Not a right to defend itself. A right to win.
“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Kamala told CNN. And then insisted that the “war must end.”
What Kamala was really saying was that Israel has a right to defend itself against an attack, but it doesn’t have a right to win.
Democrats and some Republicans have offered the same formulaic responses since Oct 7.
And long before that.
“Israel has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks,” Obama said in 2014 before calling for a ceasefire. Israel has a right to defend itself, Bush and Clinton used to say before urging a quick end to the fighting in order to make a deal with the terrorists Israel is defending itself against.
Israel has a right to defend itself is the bare minimum allotted to anyone. Everyone has a right to defend themselves when they are attacked. Agreeing to it is not a pro-Israel statement. It is at best a neutral position to which the alternative position is that the Israelis should have allowed themselves to be overrun, destroyed and massacred, men, women and children, on Oct 7.
Anything less than the assertion that Israel has a right to defend itself is a declaration that it deserves to be destroyed. And that is the state of the debate within the Democratic Party.
On one side are the supporters of a two-state solution who want to split Israel between the Jews and the Islamic terrorists. Every time the terrorists invade and kill Jews, the Israeli army would have the right to briefly defend the country before the politicians make a new deal with the terrorists. On the other side are the one-state solution backers who don’t believe Israel has a right to exist and therefore no right to defend itself and support the Islamic terrorists who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ in their quest to destroy it by any means from BDS to genocide.
The ‘extremists’ want Israel gone now while the ‘moderates’ want Israel to keep making deals with terrorists until it ceases to exist. Along the way it’ll have plenty of chances to defend itself on a diminishing amount of territory using static defenses that the enemy will plot to subvert.
Israel does not need a right to defend itself. It needs a right to win.
The right to defend yourself is the right to be penned up in a ghetto while murderers roam outside. It’s the right to spend billions of dollars on elaborate defenses like the Gaza border wall or Iron Dome that, like any alarm system or wall, only work until the terrorists find a way around them. It’s the right to be constantly hunted, to be always on the defensive, and always afraid.
That’s no right at all.
The Nazis were not defeated with the right of defense, but the right of offense. Wars don’t end when the invaded are given a right to fight for a few weeks before calling it a draw. Wars end when one side actually has the power to do more than defend itself, but to fight back and win.
When Netanyahu spoke to Congress about “total victory”, the political establishment ridiculed and dismissed the prospect of defeating Hamas in favor of a deal with the terrorist group. That deal, known as a ‘ceasefire’ after the cycle of ceasefires with Hamas initiated by Obama, would allow the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood Jihadists to regroup, rearm and attack again.
“In some respects, we are struggling over what the theory of victory is. Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of… a sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a NATO summit. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”
The Biden administration and NATO leaders did not display this sort of skepticism towards Zelensky’s promises of victory against Russia. When the Ukrainian leader recently promised to present a “victory plan” to the Biden administration, the move was met with applause.
The Biden-Harris administration and the European Union believe that Ukraine has the right to win while Israel only has the right to defend itself. That is the fundamental difference between the treatment of Ukraine and Israel, and the treatment of their two wars.
Ukraine’s demands for bigger and deadlier weapons systems, including tanks and jets, were swiftly met even while the Biden-Harris administration cut off or ‘slow walked’ more basic weapons deliveries to Israel to force it to slow down offensive operations including in Rafah. Those pressure campaigns allowed Hamas to hold on to and murder captured hostages.
That’s what the “right to win” looks like as opposed to the paltry “right to defend itself.”
Every time Ukraine pushed further or opened a new front in the war, including going into Russia, there was applause, rather than warnings about “escalation”. But every phase of Israel’s military campaign, including the push into Rafah where the hostages and tunnels were, was marked by pressure campaigns and warnings about the danger of “escalation” in the Middle East.
Ukraine attacking a nuclear world power isn’t “escalation”, Israel taking out a Hamas leader is.
The political establishment believes that Ukraine has the right to do more than just throw back invading armies, but believes that Israel’s rights are limited to defending and maintaining its 1948 borders, that it must surrender of all its Six Day War borders, including half of Jerusalem, to Islamic terrorists and then promise them everything else they ask for to end the fighting.
And when the terrorists attack anyway, Israel will have the “right to defend itself” for a week or two. Then it’ll be time for another “ceasefire”, more negotiations and more surrenders.
