OPINION:
On Oct. 7, the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the terrorist group Hamas made an unprovoked attack on Israel by land, sea and air. Thousands of rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli civilians and military bases, Hamas members flew paragliders into Israel, and a great many of its ground troops forcibly entered Israel.
As of Thursday morning, at least 1,200 Israelis have been killed and over 2,000 wounded. Some were massacred in their own homes. About 250 were slaughtered while attending the Supernova music festival.
As many as 150 hostages, including Israeli soldiers, have been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. Unless they are rescued quickly, they will all be killed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed Thursday morning that at least 25 Americans were killed by Hamas in the invasion. Some may be among the hostages.
Rape and torture are common Hamas tactics. As the Israeli Defense Forces reported, Hamas published a video of its members beheading captured Israeli soldiers. In Kfar Aza, Hamas killed at least 40 children, some of them babies.
Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad said that Iran had given its support to the Hamas terrorists. Iran reportedly funded and armed the terrorists and helped plan the attack. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the principal terror agency of the ayatollahs, reportedly gave final approval at an Oct. 2 meeting with Hamas in Beirut.
In criticizing President Biden’s payment of a $6 billion ransom for five American hostages on Aug. 22, this column pointed out that Iran could — and said at the time it would — use the money any way it wanted. It’s impossible to prove that the money Mr. Biden sent Iran paid for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, but it’s also impossible to prove that it didn’t.
Israel was surprised by the attack, which means there was a massive failure of its vaunted intelligence services. It was, in the words of several Israeli officials, their 9/11. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was at war, which Mr. Netanyahu’s Cabinet confirmed by declaring war on Hamas. Warning Palestinians to leave Gaza immediately, Mr. Netanyahu vowed that “the enemy will pay a price it has never known before.”
It should.
Israel faces a grim, long and hard fight that may become a two-front war. The terrorist group Hezbollah (literally the “party of God”) has fired mortars into Israel from Lebanon, which was answered by Israeli artillery. This could be the precursor of a huge escalation of the Hamas war. Hezbollah may still attack Israel, but only the Iranians know for sure.
That’s because Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah are wholly controlled proxies of the Iranian regime. They do nothing that is not ordered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On Oct. 8, the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, Gen. Mohammad Bageri, celebrated the “sacred wrath” of the Hamas war and said that it would ultimately result in the “crumbling” of Israeli’s “Zionist regime.”
As I wrote on this page on Sept. 12, 2001, as there should not have been any thought of “proportionality” in our response to the 9/11 attacks, neither should there be now in Israel’s response. The only proper response is proportionate to the attacked nation’s might, not the enemy’s purported weakness.
Some pundits and some Israelis are saying that Israel should wipe out Hamas for good. This idea gravely misunderstands the conflict, because there will always be Islamist terrorists whose objective is to wipe Israel off the map. If every Hamas member were killed, another group will rise in its place because this is, at its core, a religious war.
This not only a religious war but also a political one based on a fiction that has dominated Western thinking about the Middle East for decades. The Palestinians are a perpetual victim class and nothing is otherwise permitted to be said.
The Oct. 7 attack should disprove that fiction for good. The Palestinians are a protected class because Arab nations have found that they are a convenient political tool for them to maintain hostilities with Israel.
Many Western nations have fallen for that ploy, including the United States under many presidents. It was then-President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords that exploded the Palestinians’ mythology, and President Biden has done nothing other than impeding their spread by pressuring the Israelis to grant concessions to the Palestinians.
Hamas’ attack sought not only to kill Israelis but also to assert Palestinian relevance. As the Abraham Accords proved, the Palestinians are irrelevant to peace between Israel and the Arab states. All Hamas can accomplish is to delay the normalization of negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Israel or cause them to be canceled.
So far, the battle favors the Israelis. Hundreds of airstrikes on Gaza have been accompanied by a cutoff of fuel, water and electricity in the Gaza Strip. On Oct. 8, Israel’s equivalent of our Navy SEALs — its “Squadron 13” — reportedly captured Hamas naval force commander Muhammad Abu Ghali. Israeli Defense Forces are now massing troops for a counterattack on the Gaza Strip that will probably begin before you read this.
There can be no peace in the Middle East while the ayatollahs reign in Iran. We must, as we do, stand with Israel.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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