Unconditional surrender: How Israel can create peace – opinion

‘Why can’t Israel just stop fighting?” some American friends asked last week. It’s hard being whipsawed by the media’s Sanctimony Cyclone, bombarded by heartbreaking images of suffering Palestinians and Lebanese, amid the constant scolding of big bad Israel from know-it-all CNN analysts and war-weary American politicians. And it’s hard to absorb hostility against “the Jews,” assuming that if only Israel treated Hamas better, life on the Upper West Side would improve.

I always ask: What would America do against similar enemies? Why were you so silent for years as your taxpayer dollars bankrolled America’s justified, prolonged, but bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And, be specific: how should Israel defend itself?

As the Civil War general William T. Sherman noted, war is hell. Many Blue Americans today lack the stomach for sustained conflict against evil jihadists who would happily mass-murder them, too.

Here’s what distinguishes most Israelis from many anguished American Jews. Israelis – Jewish and non-Jewish – recognize our enemies’ evil. We stopped living in La-La-Land on October 7. Strikingly, eleven months later, it’s too easy from afar to underestimate the evil of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards – and the need to crush them.

Beware: when you live in the Middle East, deluding yourself into believing that your jihadist neighbors are rational or benign might make you feel good – but risks shortening your lifespan. Currently, Hezbollah’s threat from the North is untenable, Hamas is not yet fully degraded and still holds hostages, and Iran poses an existential threat.

Unconditional surrender

We historians recognize this familiar tension haunting democracies at war. The impatient desire to end the fighting quickly constantly pressures politicians and generals. In 1864, months before the Southerners surrendered, many Northerners desperately wanted the war to end; the same happened in 1944 – months before Germany and Japan surrendered. It makes sense. Who doesn’t hate war?

If the Democrat's delusion is that our enemies think just like us, this impatience is their paradox. Ending wars prematurely, while feeling like the anti-war, pro-peace position, usually is pro-war and anti-peace, extending the fighting unintentionally – especially against dictators and jihadists.

As the Civil War dragged on, Ulysses Simpson Grant became Unconditional Surrender Grant, unapologetically. He knew that, to reunite America, the North had to crush the Confederates.

Nearly 80 years later, at the Casablanca Conference, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Allies similarly demanded Unconditional Surrender by the Axis Powers – the Germans, Italians, and Japanese – to end World War II. On February 12, 1943, FDR explained: “We mean no harm to the common people of the Axis nations. But we do mean to impose punishment and retribution upon their guilty, barbaric leaders.”

It’s confusing. We Israelis have buried close friends and relatives. Our kids are fighting this war – or we ourselves are deployed. Such mourning, such fighting, often offers express tickets to pacifism. We should be desperate to end the multi-front war imposed on us – and on one level we are.

'It's easy to judge from afar'

Yet most Israelis insist on fighting until Hamas and Hezbollah are crushed and cave in. Are we genetically different from our American friends? Are we more primitive, barbaric, Islamophobic? Or, perhaps, do we see something by living close by, by knowing survivors and those who were slaughtered, raped, maimed, and kidnapped on October 7, that many supposedly peace-loving but weak-kneed allies ignore?

Remote-control morality is cheap. It’s so easy to judge harshly from afar – with limited stakes. Everyone, of course, has insights to share. But it might be worth listening more intently to Israelis with skin in the game – either scarred skin from losses incurred or exposed skin that could start bleeding at any moment.

Consider last week’s lesson. Some mysterious force, distinguishing innocent Lebanese from guilty terrorists, detonated thousands of Hezbollah terrorists’ pagers – and, surprise, surprise, the Iranian ambassador’s pager too. Many of the globally “enlightened” condemned Israel, the country that benefited from having so many of its enemies’ trigger-fingers injured – or blown off. The Washington Post interviewed Ali, a Lebanese man who “only gave his first name for fear of speaking without Hezbollah’s permission.” Hmm, maybe jihadists aren’t so benign.

Ali called most of the wounded “just civilians.” Yet when asked why they had Hezbollah’s pagers, he responded – too candidly – “In this area, everyone is part of the resistance.”

Guess what: that’s true in Gaza, too! And how dare Nasrallah call the exploding pagers “a declaration of war,” after bombing Israel for months. Or the Western media attack Israel’s “escalation” now after absorbing thousands of Hezbollah and Iranian rockets.

Post-9/11 sensibility

Similarly, since 1983, the US has claimed that it sought to punish “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” Ibrahmi Aqil, for murdering 241 American marines, among others. Recently, America offered a whopping $7 million to neutralize him. Suddenly, last Friday, a bomb helped Aqil and 12 fellow murderers achieve the martyrdom they allegedly sought but spent decades dodging. Maybe Israel should get that reward money.

America keeps constraining Israel and preaching about avoiding “escalation.” Isn’t it time for a new, post-October 7 morality paralleling America’s post-9/11 sensibility? Americans should be ashamed that this killer of American soldiers dodged American justice for 41 years. Peace for the West will not emerge if Americans and Westerners don’t understand how to fight these forces aggressively and unremittingly.

America – and American Jews especially – must stop condemning Israel and these mysterious anti-terrorist forces. It’s essential to cheer those on the front lines, literally and virtually, while helping them, however possible.

Sometimes, the only path to true peace requires unleashing democracy’s full power against your enemies. You cannot defeat evil by riding the brakes.

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