The Profound Wisdom of ‘Don’t Start a War with Israel’

By Seth Mandel

Friday, April 11, 2025

 

Brett McGurk gave a deceptively simple answer when the Times of Israel asked him what the lessons of Oct. 7, 2023 and the ensuing conflict were.

 

“Don’t start a war with Israel,” the former National Security Council official said.

 

One is tempted to say that that’s an obvious statement, but folks keep starting wars with Israel anyway, and will continue to do so. And that is why there is something more profound behind McGurk’s statement: You can learn a lot about an entity by examining why it has started a war with Israel.

 

McGurk’s plain meaning was that Israel can be a devastating military opponent. “Ask Sinwar, Nasrallah or Khamenei how they’re doing today compared to October 6,” he added, suggesting that Israel, like the Mounties, always gets its man.

 

That, however, only works as a deterrent to those who don’t want to lose.

 

Case in point: Egypt. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 arguably made the case that Egypt should stop going to war with the Jewish state, that Israel had convincingly displayed its permanence. But there was no doubt after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After all, that was the war in which Egypt, not Israel, had the element of surprise. And yet afterwards Egypt still had to negotiate to get its land back.

 

Egypt’s decision to bow out of the “destroy Israel or die trying” party meant Syria would be at a steep disadvantage if it ever decided to invade Israel again in the future. So even though there wasn’t a peace deal between Israel and Syria (as there was between Israel and Egypt), Damascus and Jerusalem have since avoided all-out war. That doesn’t mean the now-deposed Assad family had accepted Israel’s legitimacy. It means the Assads knew their window of opportunity to defeat Israel in war had long gone by.

 

Jordan was never all that enthusiastic about fighting Israel after the 1948 War of Independence, so the Hashemite Kingdom arguably didn’t even need to learn its lesson firsthand. Amman has found it quite easy to abide by the principle of “don’t start a war with Israel.”

 

Lebanon is a basket case but its only elements that start wars with Israel answer to Iran. Tehran’s proxy, Hezbollah, knows you don’t start a war with Israel unless you’re prepared to lose. But Hezbollah isn’t concerned about what happens to Lebanon, because it is an agent of Iran.

 

And herein lies the lesson: The entities that still start wars with Israel know the devastation that is headed their way from the start. The devastation is the point. Hezbollah wants to see death and destruction come to Lebanon, because “Lebanon” as a concept is meaningless to it. Hezbollah is engaged in the practice of human sacrifice.

 

Obviously the same is true of Hamas in Gaza. It was swimming in money, enough cash to turn the Gaza Strip into an oasis of peace and plenty. Prosperity was practically handed to Gaza on a silver platter, and Hamas’s response was to melt down that platter and shape it into a rocket to fire at Israel.

 

All of Gaza is, as far as Hamas is concerned, solely a military base with a hostage prison.

 

So why do Hamas and Hezbollah want to start wars with Israel when they know how those wars will end? Because undermining Israel’s legitimacy is their goal, so starting wars with Israel means there’ll be destruction that can and will be blamed on Israel. For the purposes of Hamas and Hezbollah, having the nations of the world simply parrot their own obvious disinformation and propaganda makes it impossible for them to stop fighting the Jews. They can do whatever they want and the world will blame Israel for it.

 

Meanwhile, every day we find new proof that the casualty figures dictated by Hamas to major media were completely made up, but those reporters and editors repeat them anyway. Hamas can get rich by stealing the Palestinians’ food aid and the world will blame Israel.

 

The only reason anyone—and there are no modern exceptions to this, none—starts a war with Israel is to immiserate their own citizens as well as Israelis. That’s it. That’s the importance of McGurk’s remark. Those who attack Israel want their own people to suffer, and they expect to receive the world’s collusion in making their own people suffer.

 

To this day, anyone who wants peace with Israel has been granted it. The world’s indulgence of Hamas and Hezbollah creates a support structure not for peaceful nations but mainly for those who want to kill their own population.