We are at a decisive moment in the history of the Jews. “Never Again” was the rallying cry of the Jewish people after approximately half the world’s Jews were gassed and incinerated in the death camps of the Third Reich. Six million Jews, along with at least six-million non-Jews who were also murdered by the Nazis (including three million Soviet prisoners of war and as many as 500,000 Romani).

The Jews did not have a state in the 25 centuries between the Persian occupation of the kingdom of Judea of Saul and David and Solomon, and the creation of the State of Israel as an explicitly Jewish country in 1948. For all of that time, the Jews were reviled as “rootless cosmopolitans, usurers and sharpers” because they were excluded from the professions. They had no place of safety from the perennial evils of antisemitism. As Jewish scholar Dara Horn has written, the world “loves dead Jews.” Those that retained a sense of optimistic goodwill, like Anne Frank, expiated the rest of us.

The wars inflicted upon Israel by its Arab neighbors in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — while the existence of the Jewish state was contested — did not aim to kill the entire Jewish people. King Hussein of Jordan and President Sadat of Egypt were civilized statesmen who ultimately composed their differences with Israel. The fanatical Islamic pseudo-theocracy in Iran openly and proudly espouses its objective of destroying the Jewish state and its Jewish population.

This is the first existential challenge the Jews have faced since the defeat of the Nazis. War is odious and tragic, but the spectacle of Israel which has 1.33 per cent of Iran’s landmass and 10.7 per cent of its population emancipating itself from the specter of nuclear destruction by hammering this evil regime is edifying, and the whole world should salute the courage and the determination of the Jewish State and the solidarity with it of the United States.

It is inexpressibly disappointing to see the spread of spurious moral relativism over events in the Middle East. Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are really just calls for a return to the status quo ante bellum in which Hamas continually provoked and intermittently invaded Israel, and on October 7, brutally murdered 1200 people and kidnapped 251 others, some of whom were murdered in custody.

The predictable clichéd request of the G7 leaders — except for President Trump who retains a grasp of geopolitical facts — for “de-escalation” in the Israel-Iran conflict, is effectively a call to enable and encourage Iran to complete and deploy nuclear weapons. The widespread lamentations about American withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement are utter nonsense, since that agreement would, at this point, give Iran an outright green light to join the ranks of nuclear military powers.

Although some of the neighboring Arab countries have uttered pro forma statements of disapproval of the Israeli attack on Iran, the Saudis and Egyptians in particular, had been urging the United States for years to interdict the Iranian nuclear program, and they are all informally urging Israel forward, as Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed on Wednesday.

The world’s nuclear nonproliferation system is a farce, and if Iran were responsibly governed, even as responsibly as North Korea and Pakistan, which are nuclear powers, the Iranian government would have a good point in claiming that the existing nuclear powers are not disarming at all, and are simply conducting an elite club of super-armed states righteously discouraging other countries from joining them.

All that can be said for the present regime is that it is probably preferable to what will certainly happen if Iran does become a nuclear military power: An unlimited number of countries will do the same and avoidance of nuclear war will no longer be based on a policy of restraint in developing and deploying nuclear weapons, but rather in a policy of general deterrence, and in a few cases, intricate and extraordinarily expensive anti-missile defences, which only the United States and a few other countries would be financially and scientifically capable of building.

The Gaza and Iran wars are easily distinguished. Hamas committed an act of war against Israel, violating a ceasefire, on October 7. Israel made it clear, and public and parliamentary opinion have adequately supported this position, that it was not prepared to accept that the barbarous outrage of that day was just another of the innumerable skirmishes and border incidents, but rather, was an act of war that required the elimination of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

That was a reasonable response, and it remains a reasonable policy. The successful accomplishment of that goal requires both a comprehensive uprooting and annihilation of the Hamas terrorist apparatus in all of its tunnels and redoubts in Gaza, and the termination of Iranian funding and material support for Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, all of them infamous and designated terrorist organizations.

Of course, everyone wants the hostages released, and everyone — except Hamas — regrets collateral damage to civilians. But the early release of the 20 or so remaining live hostages is not as important a goal as bringing terrorism in Gaza to a permanent end. What is mystifying is the claim by some, including the joint statement by Prime Minister Starmer, President Macron, and Prime Minister Carney of several weeks ago, that a ceasefire was the only method for assuring the removal of Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza.

As everyone remotely aware of facts, including those three leaders, is aware, a ceasefire is the only method assured of preserving Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza and perpetuating it as a source of terrorist barbarism. Contrary to widespread propagandized belief, as distinguished military historian Andrew Roberts has argued, Israel has conducted its operations in Gaza with an unusually small proportion of civilian casualties.

Civilian casualties are extremely hard to avoid in urban counter-guerrilla warfare, especially as Hamas uses its own population as human shields in hospitals, mosques, and schools and has made no secret that such casualties are useful to it for propaganda purposes. It is also astonishing that anyone pays any attention to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s unreliable estimates of civilian casualties. They have managed to roll this number up to 55,000 dead, a grotesque exaggeration, and includes deaths caused by the “friendly fire” of Hamas itself, as well as dead terrorist fighters.

Israel is right to end terrorist activity in Gaza, and to be sure, it is essential that nuclear arms not get into the hands of the present government of Iran, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the liquidation of its Jewish population and which is the principal supporter of terrorism in the world.

Either the Iranian government will negotiate a verifiable disassembly of its nuclear military program, or the United States will lend Israel the necessary equipment and ordnance to complete its destruction, or the United States will do that itself. No sane person can claim that it would not be desirable to keep such deadly weapons out of the hands of that criminally diseased regime, or deny that it was on the brink of being able to create an atomic bomb (though not a deliverable warhead).

The accomplishment of Israel’s objectives in the present conflict would be a lethal blow to terrorism in the world. It would also salvage something of the international nonproliferation policy, such as it is. And it would be a well-earned and salutary slap in the face to the People’s Republic of China, Iran’s backer and enabler, recklessly making mischief in the West. Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are controversial men, but in these matters they are right.

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From the National Post