GrossIneptitude, GrossIdiocy, GrossIrresponsibility

My tongue is not restrained by diplomatic decorum. Unlike Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I am free to call a spade a spade, deceit deceit, and a useful idiot a useful idiot. I am also at liberty to disagree with Netanyahu, especially when I think that his caution works against him and against the Jewish people and their state that he so tirelessly strives to protect. Raphael Grossi is a useful idiot in the hands of the fascist regime in Iran. He is seemingly unaware of the last time a diplomatic mission crowed about the signed promise of good behaviour it had extracted from a fascist regime intent on plunging the world into war and killing all Jews. There. I said what the Israeli Prime Minister was too gentlemanly to spell out.

It is quite wrong, and highly counter-productive, to cast Iran's threat to Israel in terms of self-defence. By the time a tiny nation like Israel would defend itself from a nuclear attack, there would be no nation to defend. This much is obvious. So why do Netanyahu and the Israeli defence establishment talk about Israel's right to defend itself? Aggressive war is already illegal. So every country has the right not to be attacked. When it is clear that an aggressive war is imminent, then it is irresponsible, especially on the part of the country about to be attacked, to not pre-emptively prevent such an attack.

Since its establishment in February 1979, the fascist regime in Iran has been open and absolutely consistent about one thing: its intention to bring about the physical annihilation of Israel. And since that fateful day forty-four years ago, the regime in Tehran has bent every fibre towards acquiring the means of "wiping Israel off the map." For forty-four years, it has been perfectly legal for Israel to destroy the means by which Iran intends to obliterate Israel, but it has not.

Before there was a prospect of the genocidal regime acquiring the means of unleashing mass death, it might still have been sensible to speak of "Israel's right to defend itself," but that concept is even less appropriate now than it was on the eve of the Six-Day War. In early June 1967, Israel did not hesitate to destroy the most dangerous weapons arrayed against her at the time, the Egyptian air force. By wiping out the Egyptian air force on the ground, it saved everyone in Tel-Aviv and the conurbation around it, in other words, the bulk of its population. This time, the target is its entire population. If Raphael Grossi is prepared to say, entirely off the top of his head, that to attack Iran's nuclear facilities would be illegal, what else is he prepared to say? Dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel is within the normative structures that we all abide by?

Being stuck in the rut of the right to defend itself blinds Israel to the fact that she is fully entitled to full sovereignty over Judea and Samaria as well as Gaza. Quite apart from her rights under the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, Israel had won an aggressive war that others, including Jordan, had launched against her. She had conquered Jordanian-occupied and annexed Mandatory Palestine territory in self-defence. The so-called West Bank was occupied territory before 1967. It ceased to be occupied territory after 1967. But Israel, chasing the chimera of a stable coexistent Middle East, wins wars only enough to lose peace. The very notion of the so-called "War between wars" is perverse.

For as long as Israeli leaders keep talking only about Israel's right to defend itself, they acknowledge the right of others to attack her. By doing this, Israel perpetuates the situation in which questions are only asked after Israel has been attacked, and only of Israel's reaction to the attack. "We call on both sides to exercise restraint," — that grotesque perversion of morality — always comes after Israel has been attacked and before she can react. Israel's defence is not even a presumption, but a question, in light of which Israel has to assert its right to react to the attack. Attacks on Israel are never questioned, thereby establishing, if not the right, then the norm of attacking Israel.

Grossi's "normative structures" hold that if you have the means to attack Israel, then go right ahead. Those normative structures include the United Nations General Assembly, the IAEA, the UN Security Council, the Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court, etc., etc., and of course, anything to do with the "Palestinians." And this is Israel's problem: in only ever wanting to defend itself, outstandingly good as it might be at doing so, it invites everyone in the world to constantly attack it. It has allowed attacking Israel to become the norm, and everyone who is hostile towards the Jewish state is under moral pressure to constantly escalate.

If you have conventional weapons with which to attack Israel, you want to upgrade to nuclear bombs to boost your moral stature as an opponent of Israel, even if you lack the means of delivering those bombs. If you are a private citizen in, say, the UK, who goes to every pro-Palestinian rally, you want to fortify your moral credentials by going to "Palestine" to help them pick olives. At every level of society the world over, everyone who is against Israel is motivated to do something worse every anti-Israel season than they did the season before, and still all that Israel can come up with is the right to "defend itself," essentially a sitting duck position. And so, while Israel prepares to defends itself against the Iranian regime that would destroy the Israeli population in twenty minutes, "Palestinians," who have no nuclear weapons, are managing to accomplish the same thing by poisoning the soul of the Israeli population since 1967.

If there is one thing that Ze'ev Jabotinsky understood that David Ben-Gurion and half of Israel's current population do not, it is that, "Each man who passes my window in the street has a right to live only in so far as he recognises my right to live; but if he is determined to kill me, I cannot admit that he has any right to live."[1] Jabotinsky further adds, "It is incredible what political simpletons Jews are. They shut their eyes to one of the most elementary rules of life, that you must not "meet halfway" those who do not want to meet you."

