I also think Netanyahu was right to go on offensive and take a maximalist response to the events of October 7. Over the past few decades, Iran has methodically built a noose around Israel with terror armies and advanced weaponry. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has declared that Israel will not exist in 2040, but he’s been patient about how to achieve his life-defining goal. For example, he’s worked relentlessly to build a nuclear program, but he’s been willing to stay just on the cusp of building the bomb until the conditions are right.
For decades, both Israel and the US were willing to tolerate the noose. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on October 7. Israel learnt, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.
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Occasionally I see lawn signs asserting that “war is not the answer”, but here was a circumstance in which war was the answer. Here was a circumstance in which the raw power really mattered. Israel was able to beat the once feared Hezbollah because it is more effective and more powerful. Iran has responded feebly to the bombing raids not because of the kindness of its heart but because it is ineffective and less powerful.
While many people have overestimated Hezbollah’s and Iran’s capacities, Netanyahu and Trump — ruthless bullies both — seem to have some ability to smell weakness. Other American administrations imagined they could neuter revolutionary Iran through some sort of negotiation, but for over 40 years Iran has relentlessly refused a rapprochement with the West.
Netanyahu was also right to understand that sometimes it’s more important to defeat a narrative than to defeat an army. One crucial divide in the Arab world is between those nations that have accepted that Israel is a reality, which they have to deal with, and those still who dream that Israel can be wiped off the map. As Jeffrey Goldberg noted in The Atlantic this week, both President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt before the Six-Day War in 1967 and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar before October 7, 2023, seemed to believe that Israel was more of a colonial outpost than a real country. The Jews could be pushed out of Israel the way the Belgians were kicked out of their colonies in Africa.
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In other words, many of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East actually believed the narrative that gets floated among overheated activists on Ivy League campuses. They paid for their belief in that myth by suffering devastating defeats, and in many cases, such as Sinwar’s, they paid for that false belief with their life. They underestimated Israelis’ desire to live on their ancestral homeland and the degree to which Israel is a legitimate nation like any other.
After the events of the past year, it’s hard to believe that anybody could still believe in the narrative that Israel is more colonialist than real country. If the Middle East is ever going to be a more prosperous and peaceful place, it will be because everybody finally acknowledges, even at Columbia, that Israel is not going to be exterminated from the river to the sea.
The final lesson to be learnt, and this is one we seem to have to learn over and over again, is that our enemies are truly our enemies. In the 1930s a great portion of the British establishment traipsed over to Germany and returned claiming that Hitler was a decent enough chap you could do business with. They simply could not acknowledge to themselves the evil inherent in that man, even though he declared it openly in speeches and writings.
This same pattern of denial prevailed in the Western response to Lenin and Stalin, in the way some in the West refused to see Mao as the mass murderer he was, and in the Western response to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. There are many people in the West who can’t believe that our enemies believe what they say they believe. They do not want to stare into the abyss and face the consequences of those realities. Netanyahu, for all has manifold moral failings, is willing to call Iranian reality by its true name and draw the obvious conclusions from that.
No, I’m not turning into a Bibi/Trump admirer. But I do miss the days when liberal hawks roamed the earth. There was a tradition – running from Franklin Roosevelt through Harry Truman, Senator Scoop Jackson and Hillary Clinton – made up of people who championed democracy and human rights, but who also understood that in a dangerous world, American power is a necessary force for stability, peace and civilisation.
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As far as I can see, the liberal hawk tradition died in the wake of the failures of the Iraq War. I look at many of the Democratic responses to the US bombing of Iran and the following thought occurs to me: Many of these people instinctively assume that American power is the primary problem in the world. Many of these people seem to assume that if Trump does it, it must be bad, and no independent thinking is required. Truman and Ronald Reagan believed in using American power to ward off foreign threats. These people, on the other hand, talk as if their mission is to protect the world from the threat of American might. A party beholden to these prejudices is simply unfit to govern what is still the world’s leading superpower.
I’ll say it again: I detest Bibi and Trump. I worry that Team Trump lacks the attention span and competence to handle a complicated international crisis. But it would be a catastrophe if those of us who oppose Netanyahu and Trump concluded that we have to be against everything they are for. That would mean withdrawing from the world and letting the wolves run free.
