by Gwythian Prins
[W]ithin days of the atrocities, the global moral compass had swung 180 degrees. Starting significantly in London, and long before the IDF had marshalled itself to go into Gaza, street protests in Western cities and reporters in mainstream media were portraying Hamas as the victims and Israel as the violent aggressor.... This accusation has been the biggest lie of the past year.
Such were the mutilations that not a single corpse of a girl or a woman was in a state fit to be shown to her family before burial.
[W]ithin days of the atrocities, the global moral compass had swung 180 degrees. Starting significantly in London, and long before the IDF had marshalled itself to go into Gaza, street protests in Western cities and reporters in mainstream media were portraying Hamas as the victims and Israel as the violent aggressor.... This accusation has been the biggest lie of the past year.
If one is among the modern cult "perfecti".... one's inherent virtue confers special privileges and exemptions which are not available to less-perfect people. By definition, one can do no wrong. Any respect for the integrity of history is lost. As in the former Soviet Union, but no longer a joke: the future is certain, only the past is ever-changing.... and the mandatory projection of modern values onto the past is popular among the self-righteous.
[I]n Israel's war of self-defence... tactical operations show that minimisation of loss of life of everyone except the terrorist enemies has been a prime concern.... To a degree that is unmatched, the IDF routinely warns civilians to leave targeted zones before attacks.
Iran's proxy groups hide their attack tunnels, command posts and weapons caches in Gaza and Lebanon under residential buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques, in an express flouting of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.... The tunnel complexes which, in the instance of Gaza, exceed the length of the London Underground, were not built for the protection of civilians in time of conflict, but only for the protection of Hamas terrorists, as Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior member of Hamas's political bureau, readily admits.... Not by choice, these are the circumstances under which the IDF has been forced to fight.
It is all the more so because since October 7, 2023 the IDF's actions on the ground in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon show the best record of any modern armed forces in discriminate targeting, even in combat with terrorists who deliberately use civilians as human shields.... On the basis of such data, former British Army Infantry Commander Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, has called the IDF "The World's Most Moral Army."
When one's enemy has no war aim other than genocide, and has said so consistently for 90 years, there is most likely zero probability of a diplomatic route to peace. After six refusals of land offered for peace since 1922, there is now no prospect of any diplomacy this side of Israel's total victory, and the terrorists' total defeat. "Mugged by reality" is now... the realisation that, whatever else people may think about him, Netanyahu is the indispensable war leader for present times. The historian Andrew Roberts has called him "The Churchill of the Middle East."
By and large the Western administrative class -- whose worldview is framed by the assumption that with enough meetings in convivial places ("diplomacy") deals can be reached that split differences -- still does not rise to a sufficient level of geopolitical and comparative historical appreciation. This weak intellectual grasp only contributes significantly to the risk of a third world war.
The need for a strategy of total victory needs to be underscored. For decades, Iran and its proxies have been trying, as Iran's former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it, to "wipe Israel off the map." Israel's enemies are still trying. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad warned a year ago that Hamas would repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel was annihilated.
With the high probability that if Iran were to be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, it would use them on Israel, the avoidance of World War III now depends upon Israel eliminating that threat. Once again, President Joe Biden must not be obeyed. Products of the Western mind-set, as mentioned, it was the disastrous naivety of President Barack Obama and Biden in seeking to negotiate over Iran's nuclear programme (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) -- and illegitimately, with no mandate, to boot -- that allowed Iran's regime to play the US for fools and in so doing to acquire vital foreign currency inflow – and time -- that enabled the Iranian theocracy to resume and hasten its road to nuclear weapons.
"Iran is reeling... insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible." — Jared Kushner, advisor and son-in-law of President Donald J. Trump, X, September 29, 2024.
The threat is not just to the Jews but to the world order and the West.... Israel rightly feels unleashed. This tiny nation has both moral mandate and customary international legal right (which long predates the experiment of UN-drafted papers) to be so. Like Ukraine's, Israel's victory matters to the entire free world.