It is clear why Ze'ev Jabotinsky was so hated by the kibbutznik Jews who wanted to secure their national home without war, and why Benjamin Netanyahu is so obsessively hated today. One can expect an astute operator such as he to be well aware that no amount of restraint on his part is ever going to impress those "simpleton Jews" who feel themselves morally superior for wanting to "meet halfway those who do not want to meet you." The implication of that self-righteous presumption is that there is something inherently unfair about not meeting the "Palestinians" halfway. The idiocy in the implication is the blind insistence that the "Palestinians" want to meet the Jews halfway, because the Jews want to meet them halfway. None of these "simpleton Jews" ever answers the question, how do you meet halfway someone who wants to kill you? Sadly, such information still comes as disturbing news to many, raving street parties and sweets for all notwithstanding.

But this meeting halfway business does not end with negotiating; it bedevils war-fighting, too. Israel only ever defeats the "Palestinians" halfway. An overwhelmingly powerful adversary that never defeats its much weaker enemy, only confirms to its jihad attackers that Allah is with them and stays the hand of the accursed Jew. Anything short of their utter defeat is clear victory. Allah has made them invincible. What else? And in gratitude to Allah, they'll be back to try again. It will never end. There is only one way to reach peace with the "Palestinians:" through their complete and utter military defeat, no fighter left standing. They are either dead or deported.

The same with Muslims in general. As soon as they are capable of acquiring a nuclear weapon, they are on their way to fulfilling their highest aspiration: killing all Jews. No sooner had Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor than Syria stepped into the breach with a programme of its own and the same genocidal objective. No sooner had the Syrian reactor been destroyed and Iran took up the slack. Once Israel destroys Iran's nuclear facilities, other Muslims will pick up the baton and run with it. My money is on Erdoğan, who has a legacy to secure. If NATO had any sense, it would have rid itself of its jihad-mongering member a long time ago, but Jews are not the only simpletons. As for Israel, it is not enough to just destroy nuclear facilities. All war-fighting capabilities must be destroyed, else they will be back — the ummah knows no nationality. It knows no defeat unless utterly defeated. All it knows is jihad, and that:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. [2]

Yet Netanyahu himself has been taking the Jews of Judea and Samaria for granted, ready to lure them with promises of full Israeli status, and equally ready to dump them when expediency dictates. It is to be hoped that Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir will ensure that this time, Netanyahu remains true to his ideological antecedents. To be Prime Minister of Israel and not capitulate to pressure is tough enough. But Netanyahu must recognise that while the thankless West rely on Israel to absorb the bulk of the jihad murders that would otherwise be tearing Western cities apart, it is the Jews of Judea and Samaria who absorb the bulk of jihad murders that would otherwise be tearing Israel apart. Even the Abraham Accords are not worth the Jews who with their living bodies give substance to Israel's strategic depth.

Easily half the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria is religious, with some Messianic adherents amongst them. There are also non-Jews who choose to live in Judea and Samaria, because they understand the need for the Jewish state to be secure. About half the Jews in Judea and Samaria are not religious at all. Many are secular Jews who see the importance of securing the "Jewish heartland," others live there out of economic necessity.[3] People have the right to be religious, except, "if he is determined to kill me," and no Jew, no matter how religious, is determined to kill anybody. Muslims, on the other hand, do not need to be religious at all to adhere to the genocide hadith quoted above. Dani Dayan observes:

Without the high hills of Judea and Samaria, an uninterrupted Islamic fundamentalist territory that starts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and ends in Tel Aviv, [an] Israel without any natural barrier exists. That is suicide. That is suicide. [4]

Those who wish to meet the "Islamic fundamentalists" halfway, will find themselves meeting in Tehran.

In the same way as Netanyahu is never going to impress the "simpleton Jews" in Israel, he is never going to impress their Diaspora counterparts, let alone the non-Jewish populations of the world for whom anti-Semitism has become a virtue, and Netanyahu and "the settlers" are Jews everyone is free to hate and abuse without risking the anti-Semite appellation. The Prime Minister has precious few friends, and Grossi is not amongst them. There is no need to alienate his own, his country's and the West's most important constituency: the Jews of Judea and Samaria. They will defend Israel, even if the IAF reservists will not. They will defend Netanyahu, if he remains true to them. No one else can be relied on, when it comes down to it.

Notes:

1. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, "The Ethics of The Iron Wall," original in Russian, Razsviet, 11.11.1923.
2. This is the notorious genocide hadith. Sahih Muslim/Book 41/6985. https://quranx.com/Hadith/Muslim/USC-MSA/Book-41/Hadith-6985
3. "The Changing Faces of Israel's Settlement Movement," Mosaic, August 2022, https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2022/08/the-changing-faces-of-israels-settlement-movement/; "Why So Many Israelis Dropped Their Opposition to Settlements," Mosaic, August 2022, https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/israel-zionism/2022/08/why-so-many-israelis-dropped-their-opposition-to-settlements/; "Why Israel's Settlers Splintered," Mosaic, August 2022, https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/israel-zionism/2022/08/why-israels-settlers-splintered/; "The Settler and the New Jew," Mosaic, Septenber 2022, https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/israel-zionism/2022/09/the-settler-and-the-new-jew/;
4. Dani Dayan, contribution to debate: "Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy," Intelligence Squared, YouTube, 17 Jan 2013. https://youtu.be/6Rk60vNUJ9Y