No one in their right mind enjoys war. Any decent human being wants to live in peace. War takes resolve, and the latest hostilities between Israel and Hamas are testing people’s courage.
Despite Hamas being designated by many in the international community as a terror organisation – which calls for the destruction of Israel in their charter – certain celebrities, politicians and many in Europe and Arab lands (historically soaked with the blood of millions of Jews) are either unilaterally condemning Israel, or “condemning the extremists on both sides.”
Such an attitude is virtue signalling. It ostensibly comes from a moral viewpoint, yet underneath it is an attempt to raise one’s own street cred, and gain popularity points. It is also cowardly and unethical to draw a moral equivalence between a terror organisation and a sovereign nation attempting to defend its civilians from hundreds of Iranian paid-for rockets. Not just cowardly, it is also dangerous. The urge for these people to show the world “how moral I am” leads to an appeasement of a savage enemy – and appeasement in our region is always temporary and a greater foe than any exchange of fire.
As this war rages on, it is worth resetting the moral compass: An IDF retaliation to the over 1300 rockets targeted towards Israeli civilians, villages and cities is not – as many contest – a war crime. And although not a politically-correct statement, civilians dying as a result of a targeted military response, is not a war crime either. War is awful, and war is violent, but just because the result is inevitable civilian casualties, it does not make it wrong.
Gazans know that Israel does not randomly bomb them, as made clear on Israeli TV by Arab expert Ehud Yaari who reminded viewers that despite the bombings, the markets in Gaza are still open.
Israel’s Achilles heel has always been the media. In any conflict where we have tried to defend ourselves, we constantly lose the war raging against Israel in the mainstream and social media. And we are doing so again. It’s no surprise that a flood of photos (some real and some manipulated) claiming the “bloody war crimes of Israel” are flooding platforms inciting the world’s oldest hatred to again raise its ugly head.
Courage is needed for war, not just for Israelis, but for anyone outside of Israel who faces a barrage of hatred for standing up for our country’s absolute right to defend her citizens.
For twenty years, the Israeli villages around Gaza have suffered tens of thousands of rockets aimed at their schools, farms and clinics. Every other conflict with Hamas has seen the Israeli government get cold feet and capitulate to the inevitable tough images which the International community has used to pressure us to withdraw. Our hope is that this time, the Israeli government will stand firm from a military point and ethically from the knowledge that this is a just war, and caring what others think has never helped us before.
If the pro-Palestinian world really cared about the Palestinians, they would get behind Israel, not for the sake of Israel of course, but for the sake of the civilians of Gaza who are under the whip of the Hamas