The world currently divides unequally into those who understand this and the majority who do not, or who may just not want to admit it.
One year ago, in the form of armed Hamas terrorists, death arrived on the wings of the morning at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Three hundred and sixty-four revellers were murdered there, out of the 1,200 murdered altogether that terrible October 7.
At the London memorial gathering on October 6, 2024, all those faces, overwhelmingly of young people, were projected onto a big screen. Standing in a cold English drizzle, it took more than an hour to view them all, in the knowledge that the fate of those smiling faces was one of utter depravity. Rape, torture and mutilation -- both before murder and post-mortem -- these crimes were committed by approximately 3,000 Arabs from Gaza, most of whom – but not all -- were Hamas terrorists.
More than 240 people in Israel – including children and a baby – were abducted to tunnels in Gaza, where those who are not dead remain. Many of the atrocities were recorded on smartphones, car dash-cams and terrorists' body cameras. Such were the mutilations that not a single corpse of a girl or a woman was in a state fit to be shown to her family before burial.
There is a memorable message texted back to mom and dad in Gaza from one young man using a murdered Israeli woman's smartphone, boasting of the number of Jews that he had just murdered. October 7 was a pogrom --- an act of bloodlust impelled by genocidal intent -- and the worst killing of Jews on any day since the Holocaust. With a grim resonance to when Jews were last lambs to the slaughter, October 7 was also the eightieth anniversary of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando revolt. Jewish slaves tasked with pulling corpses from the gas chambers and burning them in the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau attempted, with explosives smuggled to them by women prisoners, to blow them up.
The legendary professionalism of Israel's intelligence services suffered its worst failure since the misreading of Egypt in 1973 at the start of the Yom Kippur War. In part, the lapse came from a seemingly strong bias from intelligence officers who believed that they understood -- and even that they had an understanding with -- Hamas, and in part from dismissing the warnings of young women soldier-observers (tatzpitanitot) in the IDF tasked with monitoring the border with Gaza. Since May, and on that fatal morning, they had been accurately warning of what was developing before their eyes: Hamas rehearsing for a cross-border raid -- but were brushed off. Fifteen were murdered in their observation command center at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, as was noted when their portraits flashed across the London memorial screen.
We now know how right the young observers were. In January 2023, IDF soldiers had seized a computer from the Hamas command-center in Khan Yunis after Hamas leaders had fled. It contained minutes of meetings planning for the attack. These only became public on October 13, 2024. The New York Times has verified the documents with Hamas and Hamas-related sources, and the IDF also confirmed the report. They show that Hamas first plotted the attack in autumn 2022 and that in July 2023 it made strenuous efforts to involve Iran and Hezbollah in coordinated action. While supportive, both said that they were not yet ready, so on October 7, Hamas went alone, having "played dead" for two years because, the minutes stated, they "must keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm." That is what appears to have deceived Israel's intelligence services.
Yet, within days of the atrocities, the global moral compass had swung 180 degrees. Starting significantly in London, and long before the IDF had marshalled itself to go into Gaza, street protests in Western cities and reporters in mainstream media were portraying Hamas as the victims and Israel as the violent aggressor -- accused from day one of being careless with the lives of civilians and fuelled with genocidal intent. This accusation has been the biggest lie of the past year. An authoritative source has privately reported that anti-Israel organisers put in a request to the London Metropolitan Police for street demonstrations on very day of the Hamas massacres and kidnappings.
The marches started the following weekend. The world had turned upside down. Even as Israel began to dismantle Hamas and later Hezbollah with military operations of extraordinary ingenuity, it has demonstrated from the outset a world-beating record of sparing civilian lives in combat zones where the terrorists actively used their own civilians as human shields in breach of all Geneva Conventions. Yet Israel lost control of the global narrative.
