When it comes to Israel, brains go out the window - opinion

If we needed a reminder of just how corrupt some people believe the State of Israel and its fight against Hamas to be, we received it on Saturday after Israeli special forces conducted a remarkable commando operation that put Hollywood to shame and rescued four hostages from the heart of the Gaza Strip.

While Israelis celebrated some of the first good news in a very long time – on beaches, in synagogues, and outside the hospital where Noa, Shlomi, Almog, and Andrey were taken – Israel came under a sharp volley of condemnations for some fictional massacre that it had allegedly carried out in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

It didn’t matter that the hostages were being held in apartment buildings by people whom Hamas tried to portray as doctors and journalists as opposed to captors, or that the IDF came under ferocious gunfire and anti-tank missile attacks when it tried to escape Gaza with the rescued Israelis.

Moral insanity

It was as if, for the world, Gaza was some safe and harmless place where Israeli soldiers could quietly walk up to the doors of the apartments where the hostages were being kept and politely ask to take Noa, Andrey, Shlomi, and Almog back. The situation was so ludicrous that people – myself among them –were asked, on foreign news channels, variations of questions like why the IDF didn’t give notice to the residents of Nuseirat before launching the operation. The sad part is that the journalists who asked those questions weren’t kidding.

There were more serious officials, like Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, who posted two tweets after the rescue. In the first tweet, he expressed relief at the rescue of the hostages, but in the second, he openly accused Israel of carrying out a massacre.

And then there was UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, an obsessive Israel basher and hater, who wrote that she was relieved the hostages had been “released” but went on to accuse Israel of using “hostages to legitimize killing, injuring, maiming, starving, and traumatizing Palestinians in Gaza.”

Just look at the word “released” one more time. As if they were let go because Israel politely asked.

A person could be excused for thinking that Borrell and Albanese live in an alternate reality; unfortunately, they do not. Sadly, these useful idiots who pretend to run serious and influential organizations are promoting a system of values that will consistently give terrorist organizations a victory, for at least as long as they are attacking Israel.

Borrell and Albanese pay lip service to the rescue of the hostages, but the truth is that they don’t want Israel to be rescuing anyone. They are promoting the reality that if Israel comes under fire while rescuing its people, it should not shoot back and instead let its soldiers die. What they want is for Israel’s hands to be tied so that they are unable to launch a rescue operation to begin with.

Sadly, when it comes to Israel, we already know that brains go out the window, replaced by moral insanity and hatred that prevent understanding why Israelis are fighting. This moral absurdity allows people to shed tears when Israelis are killed and subsequently declare that Israel has the right to defend itself, but then, when Israel does exactly that, these same people immediately condemn Israel and call for it to stop.

Instead of promoting false claims of a massacre, why do these people not ask why hostages were being held in apartment buildings in Gaza to begin with? If they care so much about ending the war, why do they not raise questions about Hamas’s war crimes and wonder why the hostages were being held in civilian areas in the first place? That, of course, they won’t do. Instead, they willfully fall into Hamas’s trap and blast false accusations against Israel, condemning it for doing what any country would do: rescue its people.

And while we never really needed the proof, what The Wall Street Journal revealed a few days ago underscores the point. According to the article, Gaza-based Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wrote to his terrorist colleagues in Qatar that the deaths of Palestinian civilians were “necessary sacrifices.” Sinwar went on to compare it to the civilian losses in conflicts like that in Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence.

Anti-Israel activists prolong war

THIS HAS long been Hamas’s strategy: civilians are killed in Gaza, and the terrorist organization knows that no one is going to bother to ask why it embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, why it keeps hostages in apartments, or why it shoots rockets from children’s bedrooms. Instead, Sinwar knows that people will blame Israel and Israel alone.

The problem is that when Borrell and Albanese do this, they are emboldening Hamas, putting Israel – as Sinwar himself wrote, according to the WSJ report – “right where we want them” when it comes to the question of who is winning the war. When Sinwar sees that Israel rescues hostages and comes under fierce international criticism, does that make him feel motivated to release hostages in a deal or to hold on to them for longer? Why wouldn’t he feel emboldened when Israel is slammed every time it attacks Gaza?

What these Western politicians fail to understand is that their response is actually prolonging the war. Just look at Hamas’s reaction to President Biden’s proposed ceasefire deal. Why would Hamas say yes when it knows that the world will nonetheless blame Israel and push its government into a corner to accept a version that does not do enough to ensure the Jewish state’s security?

For the war to end, Hamas needs to feel that it has something to lose. Because it does not care about human life, appealing to some moral or humanitarian interest will not work. What stands the chance of getting Hamas to agree to a deal that will return the hostages and potentially end the war is for Hamas to feel that Israel is not restricted, that there is no ticking clock that has been placed in front of Jerusalem, and that the US will continue and even accelerate the delivery of strategic weapons to Israel.

If Hamas leaders in Doha were expelled or arrested, and if Sinwar felt that Israel was not right where he wanted it to be, then maybe he would agree to release the hostages and accept the US-proposed ceasefire.

And if that doesn’t happen? At the very least, the West will have stood on the right side of history. That should also count for something.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.