Golda Meir, leading Zionist and prime minister of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, observed that her country’s neighbors would choose terror and war over peace so long as “they hate us more than they love their children.”
It was a bitter lesson learned and learned again. Despite Israeli leaders’ repeated offers to consider almost any territorial compromise in exchange for recognition and security guarantees, Arab leaders in effect made their own people hostages to hate, turning their own children into killers and human bombs instead of doctors, agronomists, architects.
If there is a lesson for the rest of the world in the history of Israel’s rebirth and resilience, it is this: The civilized world must stand with this bastion of freedom and faith and dignity.
Today Israel is focused on eradicating the terror threat, which means defeating Hamas. There is no purpose in offering an olive branch in the hope that a real, durable deal may be cut. This is the practical lesson to be drawn from the past few days of war, launched by haters and killers and financed by regimes in Iran and elsewhere — but, it must be admitted, in part made possible by good men’s hope that by ceding territory to its enemies, these might turn their swords into ploughshares.
When the dust settles from the war in progress, Israel’s security forces and politicians will have some explaining to do, and there will be lessons. (READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: Time for Prudence in Foreign Policy)
Applicable to Israel and, frankly, any vulnerable free and democratic nation, which is to say all of them. For if we stand with Israel, we must see that we could be next — any decent society may be next, for unleashed and undefeated barbarism spreads. Surely an urgent tactical question should be how a relatively short border with a zone controlled by totalitarian mass-killers could be left so porous and vulnerable.
On this question, the current issue of Tablet magazine is indispensable reading. The dangers to border and territorial security are not confined to Israel; we must help them in this area, and we must gain insights and technologies and preparedness training from their bitter experiences.
What free country does not have a border that can be beached by undesirables? America’s southern border must be rendered impregnable, crossable only under strictly enforced rules made by Americans, not foreigners. It cannot escape notice that Israel has always welcomed foreign guests, given them work permits when they asked, free medical help when they needed it. Does the “government” of Hamas do this, or its counterpart in the Palestine Authority that like Hamas owes its position to Israel’s willingness to exchange land for a real peace?
The lesson is to guard what you have, to prize it, and that means making sure that, additional to defensible borders on the ground, you create barriers of the spirit — barriers against negation and nihilism. You educate your children in the values that made your own freedom, perchance your prosperity, possible.
You educate them to not have contempt for differences of opinion. Here too Israel teaches, even as, like any other free country, it must always relearn.
Denigration from within, dissent that grows out of control, is not acceptable. The bitterness of the political and cultural divisions in Israel that crystallized in the matter of whether and how to reform the judicial system distracted from the security issues with which the Jewish state always lives. These divisions are not the same as ours in America, but they are comparable.
The impeachments of Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and perhaps Joe Biden contributed to very serious strategic failures. The loss of Vietnam was not inevitable, nor was the unpreparedness for attacks by movements within Islam, but the no-prisoners politics in Washington obstructed the ability to see this and the will to act upon it.
The red-hot partisanship in Washington made it more likely that the Biden administration would give way to its worst tendencies, as in the surrender of Afghanistan to some of our worst enemies. The Trump administration was beset by partisan attacks from day one, and its concentration of looming and growing threats was never constant. It made significant gestures — the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem being one of them — but was too distracted by its critics and its principal figure’s own self-defeating flaws to follow through.
Admirable and learnable is the immediate putting aside in Israel of bitter internal political fights. The reservists who declared they would not serve if the elected government did not back off its judicial reform program rescinded their pledges as soon as war broke out.
“Right or wrong, my country,” in one form or another (the original was Stephen Decatur’s declaration upon returning from a raid against the pirates of Barbary), has been echoed down the years and through troubles by America patriots. Let’s relearn to stay who we are, to do what we must.