We live in a topsy-turvy world. Objective knowledge has been superseded by "lived experience." If one is among the modern cult "perfecti" (the highest status within the thirteenth century Cathar heresy), one's inherent virtue confers special privileges and exemptions which are not available to less-perfect people. By definition, one can do no wrong. Any respect for the integrity of history is lost. As in the former Soviet Union, but no longer a joke: the future is certain, only the past is ever-changing.
Anachronism -- disrespectfully mashing up people, events, objects, concepts and customs from different time periods, which is the essence of the 'woke' world-view -- is fashionable; and the mandatory projection of modern values onto the past is popular among the self-righteous. Common sense is dashed to pieces and disabled, most especially on the sharp reefs of "critical'" and "intersectional" ideologies. In new and unwelcome ways, this transformation makes it difficult to cut through to clarity on contested issues. That, however, is the present purpose with the subject of Israel versus its regional and world-wide enemies: one of the most contentious issues where opinions are beyond reconciliation. Therefore, clear moral reasoning and facts are our only recourse. We now have a full year of evidence.
* * *
"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," observed General William Tecumseh Sherman, the military intellectual of the U.S. Civil War. In wars, civilians will inevitably die: innocent non-combatants, women, children. The operational plan for any mission by any modern Western army contains a risk/benefit calculation that underpins the command decision about what level of collateral damage is acceptable. The higher the importance of the success of the mission the greater the level of collateral damage that will be accepted as proportionate. Like any civilised army that values life, the IDF makes such "lesser evil" mission assessments and, since the October 7 pogrom, in Israel's war of self-defence, not words alone but tactical operations show that minimisation of loss of life of everyone except the terrorist enemies has been a prime concern.
This intent has been seen in the use Israel's armed forces make of their superb field intelligence. To a degree that is unmatched, the IDF routinely warns civilians to leave targeted zones before attacks. This is done through text messages, phone calls, thousands of leaflets and by a "knock on the roof": a "two tap'" aerial assault where the first tap is the dropping of a harmless dummy bomb onto the roof of a target building to warn the occupants to flee an imminent attack, shortly followed by the attack proper.
It is demonstrable that no other modern army has ever gone to the lengths of the IDF to try to spare civilians in urban warfare; so in consequence of that fact there is no evidence -- can be no evidence -- of genocidal intent.
Conversely, the Iranian-supported proxy terrorist groups Hamas ("The Islamic Resistance Movement") and Hezbollah ('The Party of God'), despite being Sunni and Shia respectively, hold in common core politico-religious beliefs, as well as the goal of eradicating Israel from the map and, in the case of Hamas's original charter, murdering all Jews. Those beliefs derive from the celebration of death and martyrdom common to the Muslim Brotherhood whose core politico-religious text is Sayyid Qutb's Signposts, and to a fundamentalist Salafist interpretation of Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood's motto is:
"Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."
When they say "you love life, we love death," Ayaan Hirsi Ali counsels us to understand that they do mean it -- for themselves and for everyone else.
The ideological bundle makes these movements unrivalled in the degree to which, as a matter of choice expressed materially in their fighting dispositions, use of suicide attacks and military infrastructure (facts on the ground), they are willing to sacrifice the lives of their own civilians by making them human shields. Accordingly, Iran's proxy groups hide their attack tunnels, command posts and weapons caches in Gaza and Lebanon under residential buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques, in an express flouting of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war (particularly Geneva Convention IV and Additional Protocol 1 of 1977).
The tunnel complexes which, in the instance of Gaza, exceed the length of the London Underground, were not built for the protection of civilians in time of conflict, but only for the protection of Hamas terrorists, as Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior member of Hamas's political bureau, readily admits:
"We built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being killed in airstrikes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels..."
Not by choice, these are the circumstances under which the IDF has been forced to fight.
It is particularly unseemly, therefore, to try as enemies of Israel do, routinely, to tar the IDF's actions with charges of genocide or war crimes, such as the theatre macabre of South Africa's case to the UN's International Court of Justice on December 29, 2023. It is all the more so because since October 7, 2023 the IDF's actions on the ground in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon show the best record of any modern armed forces in discriminate targeting, even in combat with terrorists who deliberately use civilians as human shields.
