Israel At War To Bring Peace

Israelis visit the Nova Music Festival site in remembrance of the Horrors   Getty Images

"Despite the slaughter, pillaging and rapes committed by Hamas and many of its fellow Gazans, the international outbreak of antisemitism and the deaths of its soldiers in the ensuing war, Israel is stronger now than it was before October 7, 2023."

"Recall the circumstances before that terrible day. Israel was surrounded by a ring of united enemies avowedly dedicated to its destruction."

"Iran was moving toward nuclearization, referring to Israel as a one-bomb country given its size and repeatedly declaring its intention to eliminate the Jewish state."

"Israel was paralyzed from fighting back because it was in the crosshairs of Hezbollah's 150,000 missiles stationed across the border in Lebanon." 

Howard Levitt, National Post 

Getty Images

 

The attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists when an estimated five thousand of their operatives flooded across the border from Gaza into southern Israel, followed by any number of Palestinian civilians eager to take part in the savage bedlam that was to ensue, was as though an earthquake had shaken the foundation of the Jewish State. The tsunami that followed after the sadistic bloodletting and mass rapes, with Israel's government dispatching the Israel Defense Forces into the Gaza Strip to root out the terrorists, their enclaves, command posts, leadership while destroying their network of tunnels also served to divide Israelis.

 

Newly recruited fighters who joined a Houthi military force intended to be sent to fight in support of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, march during a parade in Sanaa, Yemen.

(photo credit: REUTERS/KHALED ABDULLAH)

 

Those Israelis whose loved ones had been kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, from the farming Kibbutzim, demanded that their government focus primarily on returning the hostages to their families. Hunting down the criminal malefactors who savaged the country in a chaotic melee of bloodletting that took the lives of over 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers and foreign farm workers should be secondary, they insisted. From the very moment that a stunned Israel began assessing the attack and the country's losses demonstrations roiled the country.

 

The government leaders who focused on neutering and eliminating the existential threats that surfaced and resurfaced endlessly by Palestinian leaders nourishing their populations on hate, inciting them to become blessed martyrs in the battle against Israel's existence were damned and condemned by a large segment of the population that demanded conflict be halted and negotiations for hostage return be implemented at any cost to the future of the state. The country divided itself left and right, and no reconciliation was possible for the year and a half since the tragedy.

 

On the positive side, the periodic wars that Israel faced, the regular missile attacks that disrupted Israeli airspace and fell close to and occasionally on border communities from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank alongside terror attacks within Israel from Palestinian infiltration intent on wreaking as many deaths of Jews as possible was finally being extirpated with the no-holds-barred incursion of the IDF into both territories. Israel was amending the loss of its military omnipotence advantage destroyed by October 7.

 

Many of Hezbollah's top leaders, including its long-time chief Hassan Nasrallah, were killed in air strikes in Beirut's southern suburbs

Moving on two fronts to respond to Hezbollah's missiles into northern Israel in solidarity with its Hamas allies, then the Houthis from Yemen, and finally Iran itself, Israel found itself competently and urgently destroying its enemies' capabilities to inflict ongoing destruction by targeting leading terrorist leaders for assassination, by bombing weapons depots, by ignoring the condemnation from the West and targeting civilian complexes where terrorist groups set up their command posts to maximize the destructive punishment it promised its enemies.

 

The tunnels throughout Gaza became tombs for the terrorists who sequestered themselves therein, blown up along with their weapons depots. Senior Hezbollah operatives were killed or injured when Israeli-produced pagers were detonated last September. Israeli warplanes  attacked the massive Hezbollah missile caches, in a stroke of military prowess destroying much of the terrorist group's Iran-provided arsenal of missiles. 

 

Israel rigged thousands of pagers with explosives and detonated them remotely on 17 September  AFP

Iran learned to its disbelief after launching missiles into Israel, that the counterattacks by Israel were capable of destroying its missile capacity, wiping out air defences and leaving Iran in fear of the next Israeli attack on its nuclear installations. The opposition in Syria, with a weakened Hezbollah took advantage of this created opportunity to oppose and remove Bashar al Assad in Syria. And though the victorious Syrian Sunni groups have now taken Syria from the Shiite Alawites, there have been no attacks on Israel from that quarter.

 

Israel has been demonstrating to the world at large -- always prepared to criticize and demand of Israel forbearance that none of them would ever exercise were they to be attacked as Israel has always been -- that it is, and remains fully capable of defending itself. Interestingly, while Israel has made inroads in establishing peaceful relations with a growing number of Muslim states in the Middle East and beyond, with more expressing tentative interest in joining that number in the Abraham Accords as they disown terrorism, the West has allowed itself to be infiltrated by Islamist groups threatening disequilibrium in democratic nations. 

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is seen on posters in Beirut. Iran is Hezbollah's main backer.