Israel shows when we resist terror, civilisation wins

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.
Until recently, this propaganda worked. Although, in fact, Israel was doing fairly well in destroying Hamas’s operational capacity in Gaza, this was obscured by the dark cloud of world and media condemnation. The suffering of civilians which Hamas deliberately makes unavoidable by the way it controls Gaza and its chosen means of military operation, using human shields, was presented, for the ensuing year, as almost entirely the fault of Israel.
This false presentation continues, of course, but Hezbollah’s decision to try to drive more than 60,000 Israelis from the north of the country coincided with Israel’s long-planned infiltration/surveillance of its supply chains, its communications, its command structures and its key locations (reaching even into Iran as well as Lebanon). Within less than a fortnight, it hit the lot, with a precision almost unmatched in history.
The consequences include:
There is something else, too. Israel’s actions which culminated in the killing of Nasrallah make September 28 2024 the permanent warning in history to October 7 2023. It is a most powerful reaffirmation of what a free country can achieve because of the skill, courage and – at least when it really matters – unity of its people. Israel’s opponents now look like bloodthirsty idiots. It stands strong.
The fact that Israel has had to defy the world to do this will not surprise those who have observed current attitudes to the Jewish nation, even in its greatest ally, the United States. But it should be no end of a lesson to all of us that when we unambiguously resist terror and tyranny, we will win. And when we don’t, we won’t.
The same lesson applies to our support for Ukraine, and if we do not learn it quickly, we shall be tested closer to home.
In an intermittently glowing obituary of Nasrallah (“courteous, perceptive and funny”, as if he were some twinkly old actor in the Garrick Club), today’s Financial Times, informed us that his inability to pronounce his Rs “was widely viewed as disarming”. Luckily, he failed to disarm the Israelis. Now they have disarmed him, for good.