Although hampered by problems with the Hamas data, the average "kill ratio" (KR: numbers of civilians killed per terrorist) that the IDF has achieved can be calculated conservatively as between 1.1:1 and 1.68:1. (Details on the calculations that underpin these KR ratios are given at the end of this article.) On the basis of such data, former British Army Infantry Commander Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, has called the IDF "The World's Most Moral Army."
Whereas the IDF record in Gaza has been by a great margin better than any other modern army, the opening phase of the elimination of Hezbollah in Lebanon has been even more life-sparing of civilians, reflected in lower collateral damage as the IDF air/land operation methodically destroys the enormous arsenal of rockets and missiles that Iran has supplied.
The IDF attacks on the leadership and cadres of Hezbollah, from September 17-28, can now be seen as the opening phase to a campaign now named Operation Northern Arrows.
The opening phase culminated on September 27, with the destruction of Hezbollah's deep underground headquarters in the Dahieh district of Beirut. As with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah's headquarters had been shielded -- in all contravention of the Geneva Conventions -- by the civilian buildings above it. It was destroyed by over 80 bombs, including specialized ground-penetrating ordnance.
As part of continuing information and psychological warfare, the Israel Air Force (IAF) released considerable detail to the press on how, with the Military Intelligence Directorate, the political, military and operational dimensions of this mission meshed, most especially the deception feint of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's trip to the UN in New York, which maintained "target stability" –- a shorthand for ensuring that the "prime target," Hassan Sayyed Nasrallah, the former secretary-general of Hezbollah, did not move out of the cross-hairs while the planes were airborne and the ordnance dropped.
The final timing of the attack was coordinated with Netanyahu's speech at the UN General Assembly -- quite possibly the last thing the "prime target" watched. Nasrallah was killed, with many of his subordinates, during a leadership meeting known as the Jihad Council. The Deputy of Operations of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), General Abbas Nilforoushan, was killed as well. There are reports that he had been sent expressly by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to urge Nasrallah to flee Lebanon.
Long in the planning, the elimination of Nasrallah was the final stage of the methodical removal of almost all his major sector and specialist commanders which had started with the elimination of his Number Two, Fuad Shukr on July 30. There was collateral damage but, without doubt, by the high value of the prime target, the mission's risk assessments would have deemed it justified.
Pin-point strikes on the Hezbollah higher command echelons were accompanied by high tempo and exceptionally high-volume precision strikes on Hezbollah missile launchers and weapons caches. Since 2006, with general Iranian and, some reports suggest, North Korean construction support, Hezbollah built ramified underground bunkers and tunnels to protect its terrorists, missiles and drones, and to move them around. These are challenging targets: unlike Hamas's "Gaza Metro," these tunnels are in harder ground, including rock. Yet with no reported collateral casualties, more than 1,300 targets were hit during September 23-24, exceeding the scale of the 100-plane pre-emptive attack of August 25 on Hezbollah missile launcher sites. In retrospect, it can be deduced that, along with Shukr's elimination, these were the opening moves in the campaign plan to eliminate Hezbollah.
The anti-missile and infrastructure strikes, which continue, are pre-emptive. Neutralising the deterrent threat from Hezbollah leaves both Iran and what remains of Hamas exposed. This is a necessary precondition to whatever comes next. This first phase was also supremely psychological, in effect in decapitating Hezbollah's command hierarchy. In both missions -– targeted destruction of chain of command and of weapons infrastructure (launchers and missiles) -- the IAF is engaged in its most arduous missions so far, which are taking the tactical use of air power to uncharted new levels of accuracy. The military press report that Israel has LiDar mapping (three-dimensional laser-mapping) of all militarily significant features in Lebanon. IDF cyber-warriors plainly have hacked any significant enemy systems including the control tower of Beirut Airport, through which an IRGC aircraft with resupply for Hezbollah was warned by the IAF to turn back or be destroyed.
