Friday, December 13, 2024

The Age-Old Curse of ‘Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself’

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, December 12, 2024

 

Israel is closer to a hostage deal today because of a key concession reportedly made by Hamas: The terror group has accepted that Israeli troops will stay in parts of Gaza during the ensuing cease-fire.

 

This is what happens when you win a war: Your bargaining position is a lot stronger. That used to be obvious to Western powers, but in the year 2024 it counts as a revelation.

 

Relatedly, what kind of concession is this? It is technically a concession to Israel, sure. But really, it’s a concession to reality.

 

Further, it shows how far we’ve lowered the bar for what counts as a “concession.” There are Americans still being held hostage by Hamas and its friends in Gaza. The American position should not be to seek minimum-effort “concessions” but to put our foot on the neck of the defeated, weak remnants of Hamas and leave it there until we get our hostages back.

 

That we’re content with mediating a cease-fire and treating the dregs of Hamas as honest diplomatic brokers is indicative of an increasingly common tactic in which the world fabricates a false equivalence between Israel and whoever Israel is up against.

 

And nowhere can this bootleg equivalence be seen more clearly than in the phrase: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

 

As opposed to what, exactly? Self-defense is a universal right. If Israel is attacked it has an obligation to defend itself.

 

Thankfully, “Israel has a right to defend itself” is going out of style. On the anti-Israel side, a growing amount of energy is being expended to argue that Israel does not in fact have any such right. This helps us identify whose anti-Zionist brain rot has become irreversible and thus can be ignored by civilized society. On the pro-Israel side, advocates are becoming increasingly annoyed by the stupidity of the reliance on “Israel has a right to defend itself,” which essentially treats as legitimate the question of whether the Jewish state’s citizens are human.

 

This debate came up again as Israel began taking out loose chemical weapons and conventional arms caches in Syria after the fall of the house of Assad earlier this week. The complaint: This isn’t self-defense! The implication being that Israel has a right to self-defense only.

 

According to this logic, Israel must wait until it is attacked with chemical weapons. Only then may it hit back.

 

The same, then, I suppose goes for Iranian nukes. Once Israel is destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, it may bomb Iran.

 

The senselessness of this position is obvious, so why do people still hold it? One answer is that, as many have said throughout the past 76 years, Israel is the Jew of the world. That is, for 2,000 years rights and privileges that were otherwise available to everyone could be withheld at random from Jews. Now that there’s a state of Israel, those exceptions are applied to international laws and norms as well.

 

Indeed, Jews should bristle at the condescending declarations that we have a right to defend ourselves, just as we do every year on the holiday that marks the introduction of that wretched phrase into our story.

 

Purim celebrates that the Jews of Persia were saved from destruction. The evil royal adviser Haman convinced the king to seal a decree that on a certain day, Jews should be killed and their property taken. When Queen Esther turns the tables on Haman, the king issues a new decree: The Jews can and should defend themselves against any and all who come to kill them.

 

The obvious question is asked: Why didn’t the king simply revoke the earlier decree? The answer: Royal decrees could not be revoked, but they could be countered by new decrees. Therefore, rather than prevent the masses from trying to kill the Jews, the king simply responded by saying that the people of Israel have a right to defend themselves.

 

This is what the Jewish people have been living with ever since. When our fate is left up to the nations of the world who continue to see us as their subjects and not their equals, the best we get is that we may defend ourselves.

 

Of course Israel has a right to defend itself. It also has a right to defeat its enemies and safeguard the lives of its people. If it were up to others, Hamas would be alive and well, as would Hezbollah. The world is a better place when Jews assert their basic rights and obligations.

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