Kamala and the political establishment are wrong. Israel does not have a “right to defend itself”, it has a right and a duty to go on the offensive and win. It has a right and a duty to utterly defeat and destroy every single Islamic terrorist organization at war with it. It has a right and a duty to secure whatever territory the terrorists were using for their operations including the Philadelphi corridor on the border which Egypt used to deliver massive amounts of weapons to Hamas.
That’s the least of what winning means.
In 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israel undertook to win. In those first three decades, it won and emerged stronger for it. In the next terrible four decades, it lost land, ambition and safety in a failed search for a peace that could never come on any terms other than its own strength.
Defense was traded for offense. Conflicts were to be managed. A weakening deterrence would reduce the scope of any individual exchange of fire. The United States and the Europeans would offer “guarantees” in exchange for a perpetual process of peace negotiations and war.
That was Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
On Oct 7, Israel hit bottom. The cost of peace at any price was no longer just the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza, rockets falling on major cities or a worldwide campaign of demonization by its ‘peace partners’, but a new invasion of Israel. Out of that horror rises a single fundamental question, will Israel remain on the defensive or will it fight to win.
The right to defend itself is Israel’s slow suicide. Survival rests on the right to win.
somehistory says
Like an abused wife has the ‘right’ to self=defense, but not if she injures her husband. If she injures him, she gets arrested.
Israel doesn’t just have the ‘right to win.’ Israel has an obligation to win. for their survival.
gravenimage says
+1
Wellington says
God forbid Jews go on the offensive against evil. Can’t let Jews win, now can we?
Defending against evil by Jews? Maybe OK (and even this maybe not). But actually going on the offensive against evil? Well, we simply cannot have that, now can we, because Jews as victims is marginally all right but Jews actively defeating wickedness is simply not an option.
Conclusion: The world at large is a hypocrite. The fact that Israel is the ONLY nation on Earth which is told it doesn’t have a right to exist very much tends to prove this enormous hypocrisy—and all the while two million Israeli-Arabs have far, far more freedoms than do Arabs in the 22 Arab countries that exist.
Oh yeah, man collectively is an idiot. Always has been this way and nothing in our era should or could make a reasonable and knowledgeable person assume that a reversal of this idiocy is in the offing (look at the UN and its Secretary-General for partial evidence of this). Want event more proof? Well, the utter nothing which is Kamala Harris could very likely become the next President of the USA.
What is good and right is fragile. What is bad and wrong is not fragile. The best in mankind takes a lot more work to prevail than the worst in mankind.
Walter Sieruk says
The government authorities and officials of the State of Israel have a duty and responsibility to use pre-emptive strike against that belligerent and hostile vicious and murderous jihad entity Hamas to ensure the safety security and lives of the people who are citizens of that nation.
As the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, rightly and wisely, in a speech had declared, “The right to self-defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals.”
Walter Sieruk says
When it comes to those brutal cruel vile heinous malicious and murderous jihadist savages of Hamas it’s “Either kill or be killed.”
Therefore, the Prime Minister Benjamin was not only right, for he also spoke the sensible thing to do when he declared, “No force in the world will stop us from elimination Hamas.”
So, Hamas needs to be hit long and hard and it should to hit with much military might and. struck great power repeatedly until it’s completely destroyed. As it had been also, rightly said “Half –measures is folly and madness.”
For jihadists of Hamas will not respond to reason or logic , in others words, they cannot and will not be reasoned with. The only language that are able to understand is that of being the receiving end of a power of a great military might. As Thomas Jefferson had ,rightly ,written “With every barbarous people…force is law.”
Even the leftist US President Franklin D. Roosevelt with all liberal socialist had very wisely declared, “No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.”
Prime Minister Benjamin had revealed knowledge and wisdom by his statement about the need to about the very important and necessary need to engage in the “Elimination of Hamas.”
RP says
Not quite.
Israel has the obligation to it.
It is completely immoral not to win.
The primary obligation of a government is to ensure the safety of its citizens.
Every other thing is secondary.
James Lincoln says
Regarding Israel’s “right to win”, Douglas Murray lays this out perfectly:
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/09/04/british-author-masterfully-nukes-piers-morgans-hamas-appeasement-talking-points-n2178907
gravenimage says
Thanks for that link, James.
gravenimage says
Israel Has the Right to Win
Not a right to defend itself. A right to win.