The first attack of Northern Arrows on September 17-18 was a "double-tap" operation via military communications. A double-tap attack means putting two bullets into the target to ensure death. Tap One on the Tuesday afternoon was with thousands of exploding pagers, carried exclusively by key Hezbollah operatives. By definition, these people were not civilians but combatants -- and proscribed terrorists to boot -- or they would not have been given a pager.
The Hezbollah leadership had become wary of using smartphones. Nasrallah had warned in graphic terms that the Israelis lurked in those phones (as indeed they probably did) "The phone in your hands, in your wife's hands, and in your children's hands is the agent... Bury it. Put it in an iron box and lock it," Nasrallah told supporters in February. Therefore, earlier-generation pager technology was ordered in 2022. Somewhere in the supply chain the pagers were turned into personal mini-bombs. Accordingly, by self-selecting their own cadres as targets, the terrorist enemies of Israel assisted in reducing collateral injury to civilians.
An operation such as sabotaging pagers was something never before attempted with such complete operational security and such ingeniously discriminate targeting. It has already been praised as one of the most successful penetrations by a spy agency in intelligence history.
The attack took place in two parts. First, pagers programmed to explode when the user pressed two buttons simultaneously to read an encoded message were activated at 3.30pm local time. The intention was to injure hands and faces to render the user incapable of fighting. Less than a minute later thousands of other pagers were detonated remotely. These inflicted other types of injury especially to the groin and abdomenal areas. (Pagers are often carried in a trouser pocket or on a belt.)
The next day the second tap was conducted. This time it was via exploding walkie-talkies, also previously weaponised (and bugged to allow conversations to be heard) as long ago as 2015, which reveals how carefully that phase of the operation had been planned.
After this, fear that any form of electronic communicator might be deadly and that other electrical devices might also be weaponised –- whether or not they were – must have been rampant. Deprived of electronic means of communications, Hezbollah leaders were forced to gather in person -- targets fixed in time and space. On September 17-18, the enemy self-identified, the chain of command was simultaneously ruptured at many levels and the injuries included some with a subliminal message: it is a best-in-class example of how to use fear to "fix" an enemy in the most life-sparing way possible, meeting the ius in bello ("just means") criteria of Just War theory.
While Israel has not taken formal responsibility for the pager attack, but assuming, as most observers do, that these two taps were facets of a unified Israeli plan of operations, the mode changed from small to larger scale, to identify with precision individuals and small meetings; but first, apparently as an act of psychological warfare ("psyops"), IAF jets dropped flares and executed sonic booms over Beirut during Nasrallah's public speech about the pager attacks (which turned out to be his last broadcast speech) perhaps to reinforce the narrative of Israeli control over the means and timetable.
Then on September 20, in a precise fighter-bomber targeting of a building in the Shi'a "Hezbollah Central" stronghold in the Dahieh district of southern Beirut, Ibrahim Aqil, along with one of his most senior subordinates, Ahmed Wahbi, and much of the command echelon of the Radwan Force – one report states twenty, another sixteen -- was killed while meeting there in a room. The choice of target was plainly made with awareness of its additional "psyops" significance in unnerving Hezbollah's remaining senior command echelons.
Aqil, less well known than other figures, was in many ways a crucial loss to Nasrallah's high command. A member of the Jihad Council and a veteran commander of terror operations, in 2019 the USA had designated him a global terrorist and placed a $7 million bounty on his head for his involvement in the truck-bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Among the 63 people murdered were eight CIA officers, making it the single greatest loss of lives in the agency's history. Six months later, 241 US Marines were murdered by a second suicide bombing on the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, followed almost instantly by another bomb that murdered 58 French paratroopers and six Lebanese civilians. The US intelligence community fingered Aqil with responsibility for both.
