Peace, Deterrence and Other Gods That Failed Years of Israeli restraint and Western lecturing look different as the scales have fallen from our eyes. By Elliot Kaufman
“Too long have I lived among men who hate peace,” says Psalm 120, recited by Jews around the world for safety in Israel. “I am for peace; but whenever I speak of it, they are for war.” Israelis know the feeling. They awoke Saturday to a jihadist invasion that may shatter as many illusions as it has lives.
How can it be, Israelis have begun to ask, that they allowed a genocidal terrorist group to reign for so long in Gaza, the fiefdom next door? There was no mystery about Hamas’s intentions. It seeks to kill Israel’s Jews any way it can.
Crazy as it now seems, Israelis learned to live with that. They took a series of defensive measures: a blockade to keep weapons out, a missile-defense system to shoot down cheap rockets, and, when those rockets got out of hand, brief campaigns of targeted strikes to quiet Hamas down. But Hamas never had to worry about Israel sweeping it from power.
To force out Hamas, Israel might have had to govern Gaza itself, and the usual suspects in the safe Western democracies—diplomats, reporters, human-rights groups and prize-seeking politicians—would have screamed bloody murder. Our cautious eminences would have deemed it “bad for peace.” But as the Jewish tradition teaches, whoever is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.
A perverse alternative reality was constructed in which every Israeli response to the threat from Hamas was illegal, immoral and disproportionate, a war crime if not sadistic outright. Gaza, which Israel gave up in 2005, is still called “Israeli-occupied” by the U.N., a claim Western media parroted. Never mind the territory’s dictatorial rulers sworn to Israel’s violent destruction. The terrorists themselves—the ones live-streaming their slaughter and mutilation of defenseless Jewish civilians to shouts of “Allahu akbar”—were politely termed “militants,” their savagery usually excused as a Newtonian reaction to Israeli security measures.
Israel was even condemned for using force to stop Hamas’s previous attempts to rush the border. Gullible Western media described those would-be infiltrators as “protesters.” Did Israel really need to shoot?
On Sunday, after a meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted, “I encouraged Türkiye’s advocacy for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas immediately.” He deleted the tweet as criticism mounted, but we should recognize it as his department’s first instinct. Its Office for Palestinian Affairs (in another deleted tweet) had already urged “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.”
This is like calling for a cease-fire the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s just another word for surrender. Peace isn’t the answer when the enemy will come back to kill you the next day.
But what could be more ingrained and respectable than the push to impose such a peace on Israel? Enlightened opinion in the West is firm that Israel needs to “end the occupation” in the West Bank, establishing a Palestinian state a stone’s throw from Israel’s capital, or a binational state in which Israel’s Jews are subject to an Arab majority. Not doing so, Israelis are told, is unsustainable and against international law. It’s even “apartheid.” In other words, by law Israel must offer up its major population centers for the kind of slaughter we have witnessed in its south, doubtless provoking an even larger war. We call this “the peace process.”
The Second Intifada (2000-05) disabused many Israelis of that idea. Maybe this, a whole intifada packed into a single weekend, will help Western liberals catch up. The two-state solution, rejected by the Palestinians every time it has been offered, is dead. Palestinian terrorism has killed it.
Israelis instead have put their faith in deterrence. Hezbollah, the story used to go, had been deterred by the pummeling it received in the 2006 Lebanon war. Iran, beset by the sabotage, bombings and assassinations that a former Mossad director called “divine intervention,” knew that it could push Israel only so far. Hamas, too, it was thought, had been deterred by its previous bouts with Israel. That Hamas had stayed out of recent exchanges between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad was taken as confirmation of the thesis.
Until Saturday, the threat from Gaza was supposed to be manageable. Israel even allowed Qatar to transfer monthly cash infusions to Hamas to grease the peace. The Jerusalem Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob, an expert on Israeli intelligence, writes that “every official who briefed the Jerusalem Post made it clear that Hamas was broadly deterred from a big conflict with Israel.”
They were dead wrong, and Israel will never be the same because of it. One wonders if evidence will emerge that this conceptual error concerning deterrence, in a replay of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, led Israeli intelligence to discount indications of aggression. More important for the future, has Israel made a similar mistake with Hezbollah—sitting on its northern border with more than 100,000 rockets? We may find out in the coming days.
How about with Iran? Like the Psalmist, the Biden administration is all for peace. Its plan is to pay as much as it takes for Iran to stand on the nuclear threshold without tipping over. But Iran is for war. It doesn’t stop pursuing nuclear weapons, and it sustains 19 terrorist proxies, including Hamas, on Israel’s borders. For 20 years, Israel has sought to buy time and establish deterrence by striking Iran in the shadows. Once considered aggressive, this policy, too, may come to be seen as remarkably dangerous—because it is so restrained.
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