Why Israel ignores international advice and focuses on its survival – opinion

Bombarded by missiles from its foes and advice from its friends, Israel has learned to stand firm against both. Well-meaning advice is easy to promulgate from the safety of the US, the UK, and the capitals of Europe and is the more insidious of the two. 

After all, Israel’s anti-ballistic missile systems, though not 100% effective, do offer the nation a fair degree of protection. But apparently, humane and virtuous calls to “react proportionately,” “negotiate a ceasefire,” and “stop firing in civilian areas” put Israel in the dock in the eyes of the world, charging the Jewish state with overstepping the mark.

The elimination of Yahya Sinwar on October 17 has, if anything, accelerated the process. Already President Joe Biden, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and figures like UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer are calling for what amounts to a unilateral Israeli ceasefire, together with an unenforceable demand that Hamas release the remaining hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to Sinwar’s death was: “The war is not over.”

Purveyors of well-intentioned advice to Israel seem to ignore the oft-stated intention of Iran and its satellites in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to eliminate the Jewish state and its people. Israel’s friends often appear to discount the fact that the nation has been fighting for its very existence from the moment it was established and that the fight is far from won.

They either fail to appreciate or simply do not believe that Iran has the West and its democratic way of life in its sights just as much as Israel and that by battling the Iranian octopus, Israel is fighting for the West as much as for its own continued existence. 

Biden's response to the deteriorating situation

This lack of perspective has marked much of Biden’s reaction to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Middle East. Biden had grown increasingly frustrated as Netanyahu appeared to brush off his advice and reject his attempts to reduce the escalation. Until October 9, when a phone call was arranged between him and Netanyahu, the two leaders had not spoken for 49 days. 

Biden was apparently angered at Israel’s failure to provide advance warning of either the exploding pager operation (for which Israel has never claimed responsibility) or the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. On October 1, 2024, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli targets, and Biden was determined not to be left in the dark about how Netanyahu planned to respond – hence their 30-minute telephone conversation.

Washington has remained tight-lipped about what they said to each other. Vice President Kamala Harris joined the call but, in a TV interview afterward, refused to provide any details, describing it as “classified.” The most she would say was, “It was an important call.”

One visitor to the White House at the time of the conversation was Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris, who was in Washington to mark 100 years of US-Ireland diplomatic ties. He told reporters that Biden “left me in no doubt” that his call with Netanyahu was “a conversation of substance and of depth, in terms of actions that Israel needs to take, in terms of aid, humanitarian aid, in terms of bringing about a ceasefire,” presumably in Gaza.

Reported by CNN, “actions that Israel needs to take” is a direct quote by Harris, and it betrays the mindset of those who regard Israel as an ally but fail to appreciate that Israel’s best interests as perceived from Washington or London are different, sometimes radically so, from the view from Jerusalem. A valid question is: Who is better able to assess Israel’s best interests – well-meaning friends or Israel itself?

On October 8, Commentary turned the issue of Biden’s frustration with Israel on its head. His problem, the magazine pointed out, was not Israel’s defiance. It was Iran’s.

Israel resisted going into Gaza, it said, until Hamas got tired of waiting and invaded Israel instead. Nor did Israel go into Lebanon until, by way of Hezbollah’s missile campaign, Iran made clear that it would be the only way to return 60,000 displaced Israelis to their homes in the North. Iran-backed attacks, the journal said, have continued also from Iraq and Yemen, as well as from Iran itself.

“Nobody has been asking Biden or Harris why the Iranians don’t listen to them,” the journal noted that Qatar doesn’t follow US advice, nor does Egypt, Turkey, or the Palestinian Authority. We only seem to ask about US influence, says Commentary, in connection with “the one country under assault and surrounded by genocidal enemies: Israel.”

On October 15, news broke of a letter from Washington, dated two days previously, stating that if Israel did not significantly increase humanitarian aid to Gaza within the following 30 days, some unpleasant, though unspecified, action would follow. The 30 days encompass the date of the forthcoming US presidential election, and whether the letter is in any way related to that momentous event is anybody’s guess.

The prestigious British journal The Spectator carried an article by Douglas Murray on October 4 headlined: “Why Israel was right to ignore international advice.” It begins by setting down the picture of recent events in the Middle East as purveyed to the UK public.

“If you follow most of the British media,” wrote Murray, “you may well think that the past year involves the following events: Israel attacked Hamas, Israel invaded Lebanon, Israel bombed Yemen. Oh, and someone left a bomb in a room in Tehran that killed the peaceful Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh.

“Of course,” he continues, “all this is an absolute inversion of the truth. Hamas invaded Israel, so Israel attacked Hamas. Hezbollah has spent the past year sending thousands of rockets into Israel, so Israel has responded by destroying Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen – now so beloved of demonstrators in the UK – sent missiles and drones hundreds of miles to attack Israel, so Israel bombed the Houthis’s arms stores in Yemen. And Hamas leader Haniyeh… never brought the Palestinian people anything but misery.”

As Murray observes: “All this time the governments in Britain and America have given the Israelis advice which mercifully they did not listen to. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Hamas’s Gaza stronghold in Rafah. 

“Fortunately the Israelis did not listen to Kamala’s beginners’ guide to Rafah. They went into the Hamas stronghold, continued to search for the hostages, continued to kill Hamas’s leadership, and continued to destroy the rocket and other ammunition stores that Hamas has built up for 18 years.”

The nub of Murray’s argument is: “The wisdom of the international community is that ceasefires are always desirable, that negotiated settlements are always to be desired, and that violence is never the answer. As so often, these wise international voices have no idea what they are talking about. 

“Israel’s enemies have spent the past year trying to destroy it, as they have so many times before. But it is they who have gone to the dust, with the regime in Tehran the only thing that is, for the time being, still standing… Sometimes you need war to make peace. Sometime there is a price to pay for trying to finish the work of Adolf Hitler.”

The writer is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. His latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.