Of similar significance to eliminating the Radwan Force's commander was the decision to decapitate the rest of the unit itself. Radwan is (or was) the special operations unit of Hezbollah and reportedly in the midst of planning civilian abductions and massacres in northern Israel similar to, but on a larger scale than, the October 7 invasion of southern Israel by Hamas. The message from both actions across Iran's "ring of fire" to encircle Israel must have been lost on no-one among Israel's enemies. The strike was so precise that while the lower floor occupied by the terrorists was vaporised, the building above did not immediately collapse.
Aqil., having been promoted to take on functions from Fuad Shukr, who was eliminated in the earlier targeted IAF attack in July, had lasted barely seven weeks in his new position. Shukr had been Nasrallah's most senior military commander whose remit covered both special operations and missile forces.
The IAF's targeted eliminations of the chain of command resumed on September 23 with an attempt to kill Ali Karaki, Hezbollah's third in command and at that moment the last remaining living member of the triumvirate of top military advisers to Hezbollah chief Nasrallah. The IAF has now revealed that due to insufficient ordnance committed, Karaki escaped that day; but he only survived for another four days. He was killed with Nasrallah on September 27. The use of over 80 bombs showed that the error of September 23 was not repeated.
On the afternoon of September 24, it was the turn of Hezbollah's rocket force chief, Ibrahim Muhammad Qabisi, who was confirmed killed along with several of his subordinate commanders. His demise was followed on September 26 by that of Hezbollah's drone force commander, Mohammed Srur, in a similar type of strike and in a location close to that where Aqil had been eliminated. Their removal further disabled Hezbollah's missile and aerial command structures, already damaged by Shukr's elimination. The following day Nasrallah was killed. The southern district commander Nabil Kaouk, a possible successor to Nasrallah, was killed in another strike on September 28. The campaign continues.
The message both to Hezbollah and to the Iranian ayatollahs is by now quite plain. Israel's intelligence penetration of its enemies is of such quality and range that the leaderships in Tehran as well as in its proxies must assume that their personal vulnerability to elimination is unlimited and that the IDF is going to kill and go on killing the Hezbollah leadership as fast as they can be replaced.
The exploding bed at the Tehran guest house which killed the head of Hamas's political bureau, Ismail Haniyah, on July 31 made the point to Iran's leaders on their own soil, with their guest, in a secure facility, that Israel must have agents among them. Haniyeh was killed on the day of the installation of Iranian Masoud Pezeshkian. Indeed, subsequently Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stated on September 30 in an interview that until 2021, the head of the Iranian counter-intelligence unit tasked with uncovering Mossad agents was himself a Mossad asset. There are reports that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was, unsurprisingly, following the killing of Nasrallah, rushed into hiding.
As Israel's actions unfold, its strategy, another of the paradoxical truths of war may be being proven before our eyes. It was most famously expressed by Sun Tzu in the maxim that supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting: in defeating the enemy by just such carefully crafted, all-enveloping fear that can lead to literally petrified inaction. Nowadays this is often described as "grey warfare." It embraces information warfare, electronic warfare and asymmetric forms of attack such as the "double taps," which are designed to weaponise field intelligence and psychological operations. It can also embrace other forms of warfare such as economic warfare; but that is a blunt instrument compared to the stiletto of the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.
In addition, faced with the nature of Iran and its proxies, who have invested in vast underground tunnel systems which, by their nature may be costly and cumbersome to destroy physically, the most cost-effective means of self-defence is repeatedly decapitating their organisations. In other words, escalation will, ironically, be the most humane -- life sparing -- road to peace through victory.
There is another reason why the Israeli way of warfare has evolved into its present form. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's words in 1973 still stand:
"They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don't know of a compromise."
Nasrallah had once observed that it was convenient that so many Jews were living in Israel because it would reduce the effort of exterminating them around the globe. Explicitly and in direct descent, Nazi anti-Semitism lives on through an ideological lineage from Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the wartime Nazi supporter the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al Husseini, and thence through the Mufti's own involvement in rejecting a two-state offer in 1948, to framing the Palestinian cause (his secretary wrote the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization). These historical facts are not in dispute.
