, for reasons close to those stated by Poilievre: Biden and Harris “have pursued polices that have emboldened Iran even after its ballistic missile strike on Israel.... Their policies towards Iran make the world a much more dangerous place.”

THE DEFEAT of the Iranian axis would benefit the entire world — and perhaps most of all the Palestinians themselves. Only when the Palestinians give up the fanatic Islamic ideology that places a higher priority on dead Jews than prosperous Palestinians can they look forward to a brighter future. And that will only come with the same thoroughgoing defeat as Germany and Japan suffered in World War II.

What begins with the Jews does not end with the Jews. Iran and its proxies destabilize and threaten the West. Hezbollah has been the world’s most lethal terrorist organization for more than 40 years. The Houthis disruption of shipping in the Red Sea has disrupted global supply chains and caused shipping costs to skyrocket.

But perhaps the greatest benefit of Israel’s campaign to defeat Hezbollah and remove the noose of Iranian proxies is psychological. Israel has shown two things that the West has long forgotten. First, not every conflict has a diplomatic solution and can be solved by drawing lines on a map. Faced with a genocidal enemy, whose sole goal is the annihilation of your country, there is no possible compromise. And second, victory, something which America has not experienced in over three decades, is still an option.

We conclude where we began — with Lee Smith’s “Killing Nasrallah.” True, Washington and the Europeans are appalled by Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, he concludes. But that is only because Israel has reminded them of the ugly truth “that no modish theories of war, international organizations, or even American presidents could long obscure. Wars are won by killing the enemy, above all, those who inspire their people to kill yours. Killing Nasrallah not only anchors Israel’s victory in Lebanon, but reestablishes the old paradigm for any Western leaders who take seriously their duty to protect their countrymen and civilization: Kill your enemies.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1034. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)