Israel has played the game of hope and change long enough

OPINION:

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had a choice to make. It was 1972, and Israeli athletes had just been murdered at the Summer Olympics in Munich. Echoes of the Holocaust resounded after the Black September massacre.

The prime minister responded by unleashing a clandestine operation code-named “Wrath of God” to kill the terrorists hiding in multiple countries. When Israel had carried out these targeted assassinations, it turned its sights on other enemies who had killed Israelis, including those connected to Iran.

How times have changed. Today, as global elites in media, academia, politics and government bend to terrorist propaganda, Israel is being bludgeoned for defending itself against an enemy that has consistently vowed to destroy it.

It’s time for Israel to ignore the world, the pundits and the protesters. It’s time for Israel to eliminate its Iranian-backed enemies with overwhelming force, including the leaders and operatives of Hamas being harbored far beyond Gaza.

Now is not the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger supported Israelis’ use of overwhelming military force to effect a decisive victory and create the conditions that led to the 1979 peace accords.

President Biden began equivocating on his support for Israel while the words from his Oval Office address were still hanging in the air. The Biden administration has now created a political, military and diplomatic mess for Israel’s leadership that is exchanging clarity of purpose for dangerous vacillation.

Even cultural Jews should be appalled at the global equivocation between Hamas terrorists and Israel being given credibility by the administration and left-wing activists.

Jewish people have learned throughout their history, going back thousands of years, that if they bow to the wider world, they will be butchered.

Israel’s acquiescence to America’s diplomatic and political agendas from administrations of both parties has meant Israelis have lived in a constant state of war with people whose unwavering dedication is to the death of the Jewish state and its people.

Israel has played the game of hope and change long enough.

Israelis hoped working toward a two-state solution, and some modicum of peaceful coexistence was possible. They thought providing the Gaza territory to the Palestinians in 2005 would change the trajectory of the relationship.

They thought providing essential services such as power and water as well as thousands of work visas for struggling Palestinians in Gaza would result in a more hopeful future.

Israel thought that releasing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in 2011 would stop the attacks from the terrorists.

However well-intentioned or coerced by externalities those moves were, they didn’t work.

Since 2006, tens of thousands of rockets and innumerable other attacks have been committed unprovoked by Hamas against Israel. Hezbollah and now Houthi terrorists are part of a global Islamist and leftist crusade against Israel. This past week, even China took the side of Hamas by urging more cease-fires.

Jews have been present in what is today Israel long before Islam was established. Biblical history dispatches the ridiculous notion that Jews are occupiers of the region. The unprovoked terrorist attacks on Israel clearly demonstrate that despite the propaganda, the only group involved in this fight that has faced genocide is the Jewish people.

Now Israel is getting pressure from Mr. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to do what any foreign policy analyst could have told you would happen from the outset: Extend the cease-fire as long as possible so the president can get credit for saving American hostages.

More than 100 hostages have been released, but the only American among them had ties to a major Democratic donor, Hunter Biden art buyer and Biden appointee.

The White House is dangling on a hook baited by Hamas, and the Israelis should go their own way even if it causes strain with the administration.

Israel should not be forced to sacrifice more of its citizens, soldiers, and the justice it deserves to exact so Mr. Biden can have a good press day.

This is a war, and the Israelis need to take a page out of their past.

It will make not only Israel but also other Middle Eastern nations safer. Israel has brought its wrath on Islamic terrorists before, and it needs to do it again without apology.

There should be no safe harbor. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to ignore the world to save Israel and perhaps the world along with it.

• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax and the author of “Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq.”