When one's enemy has no war aim other than genocide, and has said so consistently for 90 years, there is most likely zero probability of a diplomatic route to peace. After six refusals of land offered for peace since 1922, there is now no prospect of any diplomacy this side of Israel's total victory, and the terrorists' total defeat. "Mugged by reality" is now to be observed in significant shifts in the balance of Israeli opinion since October 7, and in the realisation that, whatever else people may think about him, Netanyahu is the indispensable war leader for present times. The historian Andrew Roberts has called him "The Churchill of the Middle East."
By and large the Western administrative class -- whose worldview is framed by the assumption that with enough meetings in convivial places ("diplomacy") deals can be reached that split differences -- still does not rise to a sufficient level of geopolitical and comparative historical appreciation. This weak intellectual grasp only contributes significantly to the risk of a third world war.
The need for a strategy of total victory needs to be underscored. For decades, Iran and its proxies have been trying, as Iran's former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it, to "wipe Israel off the map." Israel's enemies are still trying. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad warned a year ago that Hamas would repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel was annihilated.
Israel's predicament is more precarious than at any time since its victory in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, despite all the extraordinary military achievements of the past year, because Israel may still have failed, to date, to convince Iran's Shiite axis that Israel's existence is beyond being challenged. The deterrence that was unquestioned for 50 years after 1973 is now moot.
One need only turn to the Friday sermon -- the first in five years -- which Khamenei delivered, rifle by his side, at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla Mosque in the middle of Tehran on October 4, 2024 to understand this. It came four days after Iran had launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Most of them were intercepted by Israel's air defences and some by US Navy ships. The USS Cole, which was successfully attacked in Yemen's Aden harbour on October 12, 2000 by al-Qa'eda operatives, was in the gun line. The US Navy quipped that this was the ship's revenge. Several of the Iranian missiles did land direct hits in Israel, including some at the IAF's Nevatim air base in the Negev desert. No country would leave such an attack unanswered nor the means for its repetition intact.
Khamenei's sermon was explicit. According to him, the Hamas invasion and massacres on October 7, 2023 were "logical and legal". Iran, he declared, would not back down and "Israel will not now last long."
Yet surely it was a serious strategic error by the Ayatollah to have renewed direct attacks upon Israel, because this act of war gives Israel the full right to retaliate as it sees fit. That is the inherent right of any sovereign state. It is inscribed in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Such an attack represents a re-statement of Iran's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist at all, coupled with a clear genocidal intent. This means that Israel is licensed to defend itself by all necessary means.
With the high probability that if Iran were to be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, it would use them on Israel, the avoidance of World War III now depends upon Israel eliminating that threat. Once again, President Joe Biden must not be obeyed. Products of the Western mind-set, as mentioned, it was the disastrous naivety of President Barack Obama and Biden in seeking to negotiate over Iran's nuclear programme (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) -- and illegitimately, with no mandate, to boot -- that allowed Iran's regime to play the US for fools and in so doing to acquire vital foreign currency inflow – and time -- that enabled the Iranian theocracy to resume and hasten its road to nuclear weapons.
We now enter a pivotal few weeks in world history between the anniversary of October 7 and the US election on November 5, during which, having broken Iran's "ring of fire", Israel has effective freedom of action. Unusually, this election, for once, actually will be the most momentous in foreign policy terms since Jimmy Carter's re-election campaign was scuppered by the failure of Operation Eagle's Claw -- the attempt on April 24, 1980 to rescue 53 US Embassy staff held hostage in Tehran by the newly installed theocracy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had returned from exile the previous year and took power after the toppling of the Shah.
If Donald Trump wins and Iran's regime has not already by then itself been toppled, it soon will be, and the road to the Abraham Accords will be resumed. Trump's son-in-law and chief adviser Jared Kushner set out his thinking on this in clear terms in a post on X, on September 29:
"September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.... this is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent... their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them... Iran is reeling... insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible."
The last sentence is the punch line.
