Israel’s victory is America’s, too — or should be.
Israel’s victory is America’s, too — or should be.
N ot long ago, it was the revolutionary socialist left and sundry other skeptics of the Western liberal covenant who dissolved into apoplectic puddles whenever anyone was gauche enough to celebrate the Israeli pager operation that targeted Hezbollah fighters and operatives.
It was, for example, a display of “shameless depravity,” according to the World Socialist Web Site’s Landon Gourov, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented Senator John Fetterman with a silver-plated beeper commemorating the operation. Indeed, “the gift-exchange bears resemblance to events at the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II.” Gourov saw no distinction between the Israeli leader’s swagger and Nazi SS officers’ fetishizing the vivisected remains of the Jews they’d tortured and murdered.
There’s an elementary distinction here that Gourov and his audience failed to observe. Whereas the Nazis rounded up millions of civilians for the purposes of exterminating them and erasing their creed from the face of the planet, the Israelis pulled off one of the most discreet and legitimate military operations in history.
In a war that Hamas inaugurated and Hezbollah joined, Israel executed a plot that was years in the making. Over the course of a decade, the Israelis managed to manufacture and sell pagers and walkie-talkies designed for use in military operations to Hezbollah operatives. Indeed, the terrorist group relied on those low-tech means of communication to bypass Israeli electronic eavesdropping. When they detonated over the course of several days, they did so overwhelmingly — almost exclusively — in the hands and pockets of the terrorist organization’s militants, scouts, and commanders. Even the media outlets that set out to paint a sympathetic portrait of Israel’s targets were compelled to note that the injured, including minors, were engaged in active operations for Hezbollah.
To make the elusive distinction plainer: Israel targeted terrorists in one of the most logistically impressive and morally righteous military-intelligence operations ever, and it did so amid its prosecution of a defensive war that it did not seek. The Nazis, by contrast, massacred millions in an offensive war designed to reshape not only the geopolitical landscape but also the very composition of the human race. Hope that helps.
It is, however, a sign of the times that arguments that were once exclusive to the morally blind left are finding a receptive audience on the right.
Take Buckley Carlson, a political strategist and brother to the famous podcaster, who recently achieved online virality by rending garments over another ceremonial pager that Netanyahu gave to President Trump.
“If Saudi’s [sic] King Fahd had presented to U.S. President Bush a golden box cutter for display in the Oval Office in March of ’03, would it have seemed plausible for him to declare he was our ‘greatest friend and greatest ally?’” he asked. “Would the [U.S. Secret Service] have detained him on the spot?”
Leave aside the vaguely alien locution (who ever called him “U.S. President Bush”?), we’re confronted with the same moral inversion that plagued our confounded socialist. Even if you accept the implicit premise that the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is unquestionably implicated in the 9/11 attacks, the analogy doesn’t make sense. Why doesn’t it make sense? Because the hijackers used those box cutters to kill Americans, which would presumably offend the American president.
The pagers, it is worth noting, were used to neutralize terrorist operatives with an organization that, you know, also killed Americans. One would have to presume that most Americans would not look upon that outcome with displeasure. But rationality rarely intrudes when the subject at hand is the Jews and their nefarious plots.
The humor website the Babylon Bee recently posted a parodic article headlined, “Megyn Kelly Gets Rid Of Old Pager Just To Be Safe.” It was supposed to poke fun at how anti-Israeli voices like Candace Owens (whom, along with Tucker Carlson, Kelly has refused to criticize) constantly say Israel might assassinate them. The joke didn’t land and was subsequently deleted, perhaps because it seemed to validate the notion that Israel wantonly executes its critics.
But the piece did occasion some unsolicited self-incrimination.
“The Tel Aviv Bee deleted its ‘joke’ because this time they aimed at the wrong person,” the constitutionally anti-Israel commentator Glenn Greenwald inveighed. “But ever since Israel blew up the hands and groins of thousands, including children (claiming they were all ‘terrorists’), murdering people by pager has become the hilarious Zionist joke.” Gracing his remark was a link to an article published in the outlet he co-founded, The Intercept, accusing Fetterman and Netanyahu of indulging in a “ghoulish” celebration of Israel’s military victory.
Israel did not need to devote years and countless resources to the pager operation to neutralize Hezbollah. Tanks, infantry, and air strikes would have done the trick, too, albeit with the prospect of substantially more collateral damage. Rather, the Jewish state defended itself in one of the more discriminating and humane ways any state ever has. Israel’s victory is America’s, too, and it deserves applause. After all, many of Jerusalem’s targets had the blood of U.S. citizens on their hands.
The fact that so many on the fringes of both ends of the political spectrum cannot allow themselves to celebrate that civilizational achievement is a sad testament to the strength of the compulsion to which they’ve succumbed. But it’s not tragic. They’re telling on themselves. We should be grateful for the advance warning.