Israel Has a Right to Win

“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Kamala told CNN. And then insisted that the “war must end.”

What Kamala was really saying was that Israel has a right to defend itself against an attack, but it doesn’t have a right to win.

Democrats and some Republicans have offered the same formulaic responses since Oct 7.

And long before that.

“Israel has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks,” Obama said in 2014 before calling for a ceasefire. Israel has a right to defend itself, Bush and Clinton used to say before urging a quick end to the fighting in order to make a deal with the terrorists Israel is defending itself against.

Israel has a right to defend itself is the bare minimum allotted to anyone. Everyone has a right to defend themselves when they are attacked. Agreeing to it is not a pro-Israel statement. It is at best a neutral position to which the alternative position is that the Israelis should have allowed themselves to be overrun, destroyed and massacred, men, women and children, on Oct 7.

Anything less than the assertion that Israel has a right to defend itself is a declaration that it deserves to be destroyed. And that is the state of the debate within the Democratic Party.

On one side are the supporters of a two-state solution who want to split Israel between the Jews and the Islamic terrorists. Every time the terrorists invade and kill Jews, the Israeli army would have the right to briefly defend the country before the politicians make a new deal with the terrorists. On the other side are the one-state solution backers who don’t believe Israel has a right to exist and therefore no right to defend itself and support the Islamic terrorists who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ in their quest to destroy it by any means from BDS to genocide.

The ‘extremists’ want Israel gone now while the ‘moderates’ want Israel to keep making deals with terrorists until it ceases to exist. Along the way it’ll have plenty of chances to defend itself on a diminishing amount of territory using static defenses that the enemy will plot to subvert.

Israel does not need a right to defend itself. It needs a right to win.

The right to defend yourself is the right to be penned up in a ghetto while murderers roam outside. It’s the right to spend billions of dollars on elaborate defenses like the Gaza border wall or Iron Dome that, like any alarm system or wall, only work until the terrorists find a way around them. It’s the right to be constantly hunted, to be always on the defensive, and always afraid.

That’s no right at all.

The Nazis were not defeated with the right of defense, but the right of offense. Wars don’t end when the invaded are given a right to fight for a few weeks before calling it a draw. Wars end when one side actually has the power to do more than defend itself, but to fight back and win.

When Netanyahu spoke to Congress about “total victory”, the political establishment ridiculed and dismissed the prospect of defeating Hamas in favor of a deal with the terrorist group. That deal, known as a ‘ceasefire’ after the cycle of ceasefires with Hamas initiated by Obama, would allow the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood Jihadists to regroup, rearm and attack again.

“In some respects, we are struggling over what the theory of victory is. Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of… a sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a NATO summit. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”

The Biden administration and NATO leaders did not display this sort of skepticism towards Zelensky’s promises of victory against Russia. When the Ukrainian leader recently promised to present a “victory plan” to the Biden administration, the move was met with applause.

The Biden-Harris administration and the European Union believe that Ukraine has the right to win while Israel only has the right to defend itself. That is the fundamental difference between the treatment of Ukraine and Israel, and the treatment of their two wars.

Ukraine’s demands for bigger and deadlier weapons systems, including tanks and jets, were swiftly met even while the Biden-Harris administration cut off or ‘slow walked’ more basic weapons deliveries to Israel to force it to slow down offensive operations including in Rafah. Those pressure campaigns allowed Hamas to hold on to and murder captured hostages.

That’s what the “right to win” looks like as opposed to the paltry “right to defend itself.”

Every time Ukraine pushed further or opened a new front in the war, including going into Russia, there was applause, rather than warnings about “escalation”. But every phase of Israel’s military campaign, including the push into Rafah where the hostages and tunnels were, was marked by pressure campaigns and warnings about the danger of “escalation” in the Middle East.

Ukraine attacking a nuclear world power isn’t “escalation”, Israel taking out a Hamas leader is.

The political establishment believes that Ukraine has the right to do more than just throw back invading armies, but believes that Israel’s rights are limited to defending and maintaining its 1948 borders, that it must surrender of all its Six Day War borders, including half of Jerusalem, to Islamic terrorists and then promise them everything else they ask for to end the fighting.

And when the terrorists attack anyway, Israel will have the “right to defend itself” for a week or two. Then it’ll be time for another “ceasefire”, more negotiations and more surrenders.

Kamala and the political establishment are wrong. Israel does not have a “right to defend itself”, it has a right and a duty to go on the offensive and win. It has a right and a duty to utterly defeat and destroy every single Islamic terrorist organization at war with it. It has a right and a duty to secure whatever territory the terrorists were using for their operations including the Philadelphi corridor on the border which Egypt used to deliver massive amounts of weapons to Hamas.

That’s the least of what winning means.

In 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israel undertook to win. In those first three decades, it won and emerged stronger for it. In the next terrible four decades, it lost land, ambition and safety in a failed search for a peace that could never come on any terms other than its own strength.

Defense was traded for offense. Conflicts were to be managed. A weakening deterrence would reduce the scope of any individual exchange of fire. The United States and the Europeans would offer “guarantees” in exchange for a perpetual process of peace negotiations and war.

That was Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

On Oct 7, Israel hit bottom. The cost of peace at any price was no longer just the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza, rockets falling on major cities or a worldwide campaign of demonization by its ‘peace partners’, but a new invasion of Israel. Out of that horror rises a single fundamental question, will Israel remain on the defensive or will it fight to win.

The right to defend itself is Israel’s slow suicide. Survival rests on the right to win.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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