The Soft Bigotry of Impossibly High Expectations

The “exploding pagers” and other Mossad and IDF deeds of derring-do, including the targeted killings of Yahya Sinwar in Gaza and Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, have given some people the idea that Israel’s intelligence agencies should be able, by themselves, to defeat the Jewish state’s enemies, without the need for a full-scale ground war. More on this view, and how it imposes impossibly high standards on Israel, can be found here: “Unfair to hold Israel to impossibly high expectations in war with Hamas – opinion,” by Uri Pilichowski, Jerusalem Post, January 1, 2025:

Recently, the American investigative journalist program 60 Minutes featured a report on Israel’s impressive pager operation that decimated the ranks of Hezbollah’s officers.

In response to this operation, British broadcaster Piers Morgan – host of the YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored – posted on X/Twitter, “Mind-bogglingly, extraordinary… though it does beg the question: If the Mossad could do this to decapitate Hezbollah, why could they not have done something similar with Hamas?”

Morgan isn’t the first to assume that our intelligence agencies and special forces are so talented that they can defeat our enemies in targeted strikes without the use of the broader army.

They imagine that the Mossad has the ability to plant pagers in every enemy’s pocket as it did with Hezbollah’s leaders, or isolate each one in an empty apartment and eliminate him, as it did with Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.

The assumption-turned-accusation assumes Israel could conduct its entire self-defense without harming any non-combatants. It ignores Palestinian terrorists’ use of non-combatants that leads to so many of their deaths and injuries – and vilifies the Jewish state for involuntarily causing collateral damage.

There is a form of racism that is known as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” This racism occurs when people think so low of a group that they don’t expect them to do anything worthwhile.

An example of this form of racism is when people don’t demand that Palestinians stop their terrorism and the violent culture that surrounds it because they consider the Palestinians so pathetic that they can’t be anything but violent.

There is another type of racism that Piers Morgan plays with in his observation of the pager operation. Different than the soft bigotry of low expectations, this form of racism is the soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations.

The soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations

This form of racism is where people hate a group so much that they place impossibly high standards on the group and criticize them when they don’t reach that level of impossible behavior.

An example of this form of racism is demanding Israel defeat its enemies in a supernatural way that is beyond realistic and blaming Israel when they can’t meet the unrealistic standard set for them by antisemites.

These people assume that Israel should be able to defeat its enemies without fielding an army, and without causing more than a handful of civilian casualties, and if it does not do so, it should be condemned. It’s not enough for the IDF to be “the most moral army in the world,” as British Colonel Richard Kemp has claimed; it must consistently work wonders against its enemies, day after day, without harming civilians. It’s unfair to the IDF to demand it meet such a standard. Still worse is the belief that Israel need not call on the IDF at all; it is enough, we are supposed to believe, for Israelis to rely on Mossad, Shin Bet, and other special forces — without relying on the IDF — to keep their country safe.

Mossad and Israel’s other intelligence agencies are, as the writer Uri Pilichowski says, “incredible forces of power, cunning, and strength.” They can target enemy commanders for assassination. They can cause explosions that wound a few thousand Hezbollah fighters so severely that they cannot again fight. But Mossad cannot stop missiles and rockets from hitting Haifa, and Ashdod, and Tel Aviv. Mossad cannot locate and dig up the miles of terror tunnels that Hamas has dug, the tunnels that snake underground from Gaza into southern Israel, or Hezbollah’s terror tunnels, that go from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. Mossad and other special forces cannot conquer Gaza, moving civilians away from places about to be targeted, and taking control on the ground, city by city, and eliminating 20,000 Hamas fighters who routinely hide themselves and their weapons in schools, apartment buildings, mosques, and hospitals. Such tasks require armed men on the ground, carefully searching block by block, or room by room for enemy combatants in buildings that were once schools or hospitals or apartments, using their own weapons, or calling down airstrikes on enemy targets, when that is deemed necessary.

We can admire what Mossad and other special forces have accomplished, but must not assume that the IDF is no longer needed to wipe out those who would destroy the state of Israel and kill its people. Hold Israel in wartime to a high standard, but not to an impossible one.