………………………………………….
Israel winning against Hamas is the only way she *can* defend her people.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Daniel
Great point. I always thought there was a “but” coming after anyone saying that “Israel has a right to defend itself”. That defense does include
➤ Getting back all their remaining hostages, dead or alive
➤ Pre-emptively destroying all vectors of attack against them, be it from Gaza, Judea/Samaria, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria or Iran
I also enjoyed your video yesterday to that effect
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xWKkHw2YT6E
dumbledoresarmy says
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
I want Israel to WIN and win big.
I pray for VICTORY, for Israel.
I pray that Hamas will be utterly, totally, smashingly DEFEATED.. and I pray for the defeat of Jihad, everywhere, full stop.
The Jihad against Israel, against the Jews, is one front of a massive ongoing Global Jihad against everybody and everything not-Islam.. that has been going on since Islam was invented by somebody or somebodies’ accursed imagination.
it is only very, very seldom that Infidels of any sort have recognised this and fought not just in self-defence – to hold a boundary – but to push BACK against the encroachment of Islam; to TAKE BACK territory that the Mohammedan mob has seized and defiled.
it would be entirely appropriate and just for Israel to take and hold Gaza and expel all the mohammedan mobsters – Hamas’ willing executioners, the sheltering nurturing sea from within which the jihadis emerge – and reclaim it as NON-MUSLIM territory.
Israel was attacked FROM Gaza. Well then: the mohammedan mob should LOSE Gaza… in perpetuity.
If the mohammedans had not used Gaza as a launch-pad for mass-murderous jihad, nothing would have happened to them.
But they chose to turn Gaza into a forward operating base of would-be-genocidal jihad against the Jews. They honeycombed Gaza with tunnels, stuffed it full of booby-traps, essentially created a massive multi-level fortress, arsenal, arms dump…military base.
If Israel levels the place, fine. It would be no less and no more than what was done by the Allies to Hitler’s Germany…
Military bases are legitimate military targets.
ALL of bloody Gaza is a legitimate military target.
James Lincoln says
dumbledoresarmy,
Yes, for all of the reasons that you have stated, Israel should permanently retake – and have total control over – Gaza.
And a permanent ban on any muslims entering Israel for any reason – including “day workers”.
If the “Palestinians” don’t like it, they can blame Hamas.
dumbledoresarmy says
Those here at Jihadwatch who identify as people of faith might consider reciting, daily, with conviction, the prayer that, in Israel, is said on behalf of the IDF.
The term “Ha-Shem” (the Name) is the circumlocution for the divine Name, the Tetragrammaton.
Prayer for Members of the Israel Defence Force
“He Who blessed our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – may He bless the fighters of the Israel Defence Force, who stand guard over our land and the cities of our God from the border of the Lebanon to the desert of Egypt, and from the Great Sea unto the approach of the Aravah, on the land, in the air, and on the sea.
“May Hashem cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down before them.
“May the Holy One, Blessed is He, preserve and rescue our fighting men from every trouble and distress and from every plague and illness, and may He send blessing and success in their every endeavour.
“May He lead our enemies under their sway and may He grant them salvation and crown them with victory.
“And may there be fulfilled for them the verse:
“For it is Ha-shem, your God,
Who goes with you
to battle your enemies for you
to save you.
Now let us respond: Amen.”
I – I, an Aussie Christian – recite that prayer, deliberately choosing to stand with the house of Israel, whom I view as elder brothers and sisters.
If they were the ONLY targets of Jihad, I would say it, with passion and conviction, because Jihad is evil and I want to see Israel WIN.
But Israel is not the only target of Jihad; and so I say the prayer for the IDF also as an act of non-Muslim solidarity… because any victory for non-Muslims, against Jihad, anywhere in the world, is a victory for ALL of us!
if Israel wins, in Gaza, we ALL win!
Naja says
Thank you Daniel. The war between Israel and the “Jihadi’s / muslims” is the most crucial thing happening in the world today. It is essential for the free world that Israel wins. This is the “Mother of all Wars” that Saddam Hussein spoke of between the Muslims and the Infidels. I wish that Americans, as well as the rest of the world wakes up to this reality. As Trump says, “Fight Fight Fight”.