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Peace, Deterrence and Other Gods that Failed

(Wall Street Journal) Elliot Kaufman - On Saturday, a jihadist invasion of Israel shattered as many illusions as it has lives. Israelis had learned to live with a genocidal terrorist group next door in Gaza that seeks to kill Israel's Jews any way it can. They took a series of defensive measures: a blockade to keep weapons out, a missile-defense system to shoot down rockets, and, when those rockets got out of hand, brief campaigns of targeted strikes to quiet Hamas down. To force out Hamas, Israel might have had to govern Gaza itself, and those in the safe Western democracies would have screamed bloody murder, deeming it "bad for peace." But as the Jewish tradition teaches, whoever is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind. A perverse alternative reality was constructed in which every Israeli response to the threat from Hamas was illegal, immoral and disproportionate, a war crime. The terrorists themselves - the ones live-streaming their slaughter and mutilation of defenseless Jewish civilians to shouts of "Allahu akbar" - were politely termed "militants." Israel was even condemned for using force to stop Hamas' previous attempts to rush the border. Gullible Western media described those would-be infiltrators as "protesters."
2023-10-11 00:00:00
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