“For Iran, Israel is first,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the assembled members of Congress he addressed last week. “America is next.” When the Jewish state retaliates against Hamas, when it strikes positions occupied by Houthi or Hezbollah fighters, when it successfully intercepts an unprecedented volley of rockets and drones fired from Iran, “we’re not only protecting ourselves,” Netanyahu added. “We’re protecting you.”
The truth of that statement is self-evident to all who are willing to see the contours of the civilizational struggle the Israeli prime minister outlined. But skeptics may have been treated to a graphic illustration of Netanyahu’s meaning on Tuesday.
On July 27, a Hezbollah rocket struck a soccer field in a Golan Heights neighborhood, killing twelve children and wounding about 30 more civilians. On Tuesday, Israel retaliated against that attack on its territory with a strike on a complex in Beirut targeting Fuad Shukr, also known as al-Hajj Mohsin. According to both Israeli officials and the Saudi-owned news outlet Al-Arabiya, they got him.
Shukr’s neutralization not only constitutes just reciprocity for the atrocity Hezbollah engineered on Saturday, it also represents long-delayed justice for one of the primary perpetrators of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which took the lives of 241 U.S. service personnel.
“On September 10, 2019, the U.S. Department of State designated Shukr as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist pursuant to Executive Order 13224, as amended,” a State Department primer on Shukr read. “Shukr serves on Hizballah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council, and has aided Hizballah fighters and pro-Syrian regime troops in Hizballah’s military campaign against Syrian opposition forces in Syria.”
Shukr wasn’t just an enemy of the Jewish state. He was an enemy of the United States. If Israel has successfully taken him off the battlefield, America is all the safer for it. Not that Jerusalem will get the thanks it deserves.