Israel may sometimes look like a sitting duck while it watches and waits as Iran and Hezbollah, with their worthy patrons Russia and China behind them, howl for Israel’s destruction.
But Israel is watching and waiting because it knows its strength. It is prepared for any eventuality. Today, its military readiness is exemplary. Its intelligence services are at the height of their powers. The home front is concerned but determined, going about their lives more or less as normal.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has promised that Hezbollah will come to a bad end if it tries anything. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged a decisive retaliatory attack on Iran, if necessary.
Yet Iran and Hezbollah bluster on, because their threats are not really about revenge but their raison d’être of destroying Israel.
This is but the latest iteration of an age-old hate. It has simply acquired modern weapons and a vicious religious bigotry—a hatred capable of slaughtering women and babies, of rape and kidnapping, of outright massacre. And not just on Oct. 7, but always, for decades, for centuries.
The Oct. 7 war continues, with Iran, through Hezbollah, continuing to attack the north of Israel, from which more than 100,000 Israelis have been displaced. They have made clear that they will not return home to be targeted every day by Hezbollah’s rockets, missiles, and threats of an invasion worse than Oct. 7. Israel knows that, eventually, it will have to take serious action against the terror group.
The attacks go on and Iran continues to bluster, making blithering threats of Israel’s destruction. Iran’s strategy is clear: To use Hezbollah as a sword and shield while the Islamist regime closes in on a nuclear weapon.
But the Iranian regime cares about more than destroying Israel. It cares about its shadow fleet that bypasses sanctions and trades millions of barrels of oil a day with the likes of Russia and China. It cares about its nuclear and military facilities. It cares above all about protecting itself from the wrath of its own people. Perhaps it is time to unleash that wrath.
The Iranian people are fed up with the arrogance of a regime they hate, just as the people of Lebanon largely do not want to be hapless human shields in the hands of the mad terrorists of Hezbollah.
Israel knows this. And it knows that there is no point in trying to reach absurd and useless “ceasefire” agreements with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah. No “ceasefire” will convince the residents of the north to return home with Hezbollah still on the border.
The world should learn from this. It should not be reassured by the idea of a nice, new agreement with Iran that will hand the mullahs billions of dollars in sanctions relief and, eventually, a nuclear weapon.
At the moment, the whole world is talking about the Taylor Swift concert in Austria that had to be canceled due to threats from Muslim fundamentalists. Israel is not a concert. It is the state of the Jewish people, forever. It cannot and will not be canceled. It’s time for the world to understand this.
