Israel shows when we resist terror, civilisation wins
by Charles Moore, Telegraph:
The killing of Nasrallah will stand in history as a perpetual warning.
Actions speak louder than words, it is often said, but when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations last Friday, he combined both, to maximum effect.
As he was eloquently rebuking most member states for their cowardice and hypocrisy in the face of the terror of Hamas, Hezbollah and those groups’ beloved godfather, Iran, he was also waiting for the news that his country’s forces had finally blown up, at his orders, Hezbollah’s leader of more than 30 years, Hassan Nasrallah, and with him a clutch of his most important lieutenants.
Obviously, the extraordinary events of the past fortnight have been widely reported, but their significance has been grossly underplayed. Taken together, what with the pagers and the walkie-talkies and the killing of leader after terrorist leader, they are Israel’s greatest success since 1967’s Six Day War.
In order to understand why they matter so much, one needs to understand what revolutionaries call “the propaganda of the deed”. And to understand that, one needs to go back to the propaganda of the deeds of October 7 last year. Although the Hamas massacres, rapes and kidnappings were a feast of hot sadistic rage, they also had a chilling political purpose. “We can do this,” Hamas was saying, “and no one can stop us.”
They calculated, and they were not wrong, that the world would be awed. Islamists, including many in the West, would be elated and further radicalised. Moderate Arab regimes would be scared. The Western democracies, after expressing some distaste, would quickly switch back to their default position of begging Israel not to do anything much about it and then, when Israel did do something, calling for an immediate ceasefire. The Biden administration played its favourite trick of supplying weapons and then trying to prevent their use.
Hamas – and then Hezbollah, who quickly came in behind their uneasy ally – also calculated that the outside world would condemn Israel’s “overreaction” even before it had reacted militarily at all.
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