The daily media coverage of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East makes it seem as though Israel is perpetually “escalating” — carrying on a ceaseless assault on Gaza, bombing Lebanon, and threatening Iran. It is Israel that is portrayed as the primary destabilizing force in the region, in need of restraining.
But the anniversary of October 7 is an important reminder of why Israel fights.
One year ago today, under the cover of rocket fire, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel to commit unspeakable horrors — slaughtering babies, raping women, burning homes, and kidnapping civilians. It’s hard to find a parallel to the evil depicted in videos and images recorded on that day. It’s as if the Nazis and their victims all carried cameras in their pockets. In the assault, 1,200 people were massacred and 251 were taken hostage (roughly 100, both alive and dead, remain in captivity).
On October 8 of last year, Hezbollah, in solidarity with Hamas, began launching projectiles at Israel — and it has now fired thousands of them, almost daily. Just last night, rockets struck Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city.
As a result of the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, about 100,000 Israelis have been forced to evacuate from their homes, and parts of northern and southern Israel are still uninhabitable.
Meanwhile, Houthi rebels in Yemen have fired drones and rockets toward Israel.
All of these attacks were either directly ordered by, or made possible by support from, the radical Islamic regime of Iran — which itself has launched two major ballistic-missile attacks aimed at Israeli civilians.
Israel, as a sovereign nation, must ensure that its people can live in security — and the only way to do that is by neutering Hamas and Hezbollah and deterring their primary sponsor, Iran.
Israel’s enemies, including those on college campuses, like to say that this didn’t start on October 7 — a transparent effort to change the subject and downplay the atrocities committed by Hamas on that day.
But if they want to start prior to October 7, 2023, where should we start?
Was October 7 about the occupation? That is contradicted by the fact that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Is it really about Israel’s control over the West Bank? Odd, since Arab possession of the territories for Israel’s first 19 years of existence did not prevent the first three Arab–Israeli wars or stop the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, which envisioned an Arab state replacing all of Israel.
Is it about the so-called nakba — or “catastrophe” — that Arabs suffered when Israel was founded in 1948? Consider that in its Declaration of Independence that year, Israeli leaders stated: “WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
Instead, five Arab nations invaded with the goal of killing Israel in the crib.
If we go back further, in 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a partition plan that would have allowed for a two-state solution, but the Arabs rejected the idea of a Jewish state of any sort. Instead, the Arab leader in the region, the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met with Adolf Hitler to try and persuade him to extend his anti-Jewish campaign to the Middle East and snuff out Zionism.
Whether it is the mufti, the PLO, Hamas, the ayatollahs, or college protesters who chant “From the river to the sea,” the goal is the same — to snuff out Jewish statehood.
Jews have suffered too much throughout their history by entrusting their survival to others, and Israel is not going to allow that to happen without a fight.