No admirer of Trump, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton comes to the same geostrategic conclusion. He lays blames for the failure to neutralise Yemen's Houthis on the US and UK military and on political incompetence, and likewise the US failure to neutralise Shi'a militias in Iraq and Syria. He is unequivocal that the epicentre is with the ayatollahs in Tehran:
"[B]ehind the terrorist storm-troopers lies Iran's nuclear weapons programme. This is the ring of fire now directed against Israel, but easily convertible to a ring of fire around the Arabian Peninsula's oil producing monarchies. They understand that their strategic assessment is essentially identical to Israel's...
"Israel's next move is on behalf of everyone in the world who rejects terrorism from Iran, or any other source.... We can only wish Jerusalem the best, hoping it encourages the people of Iran to take their fate into their hands...Whatever Israel does now, the only durable outcome for Iran is ousting the Islamic revolution of 1979."
However, if we find ourselves with effectively a fourth Obama term, when his people staff a Harris administration as they did the Biden one, the world will be a far less safe place. While Vice President Kamala Harris has uttered warm but vague words of commitment to Israel, vague words butter no parsnips. Obama's people have shown that they are firmly locked inside a bias bubble that is hedged about with moral relativism and appear to believe that the purpose of war is to reach a negotiation and cut a deal rather than to achieve the unconditional surrender of an enemy whose evil was manifest as it was to a more clear-sighted generation in May 1945. Recollect that in the venom of their antisemitism, Israel's enemies Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Islamic Jihad, are, in the world today, the Nazis' most explicit and direct successors.
The threat is not just to the Jews but to the world order and the West. The geopolitical stakes are high and basic: between freedom and individualism, and state-control and slave-like collectivism. Because of the mortal threat both to the State of Israel and to Western civilisation, Israel rightly feels unleashed. This tiny nation has both moral mandate and customary international legal right (which long predates the experiment of UN-drafted papers) to be so. Like Ukraine's, Israel's victory matters to the entire free world.
The world currently divides unequally into those who understand this and the majority who do not, or who may just not want to admit it.
Gwythian Prins is Emeritus Research Professor at the LSE and has previously served in the Secretary-General of NATO's Special Adviser's Office, in the UK Defence Evaluation & Research Agency and on the Strategy Advisory Panel of British Chiefs of the Defence Staff.
APPENDIX ON THE CALCULATION OF KILL RATIOS IN GAZA IN 2023-4
1.1:1 was first calculated in data at February 2024 when Hamas had claimed 30,000 women and children fatalities and the IDF reported 13,000 terrorists eliminated. This gives a KR of 2.3:1. But, on statistical analysis by Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, there are good reasons within the numbers themselves to disbelieve the Hamas figures and when corrections are applied, the IDF KR ratio at that date is better than 1.1:1.
By September 2024, new figures were forthcoming, so a similar set of
adjustments needs to be applied. First, one takes the Hamas Health
Authority's own numbers for civilians who have died (41,500).
Hamas gives no figures for its own combat casualties. This 'all
civilian' figure has to be then adjusted in three ways: for deaths by
natural causes (500/month = 6,000), then further adjusted for drop-short
misfires of Hamas rockets falling and killing Gazans (about 1/3 of all
firings) and third for an unknowable but real number of deaths of Gazans
by execution by Hamas. This yields a probable figure of war-effect
deaths over the year in the region of 30-35,000. The most recent
cumulative figure obtained verbally from the IDF military information
office at the end of September 2024 was 19,000. Taking a figure tilted
towards the mid-point (32,000) that gives a KR of 1.68:1. Such ratios
compare to Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 who
achieved kill-ratios around 3:1. The UN figure for all wars since 1945
is 9:1. This cannot be an exact science but, as detailed, we can reach a
defensible range which realistically trends towards 1.1:1.
Gwythian Prins is Emeritus Research Professor at the
LSE and has previously served in the Secretary-General of NATO's Special
Adviser's Office, in the UK Defence Evaluation & Research Agency
and on the Strategy Advisory Panel of British Chiefs of the Defence
Staff.
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21017/middle-east-total-victory
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