A Matter of Timing
The American public understands what the war between Israel and Hezbollah is about and what it is not about. It is not about territories; it is not about occupation; it is not about an effort by poor, oppressed Palestinians to get Israel out of their land; it is not about a two-state solution. What it is about is the fate of the democratic State of Israel, which was attacked, once again, by enemies dedicated to its destruction. That Americans see the reality clearly is manifest in a pair of polls: No fewer than 83 percent say Israel is justified in its military action, while fully 76 percent disapprove of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, according to Gallup. A CNN poll found some 57 percent are sympathetic to Israel, while only 4 percent are sympathetic to Hezbollah.
Actually, any other perception would be astonishing. Israel is not an occupying power. It pulled out of Lebanon six years ago (after battling repeated terrorist attacks by Palestinian extremists there). The Israeli withdrawal behind an internationally recognized border back in 2000 was supposed to be followed by the disarming of Hezbollah, as called for by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559. That didn't happen. On the contrary, Hezbollah, supplied and financed by Iran and Syria, created a network of rockets and weapons bunkers in southern Lebanon. Last month's kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers not engaged in hostilities, accompanied by the wave of rockets into Israeli cities and towns, was a gross act of warfare and a crime against humanity. The airborne weapons were packed with ball bearings--not to destroy military assets but to maximize suffering by shredding human flesh. This is the barbarous nature of the radical Islamic jihad led by Iran against the free world. Hezbollah, Iran's puppet, has unmasked Iran's intentions of regional dominance and the Iranian threat to the United States and to our friends in the Middle East.
Carnage. For two decades, Hezbollah's Islamic fanatics have been a foreign legion for Iran in Lebanon, dedicated to hate and violence. When thousands of them cried, "Death to America! Death to America!" in response to a speech last year by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, they meant it. Before 9/11, Hezbollah was responsible for more American casualties than any other terrorist organization. The tally:
Some accuse Israel of a "disproportionate" response. But what exactly is a "proportionate" response when a whole people and their society are threatened with extinction, when hostilities are initiated without provocation, when every act of restraint invites a vicious contempt? Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government is one of the most pacific since the state was created. It is without a single general in the cabinet. It has made a commitment to withdraw from approximately 90 percent of the West Bank. How should it defend its citizens?
Hezbollah is not an organization that can be managed by appeasement. Nasrallah showed his true colors when he said Olmert was "small fry," without the capacity to retaliate. For six years, Israel has suffered under sporadic attacks from Hezbollah while the legitimate government of Lebanon (undermined by Syria) and the international community did nothing. Nothing. Israel would have been justified long ago in forcing the issue, and now it is forced to insist that Hezbollah can no longer be allowed to act as a state within a state. It's terrible to think what things might have been like in five years if Israel had not taken action, with Hezbollah in possession of even longer-range, more-lethal, and more-accurate rockets.
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