Why misunderstanding Israel fuels conflict - opinion

Writing this column – days after Hezbollah murdered 12 kids and teens who were playing soccer, after Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander, and a mysterious bomb planted under the nose of the clearly overrated Iranian Revolutionary Guards killed a Hamas leader, I sit in Jerusalem, in the heart of the jihadi bullseye. Every Israeli has felt this way since October 7 – if not earlier. Being targeted gives you a clarity of purpose, an understanding of what’s important to you, along with a sobering awareness of how the world really works.

So, first, let me be clear: there’s no place I’d rather be. I’m not going away. My family is not going away. None of my friends talk about going away. We have other places to go. But our place is here. Our homeland is forever. And no genocidal maniacs will displace us.

More than that, this war keeps confirming that those who look in the mirror and see lovely, idealistic, peaceniks, often bring on war – while some, emphasize some, of those whom peaceniks call warmongers, offer the only way to guarantee peace against dictators and jihadists.

The New York Times foreign policy guru, Thomas Friedman, once again, fails to understand this reality.

True, he writes “opinion columns.” Nevertheless, how did a fact-checker allow him to write last week that “Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7 was triggered in part by reckless Israeli settlement expansions, brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners, and encroachments on Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem…”? 

Clearly, this Middle East “expert” never read Hamas’s genocidal charter – or Hamas officials’ exuberant post-October 7 rants. They planned this assault for more than two years because they hate Jews and wish to eradicate the Jewish state. It had nothing to do with anything Israel did – but that Israel is. Hamas simply kept its jihadi vow.

Arrogant, self-centered, everyone-thinks-like-me rationalists like Friedman – and many Western foreign policy “experts” – make two fundamental mistakes. First, they project their critique of Israel on Israel’s enemies, assuming that all the motivations, frustrations, and evaluations, line up. Second, wrongheadedly, caught in their own Western-centered, ego-driven, hall-of-mirrors, they deem Israel’s apocalyptic, jihadi enemies as rational as they are, seeking a two-state solution, willing to compromise.

Yet Palestinians keep contradicting this assumption. Palestinian extremists rejected the world’s compromise in 1947 with the UN partition plan. Marauding Arabs killed 333 Palestinian Jews within weeks of that decision. In the 1990s, Palestinian terrorists used the Oslo peace process to arm themselves and establish corrupt, exploitative dictatorships. And, starting in 2005, Hamas used Israel’s total, no-grain-of-sand-occupied disengagement to create Hamasistan.

In The Essential Guide to October 7 and its Aftermath: Facts, Figures, and History, which I just published with the Jewish People Policy Institute, I quote Hamas’s Ali Barak’s boast to Russia Today TV on October 8, as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

“We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza… All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack… The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah, defending his land,” he said. “We have been preparing for this for two years.”

PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF were not the only ones stuck in a pre-October 7 conceptzia; Friedman and America’s foreign policy experts were also blinded. Israelis at least know they messed up – even if Netanyahu won’t admit it publicly. Terrifyingly, Americans are so busy Bibi-bashing they can’t see their own shortsightedness, which they have yet to adjust.

US must learn from its history

Americans should go back in history and learn from Franklin D. Roosevelt. As he recognized the threat dictators posed to democracies, FDR warned in his “Great Arsenal of Democracy” speech, on December 29, 1940: “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.”

The same is true with Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis – who put it so honestly, if brutally: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.” The Houthis’s death-cult motto builds on the equally sick words of the Iranian jihadists, who call out more primitively: “Death to US, and death to Israel.”

Facing such enemies, too many Americans fail to replicate FDR’s peace-yielding toughness. When former secretary of state John Kerry kept negotiating with Iranians under Barack Obama, looking so desperate to close a nuclear deal, I proposed he turn the table over and walk out, just once. He then would have negotiated a better agreement constraining Iran and emerged as more popular with Americans, too. 

Similarly, had President Joe Biden authorized four bombing sorties after Iran attacked Israel in the early hours of April 14, knocking out Iranian drone factories, some of their nuclear infrastructure, key missile launching sites, and some oil fields, does anyone believe we would be in today’s mess? 

Ours isn’t an Orwellian world where war means peace. But when democrats fight dictators, history’s lessons are clear. The more resolute we seem, the more likely they are to back down. So those who squeal for peace, telegraphing weakness, delight the dictators – and bring us closer to war. Meanwhile, those who threaten war strategically, telegraphing strength, daunt the dictators – bringing us closer to a true, lasting, peace – after victory, what we need and deserve.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His next book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, will be published this fall.